Meet Waymark: the Innovative AI Tool Making High Quality Commercials Accessible for All

“We make it really easy for anyone to create high quality commercials with AI,” said Alex Persky-Stern, CEO of Waymark.  

Waymark is an innovative online resource for anyone in need of high-quality video content, specifically aiming to help small businesses stay afloat in an increasingly digital world. In just the past four years, viewership of digital video content online has grown from 2.78 billion viewers worldwide in 2019 to 3.48 billion in 2023. With nearly a 25% increase of online viewers, Waymark saw an opportunity to provide support to small businesses that were struggling to make sense of how to adapt to the exponentially expanding digital world.  

To stay relevant, and expand into new audiences, businesses need video advertising. “We empower anyone to make a commercial for their business from scratch. Waymark scans your website and uses that as a foundation,” said Persky-Stern. “It pulls in images, video, everything! It pulls from social too.”  

Once all those assets are pulled in, users simply click on the “create video” button and the innovative AI system makes a video. Persky-Stern says, “The video creator even has a feature allowing users to give the AI direction. Tell it you want a laid-back video. Maybe you want inspiring, fun, whatever you want – it can do it.”  

Waymark’s AI is so powerful and accurate that it was the first company featured on OpenAI.com — the creators of Chat GPT. Persky-Stern attributes this “to the way we were fine tuning. We taught the AI with tons of videos and then we iterated. It took a long time to get to where we are, but where we are is pretty amazing.”  

The Waymark platform is so powerful that every video you create with it is completely unique. If you ask it to “create video” five times, you’ll get five different videos. Its ease of use, and applicability to small businesses, has garnered interest from some major media companies.  

Fox TV stations started offering the service to their small business advertisers. Spectrum provides it to hundreds of small businesses through a Pay It Forward program, allowing these small businesses to compete with high quality video marketing content. It even caught the attention of AdWeek who featured Waymark’s work with Spectrum.  

Despite their growth, Waymark has remained focused on fulfilling a For More Than Profit philosophy. “We started, and continue to have, a strong love of small business. We have a mission to democratize quality content and open channels to small businesses,” said Perksy-Stern. “For example, during COVID we were able to give away free videos to thousands of small businesses. We gave away millions of dollars in advertising to small businesses. It’s part of being For More Than Profit.”  

Waymark’s philosophy stems from its partnership with Detroit-based early-stage venture capital firm, Detroit Venture Partners (DVP). Found by Dan Gilbert in 2010, and built on his For More Than Profit philosophy, DVP investments come with more than a check. “DVP has been with us since the beginning. We’ve had challenges, a lot of them, but DVP continued to believe in us and support us,” stated Persky-Stern. “DVP has been great, we love the team there. They’ve been super helpful with strategy and introductions. And really practical stuff. For example, we’ve been able to test out and improve things within the Family of Companies. They connected us with Rocket Mortgage, and we did some video creation for every banker, making an individual video for each one. We wouldn’t be where we are without the support of DVP.”