Amazon launches generative AI for ads: product videos, animated GIFs

Amazon’s new generative AI for ads will create custom videos showcasing retailers’ products in just a couple of minutes, automatically. Launched today at the company’s annual seller conference, Accelerate, Amazon’s new generative AI capability for ads will also be able to create short animations — think animated GIF — that make a static image more visually interesting and attention catching.

“Using a single product image, video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product’s distinct selling proposition and features, leveraging Amazon’s unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life,” Amazon says.

Here’s the new AI video generator:

And here’s the new live image generator:

What we know about the generated videos

Amazon has been working on generative AI for ads for at least a year.

According to TechCrunch, video clips from Amazon’s video generator will take about 5 minutes to generate, and advertisers will get 4 variations to choose from. While Amazon says it will eventually enable longer videos with more complex scenes, right now they are:

• 6-9 seconds long
• 720P resolution
• 24 frames/second

The live images, or short animations, can be customized with a headline (you can choose the font), a logo, and some background music or soundtrack. 

Both functionalities are “live in beta to select U.S. advertisers,” but there’s no commitment from Amazon in terms of when this will be fully available for all. (Or when it will be available for languages other than English.)

They are also free for retailers and advertisers. 

What Amazon doesn’t show in the demo videos, which are a bit long on style and short on substance, is how advertisers create them: what kind of prompts they can use, and what — if any — guardrails are built into the technology to minimize unwanted artifacts or hallucinations in the images and videos created.

Of course, for any generative AI for ads product, it’s important that there will be an advertiser approval stage.

I can see situations where buyers might want refunds if the videos or live photos accidentally promise features or functionality that don’t actually exist. Based on the videos Amazon showcases, the generative AI features seem focused on putting products in appealing and appropriate settings, which makes perfect sense.

Generative AI for ads: soon to be everywhere

Amazon, of course, is not alone in using generative AI for advertising. Google has been piloting this since late 2023 in Performance Max ads, though there’s been little move to make it fully mainstream. 

Google did promise to make it beta for all advertisers by late 2024.

Microsoft, TikTok, and Meta are all also working on generative AI for ads, though TikTok’s solution is not for art or design but rather content and campaign creation assistance. Snap, Pinteres, Reddit, and X (Twitter) haven’t announced generative AI for ads tools or technologies yet, though all have their own generative AI capabilities.

In fact, TikTok just enabled generative AI to create “user-generated” content, according to app growth consultant Alper Taner. I can’t see it yet in TikTok Ads Manager, so it might be only in limited release, but Taner says “you really can craft UGC content in minutes using avatars (even with green screen effects), captions, translations, voiceovers etc.”

And Meta just announced that its generative AI ad tools are getting significant use … and seem to be very successful:

“We also continue to see strong adoption of our generative AI ad tools, with more than a million advertisers using the tools and 15 million ads created with them in the last month. On average, ad campaigns using Meta’s generative AI ad features resulted in an 11% higher click-through rate and 7.6% higher conversion rate compared to campaigns that didn’t use the features.”

Advertisers, of course, are using tons of tools on their own: see 10 things digital marketers are doing with generative AI right now for some ideas, or 80 generative AI tools for marketers, or 10 generative AI tools for app growth marketing.

Amazon says that 89% of consumers want to see more videos from brands in 2024. Which means, I guess, we should all get ready to see more video ads on Amazon and other platforms over the next few years.

“Video generator is another meaningful innovation that leverages generative AI to inspire creativity and deliver more value for both advertisers and shoppers,” Amazon Ads VP Jay Richman said in a statement. “We are hard at work delivering generative AI applications that empower advertisers to craft visually stunning, high-performing ads.”

One thing that’s not yet clear: if Amazon will provide a “generated by AI” tag on whatever gets created by its generative AI for ads engines.