X has developed a new product designed to help advertisers capitalize on trending events. “Trend Genius” advertisement Use AI to boost promotions at peak conversation times.
Using X’s advanced AI system, Trend Genius ads can detect trending topics and place ads in line with mentions relevant to your brand.
As explained X:
“Trend Genius allows advertisers to manually select conversation topics, anything from the Olympics and professional sports leagues to fashion, music, AI, and more. Then, when conversations around those topics reach a high level or velocity organically on X, ads with pre-programmed creatives are automatically deployed on the platform.”
For example, if you put together a campaign to capitalize on conversations around the Olympics or specific happenings at the event, X’s Trend Genius process will match your chosen keywords to growing conversations within the app and publish your ads when relevant mentions increase.
This could be a good way to enter into topical discussions, although given the recent criticism of X’s Grok AI news summaries, doubts remain about the accuracy of AI models in this regard.
This week alone, Grok has created false news headlines regarding several news events.
As you can see from this example, Grok’s news summarization process, which aims to highlight major news events based on X-posts, often mistakes sarcasm for real information. This is unsurprising, as many X-posts are sarcastic, humorous, or simply misleading.
As Grok tries to decipher the truth from a random array of these comments, the news headlines are often inaccurate. This is part of the system and X’s learning process, but if this is the same system X is deploying to launch ads based on trends, problems could arise.
X has not provided any information as to whether the same process is used to serve this ad.
But, at least in theory, X’s Trend Genius process could help advertisers maximize their ad spend by taking advantage of trends, then reduce their ad spend once the trend subsides.
“Once the conversation calms and stabilizes, ads will be automatically turned off. This is intended to maximize the relevance of paid ad creative on X and minimize ‘waste.'”
That could be a catalyst: X says that in tests, advertisers have seen “record-breaking engagement rates.”
X also says that Trend Genius promotions can be programmed via third-party data feeds, allowing it to tailor ads to real-world events based on data outside the platform. So, for example, if your local weather bureau is predicting rain, it can tailor creative to appear in your local area as soon as it starts to rain.
In theory, this could be a good option, and it will be interesting to see what results brands get when they roll out these promotions more widely.
But as mentioned above, X is still developing its AI models and false positives may occur. The answer will become clear as Trend Genius ads become available to X’s advertisers.
