The Brandtech Group Acquires GAI Company, Announces Platform Launch Partners Unilever, Bayer
The Brandtech Group has acquired Pencil, a generative artificial intelligence (GAI) creative and distribution software as a service (SaaS) platform, with plans to introduce an enterprise-level GAI product, Pencil Pro, to support global brands.
Pencil has generated more than one million creative executions for brands worldwide in the past 12 months, and the dataset that powers its predictions is built from real media spend of more than $1 billion.
Unilever and Bayer are launch partners with the introduction of Pencil Pro, the company announced Thursday.
“Pencil was born to serve SMB’s and has built unparalleled knowledge and a billion-dollar data set across 4,000 brands, doing just that,” Rebecca Sykes, emerging tech lead at The Brandtech Group, told Search & Performance Marketing Daily in an email. “We will continue to run Pencil and offer services to those businesses.”
With Pencil Pro, she said the company also can bring that expertise to enterprise brands that can benefit from greater brand control, data ring fencing and professional grade editing capabilities.
Founded in 2018, Will Hanschell and Sumukh Avadhani built Pencil’s technology on OpenAI’s GPT family of large language models (LLM). It generates multiple channel 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 achieves 2 x better performance results, the company said.
Pencil Pro was built in collaboration with The Brandtech Group during the past six months, but the partnership began long before. Initial discussions to merge started two years ago, with The Brandtech Group and Pencil deciding to move forward last year after signing a letter of intent (LOI). With the acquisition, Pencil remains a stand-alone operation within The Brandtech Group.
The platform, Pencil Pro, has unique qualities. It provides answers to key questions and concerns that global marketers have about implementing GAI.
Some include how to ensure the AI doesn’t generate something inappropriate or offensive, how to copyright or trademark the generated content, and how to ensure the AI does not use my data to help competitors.
Pencil brings along partnerships with Adobe, Shopify, Meta and OpenAI. The enterprise product Pencil Pro launches with AI integrations including OpenAI GPT-4 and ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Runway, as well as media integrations including Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, Google Display and Amazon Ads.
This is The Brandtech Group’s tenth acquisition and comes after its recent deal to acquire Jellyfish.
As part of the launch, more than 1,000 Brandtech Group employees are being trained in generative AI and Pencil. The training is led by a team from recently acquired Brandtech Group company Jellyfish.
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