TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The advertising forum DigiAsia opened this week, featuring over 20 keynote speakers discussing the latest marketing trends.
Taiwan News had the opportunity to sit down with guest speaker Dan Epstein on Tuesday (Sept. 4) to talk about how his team at CNN Create integrates AI into their workflow. Epstein is the Head of Creative Production for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region at CNN International Commercial and leads the in-house brand studio, CNN Create.
Epstein, who has been in this role for six years, said AI has been instrumental in tasks like interview transcription and translation. “We can literally drag and drop a file, and the results appear quickly,” he said. Epstein also noted that AI speeds up the color grading process in video editing.
“Our studio is using AI to manage the more laborious tasks efficiently, which is great,” Epstein explained. “However, it’s still a combination of working with human expertise. We don’t fully trust AI to do all the work for us.”
Beyond studio production, Epstein said they use AI to help understand their audiences. “It helps us understand the sentiment people have around content at scale,” he added.
Epstein said his presentation would focus on four key themes: the history of content creation, audience engagement, case studies, and common factors in successful content creation.
“As AI helps to streamline and create efficiencies for content creation, stories with high authenticity are going to create more connections,” Epstein stressed.
Touching on CNN Create’s sustainability efforts, Epstein acknowledged that while they tell many stories about sustainability, “content creation itself has a carbon cost.”
“We work with the UK’s Ad Net Zero and their carbon calculator to account for lighting, transportation, etc. And once we know that, we can make more informed decisions about how we make content and where to reduce, if possible,” Epstein explained.
