Runway’s AI Video Agent Creates and Measures Ads Across Platforms

AI video-generation startup Runway is moving deeper into advertising with a new AI agent that can create ad variations and analyze performance across platforms. Runway Ads launches today inside the company’s web app. The agent connects to a brand's accounts on Meta, Google, and TikTok. AI development platform Lovable is the launch partner. The agent can recreate existing ads, spin out variations, localize them for other markets, and publish the human-approved versions. It then pulls the performance data back from those platforms to inform the next round of creative. “The number of surfaces that [brands] need to be across and the audience that you need to get in front of is growing exponentially,” said Jamie Umpherson, Runway's chief creative officer. “This is a universal pain point." The launch also comes months after Runway’s Series E round that valued the company at $5.3 billion. The company built the tool after Runway’s growth marketing and creative teams were struggling to produce enough ads to keep up with the number of campaigns they wanted to run across platforms. Runway began using the agent internally about two months ago, primarily for campaigns promoting new products and features to drive subscriptions, which the company said helped drive $100 million in annual recurring revenue. During that period, Runway said its active ads across Meta and TikTok increased from 77 to about 890. Return on ad spend nearly doubled, while conversion rate increased about 34% and cost per subscriber fell 41%. Runway declined to share absolute figures. “As we spend more, our return is even more. And the cost per subscription is lower than before because there are so many different active ads,” said Yining Shi, founding engineer at Runway. Runway is not making the system fully autonomous. Human approval is required before an ad goes live and brands remain responsible for complying with platform policies, such as labeling AI content on Meta. The product will sit within Runway’s existing subscription tiers and brands will also be charged on usage consumption, the company said. Crowded market For most of its life, Runway sold to filmmakers, studios, and production houses. Its biggest deals were with Lionsgate, which commissions a custom model trained on its catalog of over 20,000 titles, and AMC Networks. But it has increasingly worked with advertisers such as Dolce & Gabbana, Glassdoor, Palo Alto Networks, Lucid Motors, Cloudflare, and Yamaha. The company declined to provide a breakdown of where its revenue comes from. The product is also a step into a more crowded part of the ad market, where the biggest ad platforms are themselves automating more of the creative process. Meta’s Advantage+, for example, already handles creative generation and targeting for 8 million advertisers, at no extra cost. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also outlined a future where Meta's AI entirely eliminates the need for human-produced creative assets. Meanwhile, Google and TikTok offer their own AI-powered tools for generating and improving ads. These tools have a major advantage: they sit directly on top of the platforms where advertisers spend their money and collect performance data. “The competition is significant, particularly because walled gardens can integrate creative generation directly with targeting, activation, and measurement," said Jacob Bourne, technology analyst at Emarketer. "There’s room for independent players, but Runway will need to differentiate in areas such as creative quality, ease of use, and novel capabilities that marketers can apply across media channels,” Bourne added. Runway’s pitch is that it can simultaneously operate across all those platforms while bringing the creative assets, brand guidelines and generation tools into a single workflow. The company is also competing with a growing crop of AI video startups, including Higgsfield and Pencil, that are targeting marketers with tools to generate and iterate ads at scale.

Artificial Intelligence

Runway’s AI Video Agent Creates and Measures Ads Across Platforms

Runway has used the agent internally for campaigns that have helped drive $100 million in annual recurring revenue

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Trishla Ostwal

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