This post was sponsored by Leadzai. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Not long ago, most of our conversations with agencies opened with the same question: should we even be doing TikTok for our small business clients?
That question has quietly disappeared. Agencies now come to us asking how quickly they can bring their entire SMB portfolio onto the platform, and the first thing they want to see is the video.
Both comments point to the same shift. For agencies, the bottleneck on TikTok was never the ad platform. It was the video, which is becoming an increasingly important part of digital advertising.
Video Now Impacts Search, Not Just Social Presence
Google adjusted ranking to surface more short-form video.
Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, said users “are going to short-form video, they are going to forums, they are going to user-generated content a lot more” (SEJ). Google Search Console now reports on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube posts appearing in Search and Discover (SEJ), which means Google possibly treats social video as search inventory.
TikTok videos aren’t cited by ChatGPT or AI Overviews today. TikTok is where people search. YouTube is what AI cites. A storyline that runs on both covers both.
TikTok Is Where Their Customers Search
From here, video picks up a second important task for brand visibility.
TikTok has more than a billion users, and it’s no longer just an entertainment platform. In an Adobe Express survey reported earlier this year, 49% of U.S. consumers said they have used TikTok as a search engine. For a local plumber, salon, or restaurant, that represents another source of discovery beyond Google.
Competitors Are Already Making Video Ads With AI
The production side is changing just as fast.
86% of advertisers said they are using or plan to use generative AI to build video ad creative, and small and mid-sized brands are adopting it faster than enterprises.
Now, you have to keep up with competition’s video scale for each of your clients.
How To Plan Video Production For Every Client Account
Set Your Annual Video Production Target
Four numbers give you the target. Work through them per account, then total.
- Set a creative count per campaign. Start at four, inside TikTok’s recommended range of three to five per ad group.
- Set a refresh cycle. Quarterly at minimum. Refresh sooner when click-through or conversion rate drops, which is the first sign of creative fatigue.
- Multiply by active accounts. Four creatives, four refreshes a year, 300 clients: 4,800 videos. At 500 clients, 8,000.
- Hold your workflow to that number. If it can’t hit it at consistent quality, fix the workflow before adding accounts.
Check Your Current Workflow Against Three Failure Points
Bandwidth. TikTok runs on video, and most SMBs don’t have the resources to produce it consistently.
A professionally produced ad has traditionally involved scripts, shoots, and edits that can take weeks to complete for a single client. For an agency managing hundreds or thousands of SMB accounts, producing video one client at a time simply doesn’t scale.
Volume. Generative AI has helped solve the volume half of that problem, but not the quality half. In a WARC study conducted with TikTok and 400 marketing leaders, 90% said they use AI as a core creative tool, yet only 45% reported significant improvements in quality. The report argues that the new creative advantage comes from relevance, not output.
Relevance. Volume without relevance produces ads that could belong to any business. The fix is a pipeline built around the advertiser’s real context from the first step.
How To Create AI Video Ads At Scale: A 3-Step Pipeline
The agencies scaling fastest treat video as a pipeline, not a production. Each step has one job, and the order matters.
Image: pipeline diagram Caption: video ad pipeline · 3 steps and a feedback loop
Step 1: Use The Client’s Existing Photos & Business Context To Build The Video Foundations
Start with a multimodal LLM, a model that can analyse images and text together. Give it what the business already has: a few real photos of the storefront, products, team, or finished work, along with the logo and key business information. That means what they sell, where, who they serve, and what makes them different.
The model’s job is to write a storyline, a script and visual guideline that becomes the ad’s single source of truth:
- Hook: TikTok’s creative best practices recommend putting the value proposition in the first three seconds and treating the first six as the hook.
- Problem: The moment the viewer recognises their own situation.
- Narrative: What the business does about it, shown through its own visuals.
- Call to action: One clear next step.
It also maps each scene to a reference image and identifies the key elements that must never change.
