Creator Michel Janse says she was on her honeymoon when she learned that her likeness was being used to promote erectile-dysfunction pills online.

“People had messaged me, saying, ‘Hey, I saw this ad, and it didn’t look like you, but it was you,’” she told Marketing Brew. “It was me, in my clothes, in my bedroom, but I didn’t do an ad there.”

Janse says the ad, which she briefly showed on her TikTok account, was a deepfake, and depicted Janse talking about her husband “Michael” and his issues with ED. The ad pulled visuals from a 33-minute video about her divorce that she posted to YouTube a year ago, which she called “by far the most personal thing I’ve ever shared.” That, along with the fact that the link in the ad directed to content that she described as “basically pornographic,” made the experience all the more violating, Janse told us.

AI-generated deepfakes are a new reality, and one that creators like Janse, Ida Giancola, and MrBeast, as well as celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Taylor Swift, and Tom Hanks, are all grappling with.

“With celebrities, this is a real issue right now because anybody anywhere can take the likeness of somebody and use it,” Rahul Titus, global head of influence at Ogilvy, told us. “With the way social media works and the spread of fake news, the damage potential is endless.”

There are some state-level laws regulating and limiting deepfakes, including in California and Illinois, and lawmakers have introduced some federal-level legislation, while the FCC and FTC have also moved to ban some deepfake usage. But federal regulation still hasn’t been passed—and legislation doesn’t often move at the same pace as technological developments.

“Looking back, I probably should have been more shocked or concerned than I was,” Janse said. “But when you hear so much about what can happen on the internet, I’ve kind of been mentally preparing for my turn.”

Continue reading here.—KH

85% of CEOs surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value say that generative AI will be interacting directly with customers in the next 2 years—if it’s not already.

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Disney is sold out of ad inventory for the Final Four and championship rounds of this year’s women’s March Madness tournament on ESPN, according to Jacqueline Dobies, Disney Advertising’s VP of revenue and yield management.

The tournament has 87 total advertisers, with an almost even split between new and returning brands. Google and Home Depot are among the new advertisers. Seven new categories joined in as well, including bottled water and home insurance.

“The hardest part was trying to find space for everybody, which is a great problem to have,” Dobies told Marketing Brew. “We’ve seen growth from existing categories, but we’ve also seen a lot of new categories enter this space.”

There are also several multiyear ESPN partners involved in the tournament this year, Dobies said, including halftime sponsor Unilever, which is part of Disney Advertising’s Level Up program, a framework it introduced last year to facilitate more spending on women’s sports. (Home Depot and Unilever are both advertising in the men’s tournament as well, which, as of last week, was all but sold out.)

Slow your roll: Revenue from the women’s tournament has doubled from last year, according to Dobies. Disney Advertising started fielding interest as early as May, she said, but her team didn’t immediately sell to every brand that came knocking. If they had done that, “we would have been sold out months ago,” she said.

Read more here.—AM

Calling a car? On Lyft, it might start feeling more like YouTube.

The ridesharing app has begun showing video ads to riders, Zach Greenberger, the company’s chief business officer, told Marketing Brew.

The ads, which the company announced Thursday, will begin playing automatically (but will be muted) and can run anywhere between 15 seconds and four minutes. Warner Bros., BetMGM, and Universal Pictures have already signed on to advertise, according to a company blog post shared with Marketing Brew.

“Video ads are generally really engaging,” Greenberger said. “It’s some of the most common feedback that we’ve gotten from our customers when we’ve just been generally thinking about the future of our product roadmap.”

The move to branch out into video ad inventory marks an expansion of Lyft’s media business, which includes in-app display ads, ads that appear inside rideshare vehicles on tablets, on rideshare bike stations, and on the roofs of some rideshare vehicles. The business has been bolstered by an acquisition: Lyft purchased the out-of-home startup Halo, which compensates drivers who display digital ads on the roofs of their vehicles, in 2020.

The company is also partnering with measurement firms Nielsen and Kantar to help the company and its clients measure the performance of Lyft’s campaigns, Greenberger said.

Continue reading here.—RB

Peep these performance stats. What can video content do for your business? Find out in Wistia’s State of Video report. These insights are based on analysis of over 90m videos and the 100k+ businesses that made them. Get the scoop on the best-performing video types, lengths, and more. Download the report.

Executive moves across the industry.

• Lyft tapped Brian Irving, a Meta alum, to serve as CMO.
• Vrbo marketing vet Tannen Campbell is the new CMO of Cleo, an AI-powered personal finance app.
• MullenLowe’s global CEO, Kristen Cavallo, is retiring from the IPG-owned agency.