X Launches Trend Genius Ads

X has got a new product designed to help advertisers tap into trending events, with its “Trend Genius” ads utilizing AI to boost promotions at conversation peaks.

Using X’s advancing AI systems, Trend Genius ads are able to detect rising topics of discussion, and align ad placement with brand-relevant mentions.

As explained by X:

“Trend Genius allows advertisers to hand select the conversation topics they want to align with: this can be anything from the Olympics or professional sports leagues, to fashion, music, AI, and beyond. Then when conversation about these topics organically reaches a heightened level or velocity on X, an ad featuring preprogrammed creative is automatically deployed on the platform.”

So you can put together a campaign to, say, tap into the conversation around the Olympics, or a specific happening at the event, and X’s Trend Genius process will match your chosen keywords with rising conversation in the app, and publish your ad when relevant mentions increase.

It could be a good way to tap into trending discussion, though I would have some questions around the accuracy of its AI models in this respect, given recent criticism of X’s Grok AI news summaries.

Just this week, Grok has incorrectly created news headlines around several news events.

As you can see in this example, Grok’s news summary process, which aims to highlight key news events based on X posts, often mistakes sarcasm for real information, because a lot of X posts are, of course, sarcastic, humorous, and/or simply misleading.

Because Grok is trying to decipher truth from a random array of comments like this, its news headlines are often incorrect. Which is part of the learning process for the system, and X, but if this is the same system that X is deploying to launch ads based on trends, there could be issues.

X hasn’t provided any info on whether the same process is being used for this ad offering.  

But theoretically at least, X’s Trend Genius process could help advertisers maximize their ad spend, by tapping into trends, and also, reducing ad spend once a trend dies down.

“When the conversation calms down and stabilizes, the ad is automatically turned off. This aims to maximize relevance of the paid ad creative on X, while minimizing “waste.”

It could be something, and X says that, in testing, advertisers have seen “record engagement rates.”

X also notes that Trend Genius promotions can be programmed via third-party data feeds, so you can align your ads with real world happenings, based on off-platform data. So if the weather bureau in your area, for example, predicts coming rain, you can align your creative to be shown in your local area once the rain hits.

In theory, it could be a good option, and it’ll be interesting to see what sorts of results brands see with these promotions on a broader scale.

But as noted, X is still developing its AI models, and there could be false positives as well. We’ll find out, with Trend Genius ads now available to X advertisers.