Pencil brings the scale of algorithms to the creative process by generating ads that are predicted to work. It is the first generative creative platform for performance advertising teams in brands and agencies.
Reaching billions of potential customers on Facebook or Google is a high scale game. But the creative process to produce ads is still highly manual and low scale. Pencil changes that. Their creative AI generates advertising language and visuals that are predicted to be creative, effective and on-brand. From just keywords, Pencil can generate headlines to pitch a product to different audiences. From a single e-commerce product feed, or 90-second video, Pencil can generate hundreds of new stories. When the results come in, Pencil generates new ads that take into account what’s working and what’s not, saving time and costs and delivering significant increases in return-on-ad-spend.
Pencil has been working with a number of high-profile clients over the past year including Sephora, Unilever, Kellogg’s and several of the top agency holding companies across Asia, Europe and the US. Early results indicate that a 2x improvement in advertising performance and a 10x reduction in time and cost are possible with the technology. Most excitingly, content collaborated on by both humans and AI has been found to outperform the work of either humans or AI alone.
Pencil was founded in 2018 by Will Hanschell, a former partner at award-winning creative agency Iris, and Sumukh Avadhani, a machine learning specialist who was previously a Principal at Google.
*Angel Investor: Michael Gryseels