1230: Omneky: The Future of Creative Advertising and Marketing Through Generative AI with Founder and CEO Hikari Senju

Robert Plank 0:00 Hikari Senju is here, and he is the founder and CEO of Omneky. That's O, M, N, E, K, Y.com, Omneky is a cutting edge platform that leverages generative AI to create personalized advertising content across all digital channels. So we're going to find out about this exciting world of AI powered marketing where advertising is headed in the next five years. So Hikari, glad to be speaking with you.

Hikari Senju 0:27 Thanks, Robert for having me. We're really excited to share more about Omneky and have this conversation with you for your listeners,

Robert Plank 0:33 likewise, and a lot of what we have to do and take action on begins with the awareness and the understanding and wrapping our heads around this idea. And AI is such a crazy, fast paced space, and it seems like with advertising in particular, there's like this shift towards AI, right? It seems like a lot of with the like, meta ads, Google ads, etc, it's like they want less of the targeting and keywords, and they're just like, hey, let's, let's try this on our audience, and we'll let the AI figure out, like, what's working and refine it with that. And so I'm curious and excited to stay ahead of the game and to make sure that those ads work and that everyone wins. And so tell us what we need to know about AI and advertising.

Hikari Senju 1:17 Sure, absolutely. Well, AI has been in advertising for some time. You know, meta and Google, they've been buying, you know, tons of GPUs for some time for ad targeting and better serving the ads in a more relevant way to to their to their users. I think what's changed now is not just the serving and the targeting the ads, but also in the recommendation that many kind of powers these platforms, but also the content itself. And there, this is where the challenge now is, in all these ad agencies, marketers, they're inundated with new tools. You know, every every, every week, new breakthroughs. Every week. It's becoming increasingly noisy. And, we're just, you know, and, and, and, so what we do is we provide a end to end workflow tool and solution for businesses that are looking to use Gen AI, not just to create better images or or, you know, more quickly, you know, like edit an image, but to drive better success, better outcomes in their advertising. That really spans the whole gamut from better analytics to their insights and using AI to get better insights to generating better ideas backed by data. Better collaboration with your team, better collaboration with your if you're an agency with your customers regarding brand management and brand materials and brand assets, and then, yes, generating and scaling creative assets using AI. But we really view ourselves as a solution for agencies and marketers that are looking to incorporate Gen AI in a more end to end way than just I'm going to try this tool here. I'm going to try that tool there to drive better efficiencies in their team. Maybe you know, your your marketer and your marketing team can now do 10 times the amount of work that they could previously do with with our kind of end to end workflow, better cost savings, and then also, ultimately, better results.

Robert Plank 3:13 Well, very nice. And so there's definitely some missing gaps or missing links in the process, right? Like you say, you sometimes you slap in a tool in there, you say, well, we'll use Canva, we'll generate some stuff. We'll use Dolly, and then, but then some so many times you're guessing, right? And it's like such a fast pace, and we always need to, like, crank out so many images. And then you, from my, my limited understanding of AI, sometimes you see these use cases where you dump out the analytics and then feed them back in and they give you like insights on the ads. But I've been sort of frustrated with that, right? When I say like, they say, like, well, post like, you know, put your social media on this times a day. And I'm like, well, that's great, but what's actually working? And so I'm curious to find out about how does this workflow tool work? Like, what's the pro like? What are like the inputs and outputs, as far as someone using AI to generate better ads,

Hikari Senju 4:05 right? So the workflow is, customers upload their brand assets. Step number one, the brand guidelines, the brand assets, the product photos, our AI will extract and vectorize those assets and create kind of a brand guideline brief for you. You can also, you can also just read your brand guideline, brand brief. The next step would be to connect your ad networks that you're running media on, so your meta campaigns, your Google campaigns, your Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. We then use the API integrations with those platforms to pull insights regarding what types of content is driving clicks, driving sales. And then we use both the brand information and the performance data to first generate ideas for you that you can comment on, approve, edit, it comes out in the format of a creative brief. So ideas for your campaigns with data backing the. Ideas, and then it generates the actual creative content. That's all so if you like the idea, and then we'll go and execute that idea with AI and then, and then scale that asset. So particularly if you you know, if a product has many or if a company has many SKUs, you know you want to take one asset and scale it to 1000s of SKUs you have, or you're targeting different audiences for a single SKU, you need to create variations there. So then the iterations and the variations is kind of the the next step in terms of scaling the content that we've generated for you. Then there's a kind of the last step, which is approval. So if you're an agency, for example, you want to send those ads to your customers for approval. And so customers can approve that content, provide feedback on the content you've sent them and and also, if you're a brand, you can also provide feedback on the content we've generated for you.

