TikTok rolled a slew of product info pages – all previously announced – for marketers on its business blog yesterday.

The app’s just-launched “Ad Assistant” is an “AI” chatbot which helps marketers “every step of the way” – particularly SMB marketers. Taken in aggregate, TikTok AI-related offerings (like GMV Max and Smart+) appear to take a page from Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ where marketers can let automation and AI rule the execution of the digital ad marketing plan soup-to-nuts.

The TikTok Ad Assistant pitch…

“…your new AI-powered companion inside TikTok Ads Manager. It’s designed to guide you through every step of your advertising journey from setup to optimization, so you can spend less time figuring things out and more time driving results. Built for speed and scalability, Ad Assistant helps advertisers move from concept to campaign in a fraction of the time. No guesswork, no bottlenecks.”

Meanwhile, on the consumer side, read about new AI-infused “Smart Keyword” filtering for consumers in a TikTok press release or on TechCrunch.

TikTok Business AI-related announcements yesterday:

• New Search Ads Campaign tools and features

• Introducing TikTok Messaging Ads: Where conversations fuel conversions

• Introducing Symphony Creative Studio

• How TikTok One’s Insights Spotlight keeps marketers ahead of trends

• Measure TikTok more effectively with media mix modeling

the contextual agent

Classify, a new ad tech startup with AI aspirations, came out of its stealth existence yesterday. On the company’s website, the pitch is simple: “Smart curation with a single click.” Contextual is back! See it.

The company’s boilerplate reveals some of the secret sauce…

“…adtech with AI-native, data-wrapped services offering high-margin contextual segments for advertisers and deep content classification for publishers. Classify’s AI-native ContentGraph™ engine uses deep comprehension and lookalike modeling for advanced content classification and curation. This enables rapid creation of precise URL-level contextual segments by classifying extensive web content and product pages, integrating into a major SSP…”

A company press release explains Classify is led by former SSP LiveRail (bought by Facebook in 2014) executive Brendan Norman and touts the tech experience of founders and investors alike – see the list.

and that’s not all: With Brian O’Kelley of AppNexus and Scope3 as a backer, Classify will be a part of Scope3’s “AI Agentic” platform says the company.

more: AdExchanger’s Anthony Vargas covers Classify’s launch in-depth and notes the competitive contextual ad AI-space. Read more.

agentic agency

“Your agency’s next media manager for the Amazon DSP” is the angle for Gigi (see “her”), an ad tech company targeting, well, agency work.

Previously, the company helped “brands and agencies buy and measure Amazon Streaming TV ads,” but AI seems to have changed things.

CEO Adam Epstein explained on X yesterday: “Over the past year, we’ve been working with media managers at retail media agencies to understand how they spend their time. We then deconstructed all the tasks that consume the most time and are the least strategic, and created a set of agentic workflows and automations so media managers can focus on developing expertise in the service of their clients.”

Also, read the Gigi blog post.

Thoughts: AI can reduce headcount. But, AI can make more agencies, too, whether in-house or out.

use case: L’Oréal marketing

Mark Lallemand, CMO of Western Europe at L’Oréal, spoke at ShopTalk Europe this week and discussed how AI is a part of his company’s marketing strategy going forward. Glossy covered the appearance and summarized: “AI is no longer a test. It is core to how L’Oréal builds and delivers brand experiences.”

“We used to turn around campaigns in weeks. Now we do it in hours,” says Lalleman.

Glossy reporter Zofia Zwieglinska explains that the “acceleration is possible through L’Oréal’s CREAITECH lab (a bit more on the lab here), which leverages AI to generate localized visuals and campaign assets from simple text prompts using models including Google’s Imagen 3 and Gemini. This has helped the company scale localized messaging and creative for TikTok and Instagram across 20 markets in EMEA.”

Read more.

quote unquote

“The insight for the next ten years: 1) agentic campaign set up, monitoring and control will utilize the tens of thousand of potential iterations and unlock the ability to align brand measurement with ad platform activation. 2) Walled gardens will push back, limit their granularity in the name of privacy and push for black box automation like Google Ads PMAX.”

more stuff (subscription)

• AI Agents Are Poised to Disrupt Commerce. View this Startup’s Pitch Deck to Help Brands Adapt (May 29) – Adweek (subscription)

• Answer engine optimization (AEO)—everything marketers need to know about AI search (June 3) – Ad Age (subscription)

• Opinion: Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Slop Will Make Ads Creepier and Worse – Bloomberg (subscription)