Waymark: AI video creation for traditional media

Summary

Marketecture Podcast Summary: "Waymark: AI Video Creation for Traditional Media"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
• Host: Ari Paparo and Eric Franchi, Marketecture Media, Inc.
• Episode: Waymark: AI Video Creation for Traditional Media
• Release Date: March 10, 2025
• Website: marketecture.tv

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Introduction

In this episode of the Marketecture Podcast, host Aaron Caparo engages in an in-depth conversation with Alex Persky Stern, CEO of Waymark. The discussion delves into Waymark's innovative approach to AI-driven video production, targeting traditional media platforms.

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Company Overview

Waymark is a Detroit-based, remote-first company rooted in the Midwest, boasting a team of approximately 35 employees. The company's core mission is to simplify the creation of high-quality video advertisements through artificial intelligence. Alex Persky Stern explains, “We are fundamentally trying to take down all the barriers creating high quality video ads” (01:20).

Funding Status: Waymark has secured initial funding through a small DC round several years ago, enabling the company to develop and expand its offerings within the AI video production space.

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Product and Features

Waymark specializes in AI-powered video production, primarily serving media platforms rather than direct advertisers. Their technology facilitates the creation of brand-new video ads from scratch by leveraging existing business assets. Key product features include:

• Automated Ad Creation: By inputting a business's website, Waymark's platform extracts essential information such as logos, color palettes, and product details to generate tailored video ads.

• Editing Control: Users retain full control over the editing process, allowing for customization and refinement of the generated ads.

• Asset Integration: The platform integrates with Shutterstock, providing access to stock footage to supplement businesses lacking their own video assets.

• AI-Generated Motion: Utilizing advanced AI, Waymark can transform static images into dynamic, motion-filled video content.

Aaron Caparo inquires about the product's functionality, to which Alex responds, “We can work with just about anything... we can supplement with that with stock” (03:12).

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Addressing AI Challenges

A common concern with AI-generated content is the creation of unnatural human features, such as extra fingers or distorted logos. Waymark addresses these issues by:

• Using Authentic Assets: The platform relies on businesses’ actual assets, ensuring logos and brand elements remain accurate and unaltered.

• Professional Motion Graphics: By incorporating professionally designed motion graphics, Waymark maintains high aesthetic standards without the typical AI-generated anomalies.

Alex emphasizes, “We aren't, we really don't integrate like just generate a person from scratch out of nowhere... it also isn't really what advertisers want” (04:53).

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Technology Stack

Waymark employs a diverse array of AI models tailored to specific tasks within the video production process:

• Storytelling: Utilizes Claude for crafting compelling narratives.

• Content Processing: Employs GPT04 Mini for handling large volumes of content efficiently.

• Computer Vision: Integrates various computer vision models to analyze and understand business assets.

Alex elaborates, “We use kind of the best in class for each task... it's really kind of across the board” (06:25).

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Future Outlook and Vision

Looking ahead, Waymark plans to escalate its market presence by:

• Scaling Operations: Introducing automated generation and optimization techniques to handle large-scale content production efficiently.

• Upmarket Expansion: Moving beyond the small to mid-market segments by launching Waymark 2, targeting larger brands and the bid market.

• Automated Optimization: Developing systems that automatically adjust and optimize ads based on performance data, enhancing campaign effectiveness.

Alex shares his vision, “fully automated optimization for large scale content” (07:12).

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Business Model and Pricing

Waymark operates on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, where clients pay a technology license fee based on usage volume—ranging from a few videos to extensive content libraries. As the company expands into the ad tech space, it anticipates incorporating Cost Per Mille (CPM) pricing to align with existing media pricing structures. Alex states, “there is more of a drive for some of that CPM pricing as well” (09:30).

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Market Position and Competition

Waymark positions itself uniquely by embedding within the ad tech ecosystem, ensuring their AI-generated content is contextually relevant and optimized for specific audiences. This strategic integration differentiates Waymark from horizontal AI providers like OpenAI, who may not offer the same level of industry-specific optimization.

When discussing potential competition from tech giants, Alex notes, “big horizontal players like OpenAI aren't going to do that” (10:50).

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Lightning Round Highlights

In a rapid-fire segment, Aaron poses several quick questions to Alex:

1. Biggest Challenge: “Always keeping up with the pace of AI” (11:37).

2. Primary Customer Obstacle: “Moving too slow... embracing AI is, you know, the move that everyone's going to have to take here” (11:50).