Robert Plank 5:56 Very awesome. Well, this tool sounds amazing, right? As far as you get an account, you set it up, you give it your brand guidelines, you look at the content that's already working, and you connect to all the different platforms. I mean, whenever there's a new tool, there's the fear of like, well, will it be too complicated? Will I have to learn it? And so it sounds like when someone starts using Omneky and they click around and just kind of like, it's helpful, right? It generates some ideas. It says, Hey, here's what, what can work. And so I'm curious about when people start using your tool and having fun with it. Like, sometimes the interesting stuff about AI is that new ideas come up that you never would have thought of, right? It's like having a different brain. Or sometimes there's like the counter intuitiveness, and you say, well, well, hey, like, I didn't think this kind of bad would work, but then, based on the actual data, like, here's what you should do. And so do you have any fun stories to share along those lines of, like, someone using Omneky, and like being surprised at the suggestions or the results, or like getting new creatives that they otherwise wouldn't have thought about.

Hikari Senju 7:03 Yeah, so our case studies on our site, and you can see the results we've delivered for the customers. In general, our customers, we deliver, on average, about 2x increase return on ad spend with our tool and our service. And so we have a tool customers can go in and use our workload, but we also have professional services component that can deliver these outcomes for you as well. And this means not just generating the content or or editing content, but also, you know, the media buying kind of that last loop as well. So once you've launched the ads to the platforms, you know, there's a whole other savages buying the media targeting the right audiences, having the right funnel for, you know, in terms of awareness campaigns and middle of the funnel and kind of bottom of funnel, kind of conversion oriented campaigns and so and ad sets and so we, we do that whole kind of end to end, and by us, really, you know, doing That, customers do see, in general, 2x increase return ads, but because we're creating better relevant content for customers and delivering better results, I think it was, for example, an interesting use case, an idea that that that RIA came up with for one of Our kind of consumer finance products are customers, and you know, it's just like having, you know, human hand hold the card in the end, and then, and then. So we did, you know, we, we created these ads, then with, with, with a human hand in it, and it delivered better results. So the AI does come up with novel ideas that, you know, sometimes, you know that people wouldn't have thought but on their own, and then that drives better outcomes.

Robert Plank 8:48 Well, great. And you know, you're mentioning this, this idea here of, like, working with the AI, and I find that it took me a while to get on board with that concept. And I think sometimes we need, like, a kind of reminder about it, like there's all this promise of AI, right? Like all this stuff will be automatic and it'll just run itself. But then when we start to use it, we say, well, there kind of has to be a back and forth, right? The AI gives you all kinds of interesting ideas hand holding the product, but then it's up to us humans to kind of course correct that. And so do you have any advice along those lines, when someone uses your tool and like generates all this stuff, there's the the tendency to be overwhelmed or not know what to do next. So like, what do you have to say about like, working with the AI? Or, like, what kind of like mindsets do we need to get into to use your tool properly?

Hikari Senju 9:39 So I think like generative AI is, you know, I think at this point, I think, I think, you know, your audience is playing around with it's not always 100% accurate. It's not it does still have issues. It's getting more accurate and more reliable every day, but there's still issues. There's this kind of next. Step breakthrough that's been done, which is kind of agentic or train of thought, or basically the AI goes through the steps and kind of reasons through it. And then also kind of potentially creates different, like duplicates of itself to try at different times, and kind of make sure that, you know, because sometimes one kind of agentic system could kind of go sideways and through that kind of, these kind of innovations have been done kind of at the inference step or the generation step, the outcomes have been more accurate. And so in terms of, you know, the ways that people can interact with AI today, I think, you know, there's kind of the best practices last year, which was, you know, yeah, you kind of have to be involved in every step and really make sure you're checking the AI to now today, with agentic systems, you have these various research products have been released by these AI companies as well that does deep research through this kind of agentic process. Actually. Now the outcomes are quite consistently good, and you can actually trust those outcomes. And so I think my suggestion is, you know, is kind of like, imagine, like, you're, you know, you're kind of like at co pilot stage today, but like quickly entering full self driving, and it kind of have that mindset that you know today, you know, you know, maybe you're, you know, working, you know, imagine if you check a self driving car, for example, you know, today you're kind of, you know, your hand is on the stream, even as the car is self driving. And you kind of have to make sure, you have to check and make sure that, you know the outputs aren't weird, or it's not doing anything strange. But, you know, hopefully, you know, this year, really, you know it's going to be full self driving, and you will, you can just kind of rest at ease. And of rest at ease. And so that mindset, I think, is good to have regarding consumers using or and just businesses using AI products.

