How Amazon Ads is driving advertising performance with AI-generated creative assets that scale

Since the inception of advertising, brands across all industries have grappled with the cost and complexity of developing effective and engaging ad creatives. From understanding what types of ads resonate with customers to creating those ads efficiently and at scale, advertisers have faced numerous challenges.

That is why we are innovating with generative artificial intelligence (AI) to address the big problems advertisers are facing today. Because at Amazon Ads, we know that when we help advertisers create better and more useful ads, we are ultimately helping deliver a better advertising experience for our customers everywhere.

And since the world of generative AI advancement is moving fast, so are we.

Last fall, we launched Image generator, a simple and easy generative AI–powered technology that is designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that enhances ad performance. Using the real (non-generative AI) product image, Image generator leverages generative AI to pull insights from product descriptions and reviews to create compelling, ad-ready creatives that naturally showcase the actual product on display. For instance, instead of displaying a coffee mug against a plain white background, Image generator can instantly place it in a cozy kitchen or on a nightstand, creating a more engaging, realistic scene in seconds. Advertisers are then able to easily tweak that background image, so while the product image remains unchanged, they can bring their brand story to life in a host of new and creative ways.

We designed Image generator to be accessible and easy for advertisers of any size to use—because we know there are so many brands that are navigating time, budget, and expertise constraints, but still want to create engaging and vibrant lifestyle imagery. We also know that ad imagery that is more engaging and of higher-quality translates to a better customer shopping experience.

“With generative AI, you don’t need to choose between quality and efficiency—you can have both,” says Jay Richman, vice president of product and technology for Amazon Ads. Richman’s team was responsible for developing Image generator and is working on a wide range of generative AI solutions that will help make the creative development process even more seamless and simple for brands of all sizes.

Since its launch, advertisers have used Image generator to develop and test significantly more creatives for their campaigns, demonstrating how accessible and user-friendly the technology is. This ease of use has empowered advertisers to be more iterative and creative in their approach to asset development—and we have seen over and over how they are infusing their ad creative development process with shopping insights in a way they haven’t ever before. Are the holidays approaching? No problem. With a few simple clicks, an advertiser can create imagery that places the same coffee mug next to a warm fireplace and Christmas tree, resonating with customer reviews mentioning how the mug brings a cozy and festive feeling to their holiday mornings.

We’re also seeing that advertisers using Image generator have increased their campaign submissions by over 20%, demonstrating that they are testing multiple options and optimizing their ads investment by moving spend to the best-performing ones. This highlights the technology’s effectiveness in helping brands streamline creative development, experiment with new ideas, and maximize campaign impact. In fact, these advertisers experienced a nearly 5% increase in sales per advertiser, demonstrating that better ads can significantly drive customer demand.

“As an early beta partner that has since fully integrated Image generator into our platform, Pacvue has already seen that Amazon Ads advanced AI-powered tools eliminate creative barriers and enable increased ROI, a reduction in production costs, and faster multivariate testing for advertisers of all sizes,” says Melissa Burdick, president and co-founder of Pacvue, a commerce acceleration platform. “It is thrilling to watch Amazon Ads introduce new offerings that transform our approach to branded imagery in a way that enables efficiencies and facilitates increased click-through rates and conversions for brands.”

In addition to removing the many barriers within the creative development process, we are also working to solve one of the most stubborn problems in online advertising: the tension between standard ads and native ads. Standard ads (like banners) follow a prescribed format, which makes them highly scalable and inexpensive to produce, but not as easy to tweak from a creative development perspective. Native ads are custom-built to integrate seamlessly into a particular context. While they tend to be more engaging, they historically have not been as easy to efficiently scale. As any advertiser will tell you, not only is it difficult to create engaging ad imagery, it is then equally challenging optimizing that imagery to shine across different ad formats.

To help make it simpler for brands to showcase their creative across ad formats, we are excited to introduce a new Aspect Ratio capability to Image generator in the U.S. this week—making the technology even more useful for advertisers. Initially, Image generator only allowed for campaign imagery in a 1.91:1 aspect ratio with a 1200x628 resolution. Now, advertisers can use Image generator’s Aspect Ratio to analyze and repurpose creative in multiple dimensions and resolutions for various ad formats or resize and save for different placements, helping ensure the creative drives results across various channels. This enhancement allows for greater flexibility and consistency in visual presentations, optimizing ad effectiveness across different channels.

“We’re breaking the tension between standard ads that are easy to scale and native ads that optimize performance,” says Richman. “A brand can use AI to generate great creative, and then use AI to customize it for everything from Amazon to Twitch to Whole Foods.”

And this is just the beginning. Throughout the year, Amazon Ads plans to introduce additional and increasingly advanced generative AI capabilities to help advertisers overcome creative barriers and optimize campaigns. Amazon Ads is currently developing generative AI–powered features that will analyze an ad, identify all of its constituent parts (such as logo, copy, call-to-action), and then transform the ad into any size, shape, or format. These features will also enhance the overall quality of the original ad—doing everything from correcting typos to improving color to even translating copy into different languages. This continuous innovation aims to provide advertisers with powerful tools to create more effective and polished campaigns effortlessly.

“This is a true paradigm shift,” says Richman. “We have the potential to redefine creativity and relevance in advertising. It’s a very exciting time to be in the ads business.”