3. Threat from Big Tech: Alex believes that giants like Amazon and Google will focus on their own ecosystems, viewing Waymark as a platform for other companies rather than a direct competitor (12:03).

4. Spirit Animal: Iguana, symbolizing calmness and creativity (12:30).

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Conclusions

Waymark emerges as a pioneering force in the AI-driven video ad production landscape, effectively bridging the gap between traditional media platforms and modern technological advancements. By focusing on scalability, integration with existing ad tech ecosystems, and maintaining high-quality standards, Waymark is well-positioned to lead the charge in automated video content creation. As the company continues to innovate and expand, it anticipates significant growth in both market reach and technological capabilities, reshaping the future of video advertising.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Persky Stern: “We are fundamentally trying to take down all the barriers creating high quality video ads” (01:20).
• Alex Persky Stern: “We aren't, we really don't integrate like just generate a person from scratch out of nowhere... it also isn't really what advertisers want” (04:53).
• Alex Persky Stern: “fully automated optimization for large scale content” (07:12).
• Alex Persky Stern: “there is more of a drive for some of that CPM pricing as well” (09:30).
• Alex Persky Stern: “big horizontal players like OpenAI aren't going to do that” (10:50).

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Timestamps Reference:

• 01:20: Company Overview
• 03:12: Product Features
• 04:53: Addressing AI Challenges
• 06:25: Technology Stack
• 07:12: Future Outlook
• 09:30: Business Model
• 10:50: Market Position
• 11:37: Lightning Round - Biggest Challenge
• 11:50: Lightning Round - Customer Obstacle
• 12:03: Lightning Round - Competition
• 12:30: Lightning Round - Spirit Animal

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of the Marketecture Podcast episode featuring Waymark, providing valuable insights into the company's operations, technological innovations, and strategic vision within the AI video creation landscape for traditional media.

Transcript

[Alex Persky Stern]

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. 1, 2, 3. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra. The AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do you get [e-mail] compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini Account results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.

[Aaron Caparo]

Welcome to marketecture, where you can get smart fast with in depth interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Aaron Caparo. I'm joined today by Alex Persky Stern, who is the CEO of Waymark. Alex, thank you for being here.

[Alex Persky Stern]

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[Aaron Caparo]

I'm excited to hear about Waymark because it seems to be a substantial company that I've never heard of. Uh, so what, so give us the basics. What is it? How big is it? Like how many employees you have where you're based, et cetera?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, totally. We are a remote company, but based here in Detroit, Michigan. We're, you know, got our Midwest roots and we're about 35 people making it really, really easy to create videos with AI. So we really focus on AI video production.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right, awesome. And what's your fundraise status? Have you raised money?

[Alex Persky Stern]

We raised a little bit of money several years ago, so yeah, small DC round.

[Aaron Caparo]

Okay, so what, tell me, what does this product do and who uses it?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yes, so we are fundamentally trying to take down all the barriers creating high quality video ads. And we do a lot in the TV and streaming space, but really across all platforms. And our customers are actually the platforms, not the advertisers. So we work with a lot of the major media companies and are now growing into more of the advertising tech and agency space as really anybody who's working on selling media needs help with the production.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. And when you say production, is this brand new ads from scratch or is this fixing assets or what?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Exactly, brand new from scratch. And we do a lot with the long tail to mid market. So kind of the heart of the product. It'll take any website, whether that's a business website or like a product listing and pulling in the information, produce ads. And you have full editing control of that as well.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. And so we're, you know, a video ad typically has video in it. So how do you create video if someone doesn't have video?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yes, we can work with just about anything. Even, you know, many of these business have very few assets. So at the heart is we've produced a ton of motion graphics professionally and we have trained AI how to combine business assets with those motion as well as tell the story, write the voiceover, do the scripting, all of that kind of stuff. On top of that, if you don't have it, if you have your own assets, great. But if you don't have footage, like many, many businesses don't, we can supplement with that with stock. You know, we have a full Shutterstock integration. And now the really exciting thing is with AI, you can start to turn images into videos. So right, take a static image, turn, turned it into motion.