Robert Plank 11:54 I love it, and it's at first I didn't understand it when they were, like, a few months ago, when they like all the agentic and like, multi step logic was, like, talked about a lot. It took me a while to understand it, but then I was like, Okay, it's like, it's kind of the the AI can be random and creative, and then by having the multiple steps, we just kind of, like, add some constraints, right? We sort of shape it with some kind of logic. And like, um, like, even, like this podcast we're doing now, in a future date, we'll dump out the transcript, we'll generate it into a blog post. And like, I used to get frustrated because, like, the results were all over the place, but then when I was like, hey, step one, make the outline. Step two, do the keyword research. Step three, like, build out those different pieces. It was kind of like guiding it to where it wants to go. And like, even, like the self driving cars you mentioned, right? Like, I saw some screenshot a few months ago of, like, what the display or what the logic is, right? And it's like, well, we identified a stop sign here, and we want to make a left turn, but we see in the crosswalk, there's a human it was like, okay, that it makes sense. It's not just about, like, go and do some randomness. Like, there's certain, like, specific inputs and outputs, or things it looks for. And so that's helpful, as far as just kind of navigating this and avoiding the frustrations. And speaking of frustration, being a business owner, entrepreneurship, building something cool, such as Omneky, it's full of frustrations, right? Full of problems. And so I'm curious, just from like the entrepreneurial perspective and like, the, you know, building something that's cutting edge, like, what kind of struggles have you dealt with in creating the software, growing this company?

Hikari Senju 13:33 Gosh, I mean, I feel like, Yeah, I think an entrepreneur, right is, is active. Is an act of defiance, right? It is an act of it is an act of will. And there's ops, like there is, you know, it means it is a sequence of obstacles. There are some of the obstacles are kind of environmental, obviously, incumbents, competition, kind of the innovations in terms of the underlying technology, then there's the market opportunity and kind of the awareness of the market in terms of opportunity. I think we faced that early on in life. I mean, the company was founded back in 2018 with, really the first gen AI advertising company, first move in the space. And then two now and then, there's the challenge of having scarce resources, you know, bootstrapping the company, you know, making ends meet with with very limited resources, and really just, you know, eating what you kill in terms of sales and and, you know, using the profits themselves to fund the operations and the research to, you know, raising capital, hiring managers, managing managers in a more competitive space, you know, where the technology is also rapidly, you know, kind of accelerating and and then kind of, you know, how you just shift strategy and focus there. So there's those sets of challenges as well. I think. It, you know. But that said you have to keep you have to keep trying. You have to keep trying new things. And, yeah, I mean, a lot of the things aren't going to work, but, but that is, you know, there's like that Michael Michael Jordan quote, which is, like, you missed like, hundreds on the shots you don't take, so you do need to. And then I think it was really interesting stat, which is, like, you know, Michael Jordan, or, you know, like Kobe Bryant is, you know, one of the all time scorers, but he's also, you know, the one of the all time misses as well in terms of fast, you know, shots on on goal. And so, you know, there is that element where you have to, you do need to just keep trying. And, you know, like, just lift yourself back up and keep going.

