#724 - New Creative AI Tools For Amazon PPC

#724 - New Creative AI Tools For Amazon PPC Unknown Speaker: Today, we're talking with one of the key figures direct from Amazon responsible for a lot of the cool new AI innovations that was released at Amazon Unboxed. How cool is that? Speaker 2: Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today is an episode that we're doing. We actually filmed this at Unboxed, all right? So we're talking with one of the leads at Amazon who was kind enough to donate their time To ask questions about some of the new AI features and other features that Amazon has released that is going to make Amazon sellers and advertisers lives a lot easier. And we're going to talk about some of the creative things that have been released because that's something that I think is the biggest game changer as far as all the new AI things that Amazon has done. Being able to create videos from scratch and images that could be used in advertising. Such as sponsored brand video ads and new sponsored product video ads. These can be used in your regular stack, can be used as potential kind of like UGC style stuff. The applications are endless. And so what all is available and who is it available for? Well, we're going to go ahead and find out right now. Alright, so we are here live at Unboxed and we're interviewing somebody new for the podcast and first of all, since this is your first time on the podcast, we'd love to get to know you better, Jenny. So first of all, where were you born and raised? Speaker 1: I was born in China. I was raised in Canada when I was a kid and then I moved to the US and grew up in California and now I live in New York. Speaker 2: All over the place. Where in China and Canada? Speaker 1: In China, I was born in Qingxiang, so it's a little city. And then in Canada, I grew up in Edmonton, so it's on the west coast of Canada, very, very cold. Speaker 2: I became an oiler fan. Speaker 1: I don't know anything about the oilers. Speaker 2: Anybody from Edmonton, you probably just got offended right there. Speaker 1: I apologize. Speaker 2: I think anybody is supposed to know who the oilers are. Speaker 1: I was too young. Unknown Speaker: That's an excuse. Speaker 2: And then you said you moved to New York and other places? Speaker 1: Yeah, I moved to California. So I spent… Where in California? Los Angeles, the suburbs of LA. And then I've lived in New York since I started with Amazon. Speaker 2: Where did you go to college? Speaker 1: I went to college at UCLA. Speaker 2: So you're a Bruin. Speaker 1: I am a Bruin. Speaker 2: Sometimes I have hard ones where they'll tell me I went to Norfolk State. So I'm like, oh man, what's the mascot there? But UCLA, I'm from San Diego, so I definitely know the Bruins. What did you study there? Speaker 1: I actually studied philosophy. Speaker 2: Philosophy. That's a big change to go to e-commerce and Amazon from philosophy. Okay. Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. I studied philosophy and accounting. So I kind of tried to like hit the balance with something very theoretical and something very practical. And now, you know, I'm hopefully bringing all those skills together. Speaker 2: Never have I heard those two things mentioned as like a co-major right there. You're the first. I like it. I like it. So then you've been at Amazon how long now? Speaker 1: I've been at Amazon five years now, so time has flown. Speaker 2: And then what's your position now? Speaker 1: I'm a product manager with Amazon Ads, and I work on the creative experiences team. So I specifically work on AI solutions that help advertisers with their ad creatives. Speaker 2: Awesome. Now, speaking of creatives, speaking of advertising, that's what we're here to talk about today. I want to kind of like take a mini time machine, even going back to before you were at Amazon, you know, 10 years ago, when I, you know, around the time when I was starting to get into it, there was no places in advertising necessarily for custom creatives. Like there was no sponsored video ads. You know, the sponsor brand ads were just starting, but you weren't, it wasn't really about using custom creatives. You just use one of the images like, you know, from your listing already. Sponsored display, you didn't have these, these kind of like options to be able to do custom creatives outside of what was already assigned for that product. Nowadays, there's just so many places where you can use a custom creative, be it a photo, image, or video. We probably don't even have time to talk about all of them, but from memory, can you think of all of the different ways where you can actually inject custom creatives in advertising? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think Amazon has definitely gone through an evolution in the past few years. And what is really unique about Amazon advertising is the sheer amount of placements that it offers for brands to have connection touchpoints with shoppers. That ranges from everything from on Amazon properties like amazon.com to now off Amazon properties, like Netflix, Twitch, or sorry, Netflix, ESPN, Spotify. And so what I think the evolution and expansion of that ecosystem has meant is that it's really opened up the space for creativity. So being able to express more storytelling in those upper funnel premium placements allows brands to better communicate what they want to say about their brand, what customers should know about their products, and ultimately inform whether or not shoppers choose to buy. And so that's really what our team has been focused on solving for is how do we help advertisers unlock the potential of all those placements? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don't want people out there who We're hearing things like ESPN is way above my brand's status. But even just regular sponsored product advertising, there's opportunity to place custom creatives. What are some of them? Regular sponsored ads, it's still like, okay, I'm going to target an ASIN, I'm going to target a keyword or something like that. But talk about some of the ways that even brand new advertisers or sellers can inject custom creatives in some of the more basic forms of advertising. Speaker 1: Right. So sponsored ads do all offer a pretty approachable space for brands and sellers to start with advertising. And advertisers can now inject custom creative, whether that be image-based, video-based, audio-based creative into sponsored ads placements to help their brand stand out in those cases. Speaker 2: Yeah. So why should a seller or a brand even be worried about this conversation or thinking about it? Like, hey, I'm good with just my sponsored product keyword targeting campaign. I'm good to go. I've been doing that for years. Why do I need to start worrying about custom creatives? What can you talk about some reasons for our listeners to get involved in this? Speaker 1: So we know that creative is a performance driver. High quality creative tells a customer why they should care about that brand and that product. It improves stop scroll behavior and premium high quality advertising. Engages users to better trust a brand, to feel the authenticity of that brand. And so creative really transforms what a brand can do to tell a shopper why they should care. