As part of this announcement, the Group launches Pencil Pro, a generative AI product tailored specifically for the needs of global brands, which revolutionizes the production of creative work.
New York, New York, 08:00 EST, 15 June 2023: The Brandtech Group, has acquired 100% of Pencil, the No.1 generative AI creative and distribution SaaS platform. In addition, the Group is launching Pencil Pro, an enterprise-level generative AI product, specifically created to meet the needs of global brands. Unilever and Bayer are Pencil Pro launch partners.
“Generative AI is going to change the world and the world of marketing beyond recognition. When we created the company, machine-generated content was a core foundation of the group and most people laughed and said it would never be a thing. Since then we have made several investments in different AI companies, from chatbots to AI twins, to media planning, but this is our first acquisition.
“Pencil is easily the most significant company in the generative AI marketing space. While lots of people are talking in the future tense about what they will build or might do, or announcing made-for-PR partnerships, Pencil is the only company in the world to have already used more than $1BN of actual media dollars across 4,000 brands since 2018, building unparalleled data, insight and learnings around Gen AI for marketing at global scale. Like generative AI itself, what Will and Sumukh have built is truly remarkable and we’re thrilled that they are joining the group,” says The Brandtech Group founder and CEO, David Jones.
Pencil was founded in 2018 by Will Hanschell and Sumukh Avadhani. It is built on Open AI’s GPT family of large language models (LLM) and generates multiple channel-ready ads and copy by looking at a brand’s objectives, assets and preferences.It also provides a predicted success rate for each iteration. The process takes minutes and the resulting content is up to 10 x lower in cost to produce, but achieve 2 x better performance results. It was one of the very first GenAI companies in the world to enable brands to generate finished, ready-to-run ads, launch them and measure real uplift in performance.