Visual Innovation: Amazon's Generative AI Enhancing Product Images for Advertisers

0:00Amazon is introducing a new AI powered tool that essentially allows advertisers to generate backgrounds for their ads based solely on product descriptions and selected themes. So currently this is in beta testing with a select group of advertisers and the company plans to widen its availability in the foreseeable future. This is a trend that I think we're going to see across like every tool where anywhere they can integrate generative AI they will. Amazon's definitely not the first. Meta has been using generative AI for their ads for a number of months now and Google is also doing something similar so it seems like they're following suit.

0:33But Amazon actually traditionally has been very good in this space. So in order to utilize this new tool, advertisers need to upload an image. They then key in a background description, right? So like, let's say it's a shampoo bottle or a remote or a pillow, you upload an image of the item, and then you say like, couch for the background of the pillow, and then the pillow's on a couch. Or you can choose a theme, you can hit the generate button. If the result is not kind of what you want when you do this, advertisers then can make adjustments they can re-enter a text prompt and essentially it's pretty much like you get you know mid-journey or whatever to uh to generate images behind your image um i think this is interesting of course you definitely could do this yourself on photoshop or mid-journey and kind of like photoshop your your image together but i think this is really cool for people to be able to do this on the fly really quickly um it kind of like i think this is going to happen more where a lot of these tools get it's like you're not just using your creative suite of software to do this your photoshops and your canvas and whatever to use all these ai tools it's like it's just going to be ai is going to be baked in and built into like all of these different platforms so um you're just going to be able to do it right on the platform that you upload the image to which i think is a really interesting concept because virtually every platform every software in the world has an image upload for something or other right whether that's just to upload your profile picture or like that's I guess the most basic everyone will have that and so it'd be interesting to see if Amazon because a lot of their their AI tech that they roll out in their their platforms that same tech is on their Amazon bedrock program so essentially anyone can kind of integrate with it that's on AWS which is most software companies today are a lot of them so it's kind of interesting because when I see something like this it makes me think like eventually every software every platform you use for anything you're going to upload your profile picture and you're gonna be able to use generative ai to like auto make like cool backgrounds and do all sorts of really interesting things so amazon showcased this tool's capabilities uh using an image of a toaster uh then they had you know like an autumn themed kitchen table top backdrop uh they had like fall leaves and pumpkins um while the beta version definitely has its quirks of the software um such like sometimes it's got like these oddly placed forks in the frame you know it's just stuff you expect from this ai generated software um that isn't mid-journey mid-journey seems to have solved a lot of those problems but i think the backdrop generation is really like it's impressively realistic um which is very interesting and it's kind of funny because i've definitely been on amazon a lot and seen like a picture of some product like on it let's say on a table but it's just like the dimensions are in the they're like completely off it's like i don't know like let's say it's like some cutlery on a table but it's like the cutlery is like way too big for the table or the table's way too big for the cutlery and it's you know not very realistic so amazon's doing a really good job here i think a lot of products might actually get better pictures because of that i think generative ai's promise is really kind of simplifying ad creation um and i think this has caught the attention of a lot of different brands creating a really impactful ad can be quite pricey and labor intensive as well so specifically i think what they're building here isn't just for like when you're looking at like a product on amazon and it has a picture this is more for like the ads around those products.

3:55And the reason why this is important is because when you're doing ad creative, my background is in digital marketing. And so I have a lot of experience in this area. But when you're doing ad creative, you get what's called ad exhaustion. So pretty much if I'm running the same ad for the same product to the same audience, you just get sick of seeing the ad. And so you want ways to spice it up to make it more to make it unique. And in addition to this, you want to make it like a new theme or a new season. So if I'm selling, you know, party plates, I'm going to want to, I'm going to want to like have a Thanksgiving table set in, you know, November or whatever, almost said October.

4:29My Canadian background for those that don't know in Canada, October is the month where you have Thanksgiving. In America, it's November, but I'll forgive the Americans for that. But in any case, yeah, so pretty much you're going to want to like switch up the background of your product, right? So if it's the party plates, you want a Thanksgiving background. You want a Christmas background. You want maybe like a Valentine's Day background. I don't know, like any or Easter, right? So any season you want to kind of switch it up for the ad. So it seems really targeted and specific and exactly what people are going for.

5:00So I think in this sense, this is really awesome for people that don't have the resources or assets to kind of like create this very quickly. they can spin these out off. I think Nestle and Unilever have both used AI software like Chad Chipotene and Dolly to kind of work on their ad campaign stuff. So this is there's definitely precedent for big brands using this type of technology. I think addressing the potential of this tool, Colleen Aubrey, who's a senior VP of Amazon ads product and technology recently said, quote, producing engaging and differentiating creatives can increase costs and often requires introducing additional expertise into the advertising process, Amazon ads are focused remains on offering advertising advertisers tools that maximize impact with minimum effort and while enhancing the advertising experience for our customers.

5:49I think this is like this is smart on Amazon's end because anything that moves more product obviously gets them more commissions and makes them more money. So like it's in their best interest to make these products sell as well as possible. So they're going to create the best tools possible. I think their primary aim with this feature is to essentially just help brands elevate their ad performance, which of course is going to make them money by allowing advertisers to move away from some of these more mundane tasks, right? And instead kind of position their products within a contextual and creative narrative.

6:18I think the tool has a potential to boost click-through rates by up to 40%. That's what Amazon's claiming right now. They're saying this is going to boost click-through rates by up to 40%. So I think this initiative aligns with Amazon's intensified focus on generative AI, the e-commerce giant of Amazon, you know, I think it recently launched a tool to assist sellers in creating like a bunch of really interesting product descriptions. And they've also used AI to essentially summarize customer feedback and do a bunch of other things. So they're definitely integrating this. And I would say Amazon is not a company I would count out when it comes to the AI arms race.