Robert Plank 15:41 I love your mindset and your strategy here that and that. What I'm getting from it is that we need to be informed and look at the data and just figure out what kind of game we're playing in. Because a lot of what we're trying to like you say entrepreneurship is an act of defiance, but people have bootstrapped before. They've done startups before. There's so much to be learned and and, you know, say someone was an upcoming basketball player, right? Say there's some eight year old out there saying, hey, I want to be the next Kobe Bryant. You look at what they did, and you say, hey, well, I'm not just going to get there by luck, like they practiced their tails off, right? They did so much of the training, so that's what I need to do. And it seems like that gets us to be more well informed, and that way, when we do set aside the time, take the action, do the strategy, figure out the logical and emotional hurdles, we can say, Well, hey, I've kind of seen these other templates, blueprints, what other people have done before me, and then I'll apply that to my situation. Of course, we're all different and unique, but there are lessons to be learned from these, you know, these, these people and the LinkedIn articles and the books and people like you and so as far as what you've achieved and what you've built, like would you say, is there something either about like you as a person or you as a company, where you like you really excel. Where you like you really you are unique and stand out better than anyone else.

Hikari Senju 17:06 Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, I think it's fact that I'm studying computer science, the focus on AI and artificial intelligence at Harvard, I cross registered at MIT for studying AI, you know, I got very excited about generate a back when I was in college, when I was seeing the AI generate, at that time, very poor quality images, but still images on the left. And in fact, based in Silicon Valley, you know, at the heart of the revolution and the so we were very, and we're very focused on this advertising use case. I think that is pretty novel. I think, you know, there are a lot of these ad apps. Maybe they're based in, you know, other parts of other parts of the world that aren't as, you know, AI focused in terms of, like, innovating in terms of AI and and, and, like for us, what we're focusing on is, is we want to bring the cutting edge AI to, you know, deliver business outcomes for you, for your business, for your agency. We built a bunch of these tools ourselves to help you know, whether it's ideation or analytics or insights or scaled creative generation. You know, we you can import, import PSD files and scale them with our tool and and then, you know, let's craft the right solution for you so that you know your business or your agency can see 10x outcomes. And so we kind of come at it with a mindset of humility and learning and and not being overly constrained in terms of, like, you know, this is where Canva, this is the use case, and, you know, the this is the editor, which is, I think, great and, you know, but we're really more focused on on delivering a business outcome or solution for that, for that marketer.

Robert Plank 18:57 I love it well, it's a lot to navigate, but it's also exciting, because a lot of the time when you see these AI products or use cases, I think, like, man, that's it's impressive. But how does that affect me? Right? Like, there's always the hype about calculating black holes, and they'll say things like, you know, this is the most advanced computation in all of human history. I'm like, that's great. But like, I don't as an everyday person, like, how does that change my life? And then even you look at, like, all these, like, social media algorithms, right? They optimize for what you want to see. And like, that's great. How does that help me? But now you're talking about making sales, right? Making conversions, growing a business and changing the outcome there. And that's that's exciting for a lot of us. And so you mentioned sometimes, oh, yeah, go ahead.

Hikari Senju 19:43 Well, so I mean, one thing I want to note there is the that, like, marketers are inundated with, like, tons of noise today with all these tools that, you know. Some of them are in beta. Some of them are, you know, live. Some of them are just announcements, and they're not live yet. I. And some of them are real products, you know, that can deliver value, but the marketer is trying to throw their head around all this and forget, well, how does it improve my business processes? How does this help me deliver, actually, deliver outcomes? Okay, cool. I can generate product video. We can do that. I can generate product video. But what you know, like, what does this mean for photo shoots? How does this incorporate into my, you know, asset creation workflow and launching the workflow? How does this turn into, you know, powering my digital asset management tool? Or, you know, Omneky, he also has an asset management tool. So how can I mix my my my generated assets with my existing assets to create compelling content, have like a good, thorough put of creative outputs. That whole workflow to deliver a business outcome is what we hear. We're here to be a partner for business owners to help them cut through the noise and ultimately achieve the business outcomes that they're seeking, utilizing our tools and utilizing state of the art generative AI.

Robert Plank 21:06 Very exciting, and it's important to rise above the geekiness, isn't it, to say, Well, hey, like, we made this amazing tool. But what's also important is saying, well, here's where you as an agency are stuck, and here's where things aren't quite ideal, and here's how you can then integrate it without it being this, this big extra hassle, this big monstrosity. And so I'm curious about, like, what type of business is this for? Do they need to be, like, certain size, certain level of achievement? How does someone know if Omneky is right for them?

Hikari Senju 21:36 So we're focusing on mid market agencies and and the brands that they serve. So that is, that is who the product is known for, and the solutions designed for.