[Aaron Caparo]

Okay, so how take me through the product, like is this just like a prompt? Like an AI prompt? Like give me a video of my gas station and feature the Cheetos on sale or is there, you know, more of an assembly process? And you mentioned Shutterstock, like how does that become involved?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, it's all very fast, but it is using actual business assets. So you'll basically plug in a website. First we'll go collect all the information, you know, your logo, your color palette, how you talk about your business as well as all the assets. Then you can give it a prompt. We'll actually write the prompts for you so you don't have to. But you can, if you want, generate, you get an ad. You can also riff through several if you want, or you know, take one and edit it.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. Okay. So the customers, the end advertiser, you said is torso and tail. So we're talking about like, like the traditional model where the cable TV company is selling to the local advertisers and the regional advertisers. Is that like the sweet spot here?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, 100%. See how we're working with pretty much all the major cable and broadcast groups as well as, you know, if you got that ad tech sales group. And then we also plug the platform into self serve platforms so that the advertiser can do it themselves. It's all white labeled, but they can kind of take that on for themselves.

[Aaron Caparo]

So in that typical use case though, is the hands on keyboard more likely to be sort of an add on ops or account manager at the cable company? Got it. And then how do you react to the typical problems with AI? The six fingers and the weird teeth and the eating spaghetti?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, we've taken a very practical approach. I'd say there's a lot of nifty demos that have six finger problems. We've been really focused on using business's actual assets and our professionally designed motion graphics to create nice looking motion. But we aren't, we really don't integrate like just generate a person from scratch out of nowhere. Because it's not only is it kind of ripe with those problems, it's also not really what advertisers want. They want their own content.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. Okay, so now we'll get to the advertisers. You mentioned kind of approval processes. Like how often is the first draft approved versus versus having to go back.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Oh yeah, well, everybody's got notes. I don't think they'll ever meet a business that doesn't have their creative vision of whatever they want. But that's kind of the beauty of Waymark 2. It's not like generate and just hope and get what you want. You actually can make fine trained edits directly too.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. Another problem with AI is that it often has problems with the words and logos. So how are you overcoming those problems?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Which kind of logo problems are you talking about?

[Aaron Caparo]

Well, like if you ask an AI to give me a McDonald's logo in this ad, it won't do it. But also if you give it a logo, it may manipulate it and not make it look right.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Got it. Right. And that's kind of. Our approach is not going to allow AI to do any of that stuff. We basically take an orchestration approach. So we've gotten your assets from your online presence and we're going to use that directly. And we're just going to say, hey, write a story that it would be a compelling story for this business but don't mess with its assets.

[Aaron Caparo]

In terms of, do you disclose what AI models you use behind the scenes?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, we use a whole bunch. So it's kind of a long list. Our basic approach has been to break video down into very small modules. So we have 13 different modules that are creating video. So we use kind of the best in class for each task.

[Aaron Caparo]

Got it.

[Alex Persky Stern]

So like Claude is a good storyteller. We use that for writing. We use different computer vision models to understand people's assets. You know, GPT04 Mini is fast for large amounts of content, so we use it for like more bulk production type of things. So it's really kind of across the board.

[Aaron Caparo]

Where do you see this going long term? Like both for your company and for other folks who are investing in this area. Do you think it breaks out of the small advertiser who doesn't have creative? And how, how soon does that happen?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it breaks out in two directions. One, it for sure is going to go. Continue to go up market. We just launched Waymark 2 last week, which is moving from kind of that small business into more of the bid market. You know, large brands are certainly coming down the pipe. I think the more exciting and interesting direction for me is the scale. Right now. You kind of go through that process we just talked about, which is very fast. You know, you could have an ad in five minutes, but it still is a manual process. What we're bringing this year is automated generation. Where we see this going in the next couple of years is fully automated optimization for large scale content.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right.

[Alex Persky Stern]

So that's kind of the, I think, where things really get interesting.

[Aaron Caparo]

So are you. Is your model generally more like a creative agency where your AI and tools are creating just a pretty small number of versions and. Or are you referencing a future world where you're creating a lot of versions and optimizing?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, both. So for the kind of smaller business campaign, kind of that traditional stuff, you basically get your one creative or a handful of creatives. Where the scale comes in right now is you can produce for way, way, way, way, way more businesses than you used to be able to. So that's what's fun and exciting about that. But yeah, exactly where you're headed is all this stuff can now be generated automatically and it's a short order of time before it's being reviewed, adjusted, approved and optimize based on actual performance data.

