Coca-Cola’s latest Christmas campaign signalled the bold and controversial arrival of generative AI onto the stage of global advertising. Behind the warm neon and polar bear fur seen on our screens were AI tools such as Runway, Leonardo and Luma; tools integral to how Secret Level and Silverside AI built Coca-Cola’s festive world both at pace and in its rich detail. What these studios created was met with both backlash and excitement. Its cost-cutting and lack of human input seemed at odds with the festive period, yet it also showed AI’s growing prowess in completing creative tasks at competitive prices.
Whilst Silverside are based in San Francisco, I wanted to understand the companies based in the UK that similarly define the cutting edge of AI’s role in marketing content generation, and how this technology has been adopted across other aspects of marketing. Through just using the information about Silverside from The Data City’s Industry Engine and identifying similar companies, a training set was developed that was used to map the growing role of AI for content generation in the marketing sector.
This process began by pasting Silverside’s website into The Data City’s Instant Classification Service, which uses proprietary AI methods to assign a company to its most relevant classification, whether that be a Real Time Industrial Classification or those we use to map international markets. In this case, Silverside was found to be similar to the companies we have classified on our platform as within the AI Ecosystem RTIC.
Since the taxonomy behind this AI RTIC was made with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to capture tangible AI applications across multiple sectors and their supporting services, a keyword search was used to identify those that specifically focused on creative video production. The results showed me companies with websites that frequently featured the words “creative video”.
Within these most relevant companies was Lightricks, an Israeli company with offices in London that builds advanced generative AI models powering creative tools and next-gen video production. Its flagship LTX-2 model generates synchronised audio and high-fidelity visuals at cinematic quality and across a broad range of visual styles.
Interested in companies pioneering these broader features, I applied a wider keyword search for “video” and “marketing” and found Synthesia, a London-based AI company that specialises in synthetic media and AI-generated video for marketing, training, and communications. Using neural rendering and speech synthesis, text can be turned into animated avatars and polished videos with multilingual voiceovers; all without cameras or studios.
Looking further
Looking further into how these avatars work across the marketing and advertising industries, I used the similar companies feature to identify companies that use related concepts to describe what they do. Like Synthesia, Colossyan uses generative AI to automate video production via avatar-led presentation and text-to-speech technology. With offices in London, Colossyan also developed a platform that can use text and PDF documents to create these presentations, helping workflow teams rapidly transform static materials into engaging videos that can be used for onboarding or customer-facing product explainers. Also featuring voice synthesis and text-to-video capacities, Cognitive Videos‘ platform turns documents and brand assets into professional videos quickly. Based in Reading, their video marketing automation platform also extended into AI-powered script writing and brand-focused video editing features, which prevents AI generated content from warping logos.
After viewing these 4 companies, I realised that the use of AI in the creation of marketing video content is multifaceted, ranging from script writing features to the use of existing static documents to prompt video creation, the building of multilingual avatars to narrate this and the application of specific brand features to make the overall experience customisable. I also saw the differing scales at which these companies operate, with established players like Synthesia, Lightricks and Colossyan being joined by smaller and UK-based ventures like Cognitive Videos.
This variety prompted me to investigate further other companies active in the intersection of both AI and marketing, and after 30 minutes of looking through this RTIC and their similar companies, I had built a positive training set, or a list of exemplar companies that best defines this intersection.
Through our ML List Builder, this training set was used to build positive classifier terms, and by providing it with companies that I know are irrelevant, negative classifier terms are also generated. Based upon a complex weighting of these terms, or those that reflect the sector I am trying to capture and those that are irrelevant, each of the 1.5 million companies we have matched to the website is given a score and a list of this niche industry sector is generated.
After refining this list by updating both training sets, I had created a list of over 400 UK companies that are active in applying AI for marketing purposes. Whilst I started this exploration with one example from the US that had been active in doing this since early 2024, I was now able to view UK companies that had become incorporated in 2025, giving me a real-time view of the cutting edge.
As examples, the London-based Retail Labs uses AI-powered imagery generation to transform basic product photos into virtual modelled fashion and campaign visuals. Where they automate studio quality e-commerce images and product videos, Contenta AI, also London-based, focuses on AI-driven content creation for creators and publishers.
Using AI to write SEO-enhanced copy and with services coming soon that will enable this to be turned into short-form videos designed for social media, both Contenta AI and Retail Labs exemplify how the interaction between AI and marketing is broader than what I previously thought.
In summary, The Data City’s Platform was used to turn one example of an American company utilising AI technologies for marketing purposes into a sector-wide view of companies doing the same in the UK. Through searching through the Artificial Intelligence EcoSystem RTIC to find the companies used in the training set, it was made apparent that they were providing services that were distinct from what had been captured under previous taxonomies.
Since these services have become more established, they will feature in a new vertical that will be part of our Marketing Agency RTIC and will be released once the update has been completed.
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