This is where consistency is decided. If the guideline specifies this restaurant, with this dining room and these dishes, every downstream step inherits it. Skip this step, and you get a generic video about “a restaurant” that could belong to anyone.
It’s also a learning step. When the agency or business owner asks for a punchier hook or a warmer tone, that feedback refines the storyline, and every later version improves. Next industry insight would be nice here: when does this go live?
The reactions to those videos have been remarkably consistent. “It’s amazing how real the ad looks based on contextual images. It feels like it was professionally made,” one agency partner told us after reviewing ads built from a handful of a client’s own photos. Another described the part that surprised them most:
“The storyline keeps getting better and better as we provide feedback.”
Step 2: Choose An AI Video Generator That Accepts Reference Images
Next, pass the storyline and the same images to a video model. Here, the field narrows quickly. Very few models accept images as references for generation rather than text prompts alone. Current options include Google’s Veo 3.1 and Gemini Omni, ByteDance’s Seedance, Kling, and Alibaba’s Wan.
For SMB advertising, reference images are non-negotiable. Text-to-video can produce stunning footage, but a video advertising your restaurant that shows a restaurant that isn’t yours is worse than no video at all. For a local business, the real place is the product, so the context and visuals have to feel real.
Generate in vertical 9:16, at 15 to 20 seconds. In our pipeline, each video is ready in minutes. That changes how agencies work: review, feedback, and a new version can all happen in the same sitting.
Build for model churn. Don’t build your process around a single model. In recent months, OpenAI shut down the Sora 2 video API with no direct replacement, Google retired Veo 2 and Veo 3.0, and new models such as Gemini Omni and Seedance 2.5 arrived. Any agency that hard-wired one vendor has already had to rebuild.
The durable assets are the ones you own: storyline guidelines, brand inputs, feedback history, and a library of hooks that work. Treat the video model as a component you can swap.
Step 3: Add AI Voiceover & Captions In Each Client’s Language
Finally, turn the video into an ad. Generate the voiceover from the script with a text-to-speech model. Leading voice models now cover 70+ languages, allowing one storyline to serve a client in Lisbon, Zurich, or Dallas with native-sounding narration.
Then add captions in the same language. TikTok suggests five to 10 words of on-screen text per second, and captions help carry the message for anyone scrolling with or without sound, while making the video more accessible.
AI labeling is either set by the advertiser at upload or applied automatically by the platform. Many video models embed invisible watermarks, such as Google’s SynthID, that platforms can read to identify AI-generated video. Make disclosure a default setting in the workflow, not an afterthought.
Last, produce variants. TikTok recommends three to five creatives per ad group. Because the storyline is reusable, a new variant means a new hook or angle, not a new production. Refresh the creative as performance starts to decline.
One Storyline, Every Channel: TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts & AI Search
One storyline can power every channel your clients run, but each network needs its own cut.
- TikTok: Keep it native and creator-style, sound on, with the hook in the opening seconds. TikTok treats sound as a basic creative requirement, not an extra.
- Instagram and Facebook Reels: The same 9:16 format works, but the creative should also work without sound. Let the captions carry the story on their own.
- YouTube Shorts and Performance Max: Shorts now average 200 billion daily views, according to YouTube’s 2026 outlook. For Performance Max, supply your own 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16 versions. If you don’t provide video assets, Google can auto-generate videos from your assets, and its own help documentation warns these may feature a different product than the one on your landing page.
The principle is the same everywhere: the storyline stays fixed, and only the format, pacing, and text treatment change.
Creativity Stays Human. The Pipeline Makes It Scale
The creative gap that kept SMBs off TikTok is closing. The agencies best positioned to scale won’t necessarily be the ones with the newest model, but the ones with the best inputs, the tightest feedback loop, and a pipeline that turns each client’s real world into a video worth watching.
People bring creativity. The pipeline makes it scale.
To see what that looks like for your client base, start with how the storyline step works.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Leadzai Used with permission.
In-Post Images: Images by Leadzai. Used with permission.