[Aaron Caparo]

Yeah, right. You need. It's hard in video and ctv. The signal that comes back is not very strong.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron Caparo]

So what's the general pricing model? How do these, I guess, media companies are your customers and how would they pay you?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, so we have a SaaS model. We basically give access to the platform and then the scale by how much you're actually using it. Are you producing a handful of videos or tons of videos? But it's really a tech license fee.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. So it's not per impression volume, like it doesn't serve.

[Alex Persky Stern]

So yeah, that's been kind of our historical model for these media companies you're mentioning as we're moving into more of the ad tech space. And we'll have some fun announcements on that in the next couple months here. There is more of a drive for some of that CPM pricing as well, so that you can, you know, package that into the pricing that is already.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Being used.

[Aaron Caparo]

Yeah, I mean, I guess your customers might prefer CPM pricing in a sense.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, it really depends on the customer. But yeah, I think for a lot of the places that we're headed that CPM pricing is probably more the direction of the future.

[Aaron Caparo]

Is there any likelihood of you going direct to consumer in this case business?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Not a lot. And I'd say the fundamental reason for that is we've really two foundational beliefs. One is in the near future most ads are going to be generated. That's not even to say there will be fewer ads that are traditionally produced. It's just there are going to be way, way, way, way, way more ads.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right.

[Alex Persky Stern]

So most of these are going to be professionally produced or automatically produced. And then the second belief is that the platforms are going to be responsible for that creative tech. And I think the same way that audience data and targeting has become a responsibility of the platform, creative is going to follow that same pattern where if a platform doesn't provide creative tech, you know, what are they doing?

[Aaron Caparo]

Right, interesting.

[Alex Persky Stern]

So that's where we think that creating the relationships with the platforms is really the direction of the future.

[Aaron Caparo]

What do you think about the argument that this is all going to be commoditized and just as the AI platforms develop at some point any publisher would be able to just plug into their cloud providers AI and produce commercial ready videos with a prompt.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Yeah, I think that there's going to be amazing developments in video generation. And so I think like what we do today, which is mostly produce assets, you know, that's going to over the next five years start to become relatively straightforward to do. And the key is that tapping into the actual ad tech ecosystem so that you're generating for every audience, you're generating contextually relevant content, you're optimizing based on the performance data that gets getting back across all your campaigns. There's so much power in the workflow and context and outcomes that is really specific to the industry. So like big horizontal players like OpenAI aren't going to do that.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right, interesting. Okay, let's go to a quick lightning round. We'll have relatively quick questions and hopefully quick answers. What's your biggest challenge right now?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Always keeping up with the pace of AI. There's so much incredible technology moving quickly and we just got to always be rolling into the product.

[Aaron Caparo]

What's the biggest reason why customers would not use your product?

[Alex Persky Stern]

Moving too slow. You know, I think people have a lot of fear of AI, but I think that embracing AI is, you know, the move that everyone's going to have to take here.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. What, what would stop the big guys, the Amazon Google's metas from crushing it?

[Alex Persky Stern]

I think Amazon Google and meta, particularly Google meta will build for their own ecosystem. And so, you know, we don't really think of Google and Meta as potential customers. We think of us ourselves as a platform for everybody else.

[Aaron Caparo]

Right. Makes sense. It would be ideal if they would see you as a potential customer or as a vendor, but seems unlikely. Totally. All right, last question. If your company was an animal, what animal would it be?

[Alex Persky Stern]

My spirit animal is the iguana, so I think maybe it would live after that. I think they've got great calm as well as beauty. We're ultimately a creative company and we love the creative itself.

[Aaron Caparo]

All right, there, you got it, Iguana. All right, Alex from Waymark, you had that one before. No, I'm not. I've gotten chameleon. Thought you were going to go chameleon because it changes colors and stuff.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Oh, no, no, totally. I don't.

[Aaron Caparo]

We get at least one third of the answers are lion. So just as long as you don't say lion, I'm pretty happy.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Deal.

[Aaron Caparo]

All right, Alex from Waymark, thank you for being here.

[Alex Persky Stern]

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

[Aaron Caparo]

Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News marketure tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to [e-mail].