Whirlpool needed engaging holiday campaign assets—fast. The Amazon Ads AI Image generation tool created them instantly

Heading into the final quarter of 2023, the Whirlpool consumer packaged goods (CPG) team found themselves in a time crunch that many marketers know well. With the holiday season looming, the team noticed an asset gap in their appliance-cleaning business: They had images—but nothing that was relevant to the holidays.

“While we could have used those assets, it just wouldn’t be super relevant, and we risked them getting lost in the mix of other ads during a peak season,” said Melissa Bello, a brand product and marketing manager at Whirlpool CPG. “Holiday prep is a key period for our appliance-cleaning business. Nobody wants to have a foul dishwasher when they’re hosting parties or family gatherings.”

Typically, the Whirlpool CPG team works closely with agencies to bring the brand to life with memorable and relevant creative.

“Some of our brands exist in a very crowded space, and it’s important that we get the creative right,” Bello said. “It all starts with a kickoff meeting where my team walks through a creative brief: weeks of planning on the agency’s side, and shoot execution. It can take a ton of time and become very costly.”

But with the holidays around the corner, time was not on their side.

Chatting about the problem with their team at Amazon Ads, Bello and her colleagues learned about a new generative AI capability designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that can help improve their ads’ performance. The tool leverages generative AI to deliver lifestyle images, based on product details, in a matter of seconds. Multiple images can be quickly generated by entering short text prompts and tested to optimize performance.

“This was super intriguing, since we were caught on our heels and didn’t have enough time or resources to kick off a brief with our agency of record,” Bello said. “Our Amazon Ads team walked us through the tool together, and we started having fun playing around with various options. The tool came back with loads of backdrops and options based on our variety of word searches—we played around with adding in our product limbo shot, and found a great option that looked super natural.”

The Whirlpool CPG team took the limbo stills of the Affresh washing-machine cleaner product and placed it in a kitchen with holiday decor and dishes in time for the start of their campaign. As Bello explained, it’s imperative for brands to create relevant ads for consumers during such busy times like the holidays.

“Customers see so many ads and content, which makes it really hard to stick out,” Bello said. “Being seasonally relevant is really important when trying to cut through the clutter—it’s so much more relatable, which increases the odds of customer engagement and conversion.”

Given this was such an important time of year for the brand, they wanted to focus on leveraging the creative in sponsored ads to drive impressions, sales, and conversion.

Using these AI-generated images in campaigns in the lead-up to Thanksgiving and Christmas, Whirlpool drove more than 2 million impressions and a 2.017% click-through rate (CTR), above the 0.52% CTR category benchmark.¹

“We were blown away by how well it performed and the results we achieved,” Bello said. “We’ll continue to leverage traditional campaign shoots and creative, but we believe that there is a place for AI in addition to that. We’ve used the tool a few additional times since our initial trial with spring-cleaning campaigns and continued to see positive results.”

As Bello explained, the AI Image generation tool allowed Whirlpool to move quickly, expand the breadth of their campaign creative, and be more relevant during important seasonal windows.

“We created the creative in less than an hour, it was different that any of our core campaign assets or competition, and our marketing team was in full control of what the creative looked like as we plug-and-played with various AI-generated images,” Bello said. “This can also help to pull some pressure off our team when it comes to having ‘fresh’ content, which is huge when it comes to budget planning.”

Going forward, Bello said Whirlpool is interested in using the tool for other important seasonal moments or other trends the brand might want to jump on quickly. It’s also important, she said, for brands to test, learn, and iterate with new technology like Image generation in order to stay relevant and reach customers.

“With all the content consumers absorb on a daily or even hourly basis, it’s definitely a competitive advantage to leverage new technology to reach them in a more meaningful way that is efficient and always on brand to still be authentic,” Bello said.

Thanks to new technology like AI Image generation, marketers can breathe a sigh of relief when they end up in a campaign asset pinch.