Hisense Mexico and EPA increase return on ad spend by 48% with AI-powered image generation

Goals

Hisense Mexico, a leading consumer electronics brand, and their agency EPA faced a common challenge—they struggled to rapidly produce cost-effective, high-quality image creatives that aligned with brand and local market requirements. Their creative strategy depended on global creatives that were not appealing to local buyers in Mexico.

The creative development process was slow—producing a new creative asset and launching a campaign could take up to a month. Creative refreshes to combat ad fatigue were both time-consuming and expensive. This lack of flexibility limited Hisense Mexico and EPA’s ability to resonate with potential customers. It also led to missed opportunities during seasonal events such as Prime Day.

The teams therefore set out to optimize the creative strategy by testing AI-generated creatives in a sponsored ads campaign in Amazon Ads. They established clear and measurable KPIs that could be compared to performance benchmarks. The goal was to increase click-through rate (CTR) by 30% and return on ad spend (ROAS) by 25%, while reducing advertising cost of sales (ACOS) by 10%. They also wanted to shorten the creative development process and reduce costs.

Approach

Hisense Mexico and EPA developed a more agile and data-driven approach. The strategy was to intentionally explore non-traditional audiences and tailor creatives to different lifestyle clusters. AI-powered image generation encouraged them to rethink long-held assumptions about their “core” TV audience. The tool helped them discover creative directions that resonated with unexpected, high-value groups. To increase engagement, they used insights to tailor and simplify the creatives with a clear message. They focused on developing lifestyle creatives with custom backgrounds aligned with their target audience’s lifestyle and interests.

How Hisense Mexico and EPA increased performance with AI-powered creatives

Initially, only a handful of team members used Amazon’s AI-powered image generation capabilities, but adoption grew organically as more colleagues wanted to try the tool. The team ramped up rapidly—within a week of testing AI-powered image generation, they successfully produced multiple creative variations that looked authentic and maintained their high creative standards. By the first month of usage, they were producing a high volume of new creatives—not only for the test campaign, but for always-on campaigns as well. Within a couple of months, they scaled to seven new business lines that previously lacked image creatives. EPA used an iterative and collaborative approach to prompting in order to fine-tune the process. This helped maintain authenticity and brand consistency while producing a high volume of variations.

Using AI-powered image generation, Hisense Mexico and EPA were able to develop and test up to seven different creative variations per product—compared to one or two previously. Data-driven optimization helped the team refresh creatives on a monthly basis, reducing ad fatigue and allowing them to quickly adapt when seasonal creatives needed to be updated. These variations, along with more frequent creative updates, led to measurable increases in performance.

Results

Hisense Mexico and EPA were able to exceed all their performance goals—growing CTR by +50% and ROAS by 48%, while lowering ACOS by 32%.¹ The use of AI-powered image generation helped transform their creative development process. Creative production time dropped from four weeks to under an hour. This delivered significant time and cost savings, and team members are now able to focus more time on strategic initiatives while the organizations have become more agile.

Hisense Mexico and EPA used AI to enhance their capabilities. They embraced creative experimentation through A/B testing, lifestyle imagery, contextual storytelling, and emotionally resonant messaging. This test-and-learn approach, combined with more strategic data use, helped them evolve as organizations. By combining data-driven insights with creative thinking and AI technology, Hisense Mexico and EPA closed performance gaps with their creatives and forged stronger connections with their target audiences. As a result, they're now more consistently delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Sources

¹ Hisense Mexico/EPA, Mexico, 2025.