Robert Plank 21:51 And like do. But do you say, like, Should someone have like, a certain like amount of revenue, certain number of employees in order to, like, have the best use for this?

Hikari Senju 22:00 Yeah, so I would say somewhere along between 10 to maybe 1000 employees, but probably closer to, like, the 10s or hundreds of employees is really where we're focusing on, particularly if you're an agency, it's probably on the lower end there. Yeah. And you know, in terms of revenue, you know, sub billion revenue companies.

Robert Plank 22:24 Well, wonderful. And so what's the next step here? I know we have Omneky.com that's O, M, N, E, K, Y.com, you go there. You see some screenshots. See what it's all about. There's a button to book a demo. But I'm curious about your opinion. If someone listens to our podcast and they say, man, what Hikari shared with me is great. Omneky sounds amazing. I want to check this out. Where should they go?

Hikari Senju 22:48 Book a demo. We're here to, you know, first, hear your problems and your challenges that you're facing in your marketing advertising, and then, and then, we're here to see, you know, and see how our tools can help you solve those challenges. And our people are here to help as well. And so book a demo. We're here to listen and then and work together to help. Ultimately, you know, the pitch here is every agency is turning into an agent, AI agency. You know, every marketing team is turning into an AI marketing team, and we're here to help you with that transition. We want to be the platform that powers the transition of your agency into an agentic AI agency. We're here to power the transformation of your marketing team into a agentic AI marketing team and advertising team and and, and we have series of tools that we've built to help with this. And if agencies big and small using our tools today, we have many brands big and small using our tools today, and we're confident that the solutions we've built can help serve your needs.

Robert Plank 23:59 It sounds like you've touched on so many amazing ideas and features. And I love the way that you put that about how the AI transition, it's already started, and it's happening. And you hear the hype about how you can get with it or get left behind. And so you're saying that if an agency is concerned about this change, they really need to focus on it. Don't go it alone. Don't keep doing what you've already been doing. Get the additional help from Omneky. They have great people. They have great software. Go to O, M, N, E, K, Y.com, and on the bottom corner of the screen, you'll see there's a button to book a demo. Listen to their needs. And that's also really, really important and underrated in business and in software, right? Getting that feedback. And those software companies that succeed are the ones that are always talking to the customers, the prospects, saying, Hey, here's where we're stuck. Listening to your needs. That way you get the features dialed in, that way you get the marketing dialed in. Omneky key.com, book a demo, O, M, N, E, K, Y.com, and so Hikari at the very end of our show. Here, it's time to stump you, perhaps, put you on the spot slightly, and ask for a fun quote or lesson that has served you in life or in business that you can pass on to us. So what comes to mind for you as far as a fun quote or lesson?

Hikari Senju 25:16 Yeah, you know, you know, I'm, you know, as I think, you know, it's you battle, right? It's a battle every, every single day is a battle. And I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've started a company in college, which I sold. So been an honor, essentially, for my entire career. And I can say that my favorite quotes, I keep going to actually, there's numerous quotes about this, but one of my favorites, one is by Winston Churchill, which is like, never, never, never, never, you know, never, never, never, never, never, never, never give up that, you know, like, especially now, because the space is changing so quickly, and you hear about so many companies that overnight go from money losing to very profitable, because suddenly there's some innovate, some innovation, AI, and that totally changes in economics. And so, you know, like, it's important to, obviously be learning and and be hungry and have a learner's mindset, but also to be willful and and be, you know, and be a little bit stubborn in terms of your vision and not give up. And so that would be kind of, you know, like my advice or quote is, you know, you haven't failed until you give it up.

Robert Plank 26:35 That is inspiring. Figure out a way to make it work and don't stop it two or three Nevers. Keep going with the nevers and figure out a way to innovate, or go through it, go around it, go under it, figure out a solution. And the solution that you can and should look into as far as scaling sales with data driven creative is from Omneky.com o, M, N, E, K, Y.com, generate 1000s of personalized marketing assets quickly with AI ensuring brand consistency and optimizing for various markets and channels. Omneky.com book a demo. You'll love it. And thank you, Hikari, for showing up, giving us all kinds of logical, practical advice, but also the inspiration motivation. I really appreciate what you brought to the table. So thank you.

Hikari Senju 27:22 Thank you, Robert, it was really pleasure.

Robert Plank 27:24 All right.