The artificial intelligence platform for the creative industry Magnific, known until last April as Freepik, has announced the investment of 10 million euros to help marketing departments and advertising agency teams in Europe to adopt AI and promote its integration into creative production flows.
It will do so through an initiative called Magnific Fund and with which it seeks to support the evolution of European companies towards a new phase of work with artificial intelligence. “We are in a moment of profound change in the world of marketing. Now companies can do things they couldn’t afford before.”, explains José Florido, Chief Market Development Officer of Magnific, in statements to reason.Why. “There are very positive prospects and great opportunities in this technology. We consider that our mission is to facilitate and support them to transform themselves”.
The funds are aimed at internal marketing and creativity teams, made up of between three and thirty professionals, as detailed by the company to this medium. When selecting applicants, Magnifica will prioritize SMEs and creative teams from the European Union and the United Kingdom, although organizations from other regions may also submit their applications. Those responsible assure that they will evaluate all of them.
The program offers a 30% discount on the Magnific Business plan during the first 12 months, and an additional 30% in extra credits during that same period. It also provides exclusive access to the new artificial intelligence training plan, and personalized onboarding designed to help teams configure their brand kit, collaborative workspaces on the platform and the deployment of their first campaign.
The call will remain active until June 30, and interested companies only have to fill out a form and wait for the evaluation of their eligibility. Magnific points out that the fund is aimed especially at teams that need to generate a high volume of campaign resources, product images or content for social networks, and the tools to which it gives access will allow them to do so without increasing the complexity of production.
One of the highlights of the initiative is access to the platform’s training program, which includes a practical guide with use cases and prompts ready to use and generate creatives; as well as on-demand video series, monthly live webinars and continuous training support, as stated by Magnific.
It is articulated around six real production workflows with AI tools that solve the current volume and speed needs of creative teams. Thus, it focuses on the generation of packaging options for product development; the linguistic adaptation of the creatives; product photography without production, asset animation and motion graphics generation, adaptation of various formats and comprehensive management of the production of an advertisement.
The motivation for the focus on training when launching Magnific Fund is for AI to be part of the real production processes and to stop being a simple secondary experiment. The company seeks to help close the knowledge gap that the company observes in the sector. “We believe that teams are still not well familiar with the possibilities of AI and in many cases training is lacking.“, José Florido assures us. “Over the last three years our team of creatives has made the necessary transformation to adapt to the new reality with artificial intelligence, and we believe that we can share all that knowledge with the industry.”.
The company was founded in Malaga in 2010 initially as a search engine for graphic resources and over the years it shaped an ecosystem of image, video, audio and collaboration tools that coexisted fragmented. It now offers an integrated creative infrastructure driven by artificial intelligence and represents one of the most complete creative platforms on the market, surpassing in capabilities some of the large American players.
Companies and brands around the world are already turning to features and capabilities. Puma, for example, carried out its advertisement alongside Manchester City with Magnific; while Alain Afflelou did the same in his children’s glasses campaign. The hamburger chain Carl’s Jr has also done it in its campaign with Paris Hilton.
The announcement of the €10 million investment comes after the recent relaunch of Freepik under the Magnific brand in April, and those responsible believe that the fund will boost their strategic plans. ““We continue to focus on independent creatives, but for some time now we have also been working on bringing our solutions to the business ecosystem.”points out José Florido to reason.Why. “The fund can help boost the positioning of European companies in AI. There is talk that Europe does not have a champion name in artificial intelligence. This can prove that we are”.