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I am not, me personally, I'm not graphically inclined. I can barely draw a stick figure. For me, I've never really gotten too much involved in this. But now, in the last couple of years, at Unboxed and Accelerate, I've noticed so many different things that Amazon is releasing, like they're using generative AI that help somebody like myself who's not graphically inclined. So what are some of the things that have been released over the last year or so, including here at Unboxed, that help advertisers like myself who do not know how to do Photoshop? Speaker 1: So at Unboxed this week, we have unveiled Creative Agent, which is our new agentic AI creative partner for advertisers. And we built that to really enable users of all skill levels to produce high quality creative. And so that allows brands and sellers of any size, whether or not they have creative resources, to We build videos and new lifestyle imagery for their ads. We have been beta testing Creative Agent with a number of users over several months. And our users range from those without creative skills to creative experts. And we found super valuable use cases for each. So creative experts have been actually a really engaged population of our users. And they have told us that being able to use an agentic experience like Creative Agent actually helps them scale. It helps them test more variations of creative. It helps them more quickly iterate and try out successful approaches. And so ultimately, you don't have to be a professional or a creative expert to be able to produce those ads. Speaker 2: What is needed to get started with it? Is it like, I'm just going to go to a prompt and start typing stuff in or do I need to tie it to my listing, my Amazon listing? Do I need to upload my own images? What would be needed as the input to get really good output? Speaker 1: So when a lot of the models, the generative models, like image generation, video models, came out, the early interaction patterns with a lot of those was direct interaction with the model. So if you've used early image models, you had to do some pretty expert technical prompting to be able to get great results out of those. And what we have done by launching an agentic experience So what we've done is we've focused on taking that complexity away from a user and put that responsibility on the agent. So now you as a user, you can give your ASIN, your product, your brand, but you don't have to have, you know, technical prompting expertise. You simply describe what you want, what your objective is, what the story is that you want to tell, or, you know, what the visual tone is. Translating that into how should this be executed in an asset to fill that objective for you? Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember a year or two ago when Amazon first started coming out with AI tools to help generate graphics, or just in general. If you really want a good quality, you'd have to get really specific. You use a Nikon SM60 lens and this will be a picture taken at dusk and stuff like that, which I'm sure you still probably could do if you really needed to get specific, but it sounds like with Creative Studio, you don't have to get as technical anymore. Along those same lines, what are some of the differences, apart from what you've mentioned, about Creative Studio that was just announced with some of the other agentic AI graphic or creative tools that Amazon has had previously? Speaker 1: Yeah, so the evolution of creative tools within our organization has been really cool in the past couple years. A while ago, we announced Image Generator. And that was kind of an early foray into generative AI for creative assets. And that allowed users to simply plug in an ASIN and do a one-click generation to get product in context shots. And then we launched Video Generator. And that kind of leveled things up to let users create simpler videos to showcase their products in more dynamic contexts. And that again, was a few click experience that really enabled sellers, especially small businesses who had never been able to do, you know, maybe video creative before to open up that opportunity for their advertising. And then Creative Studio, we announced at an unbox last year. And Creative Studio kind of brought all those tools together into a creative hub as sort of a one stop shop where users could take advantage of those experiences that we had launched as well as you know, some new AI experiences like image editing or like simple animations. And now, Creative Agent, which we're launching this week, really brings all of that together into one simplified user friendly experience, where a user can engage with all of those capabilities, but do so through simple, conversational, natural language. And be able to inject more of their input into the process. And so unlike those one click or few click experiences, when you use creative agent, you as a user can have more creative control. And therefore it's really well suited to midsize brands or large brands that have a lot of requirements or creative direction or brand inputs that they want to make sure their creative reflects. Speaker 2: Okay, so based on the things you've been saying, it almost sounds like someone like me who's not graphically inclined. I would be okay using this where maybe I don't have a photography experience. I don't know a lot of the technical terms. I'm not able to draw things on my own and give it input. But even somebody like me would absolutely be able to use a creative agent in order to generate some high quality video and photography. Would that be correct? Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Speaker 2: I like it. All right. So let's give a scenario. I sell a lot of brands myself online. One of them is this spooky product brand like their shell shaped like coffins. I've got bat shaped bath mats and things like that. And I have not done video, for example, for those. So now that I have access, and I believe everybody has access in all countries for is it all countries for a creative agent in the US in the US. So everybody in the US right now, you've got access to this. That happens to be where I'm selling my products right now. So Where would you start if you were me? If I haven't done sponsored brand video ads, maybe I haven't done custom creative on sponsor display, I've got this spooky brand. I've got multiple products. I said shelves, bath mats, and probably a couple other spooky things. What should be my first thing for my first foray into creative agent? Speaker 1: Yeah, what what kind of shoppers do you typically go after with with your very strange because they're after them I'm happy. Speaker 2: I am NOT my own target market, but there's thousands. It's kind of boggling mind-boggling to think that there are actually thousands of people who have this I coffin shaped shelf in their in their, in their house, but it's more it's people who are like gothically inclined and into kind of like spooky decor. It's not just a Halloween product. Like you might think like we sell these things throughout the year. So younger like maybe maybe under 30 usually I found when I look at the Amazon demographics reports. Speaker 1: Got it. Okay. So I think I would start with pretty simply giving your brand and your product to creative agent. And Creative Agent would go to your product page and retrieve a bunch of details. It might be able to pick up, you know, some details about the audience that you have in your product listing. But then I would start simple with concepting. And so you can specify you know, I'm, you know, I'm I'm targeting my product towards consumers who have a gothic vibe to their decor. Give me concepts that are tailored to that idea and to that customer who can picture the shelf in their living room, in their bedroom. Speaker 2: Hold on because what you just said is interesting. It's not like I need to go directly into instructions about the exact kind of Creative that I'm producing like, hey, make a video about this. I can actually start with just a conversation about even the concept of where what direction I want to go into. Speaker 1: Exactly. I would say that the best place to start with creative agent is actually your intent as an advertiser. So what do you really want to get across as your message, as your, you know, your brand positioning to a customer? And then Creative Agent then takes you through and guides you through the steps to then turn that into a video. So you don't have to start with, here's how I want to produce something. You start with, here's what I want to accomplish, and then it'll take you there. Speaker 2: Interesting. Interesting. I like it. So just in general, I know historically with AI, One of the most important aspects to get good output is good input, in other words, the prompting and stuff. There are some of us, including myself, who might not be that great at prompting to be able to get the best output. What are just some general tips about when we're using Creative Agent or other AI tools that Amazon has? What are some prompting tips that you can give our listeners out there and myself? Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. So I would say what we have learned from building and using Creative Agent ourselves, but also through the various users that we've worked with up until now, is that you really want to start simple and then learn from there. So you should start with, you know, one task at a time. Be super specific about what you want to accomplish in that step. And then a lot of it is learning along with the agent. So creative agent adapts to how you as a user work, it's going to be able to perceive whether you like to give, you know, like a creative expert might give like a page long description of what they want, or whether you want to give, you know, simpler inputs. In that case, the creative agent is going to prompt you with more questions to help clarify that ambiguity or help make sure it's taking things in the right direction. It's really a learning and iteration process, I would say. Once you go through that, you, I think, quickly learn how much the agent is capable of and how much it can help you as a user bring your ideas to life. Speaker 2: Awesome. Now, I'm not going to hold you to this because I know it's very difficult to predict, but you've been in this game for a while. You're deep into AI and things and you work at Amazon, so you have a lot of insights that some of us might not have. Where do you see the next six months, the next year, the future of how AI in general is going to be impacting the way that brands sell and advertise on the Amazon? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I would say that we're still very early in that journey. It has been a fast journey. So much progress has happened in the industry as well as within our team in just the past year. But there's still so much more room to grow. I think up until now, a lot of advertising and selling has been about managing inputs. About identifying, you know, writing copy, or identifying what keywords you want to use or choosing creatives. But what AI enables is managing a lot of that for you, so that marketers and brands can focus less on repetitive and more mundane tasks, and offload those to an expert agent. So especially for creative, I'm really excited about the potential for AI to take customers from what, like, from what they can do today to something that they, they, you know, might not even think about tomorrow. And so I think brands are gonna have to worry less about Can I produce high quality creative? And more so they're going to come to their advertising and just be able to focus on what is it that I want my brand to say today. Speaker 2: So anything else you'd like to tell our advertisers out there? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the takeaway that I want to leave advertisers with about our Creative Agent launch this week is that it's super easy to use. It's available at any time. It's free to use. And so advertisers should just dive right in and try it out. Experiment with their products and their creatives and really see like what the potential is that they can unlock. Speaker 2: I 100% agree. You guys have no excuses out there. It's literally free to use and so for those of you who've been using Helium 10 to do your advertising, start making these campaigns that require these creatives, more sponsored brand video campaigns, more sponsored display campaigns and others and tie it into your existing campaigns. You already have so much data that you've gathered about what keywords, what ASINs, that are good for targeting. Now you are not starting from scratch when you try these new creatives. And especially as we go into the holiday season, try these creatives, like do some holiday inspired themes that you can change all of your advertising, like all of your sponsored brand, headline ads. Maybe you've been doing your own creatives. It's a perfect time. Go into all 100 campaigns and put in some holiday themes. There's so many things that you can use this new creative agent and all of these other features that Amazon has been releasing lately. And who do you have to thank for that? One of them is right here, Jenny. So if you see her at the next conference, make sure to thank her for saving us advertisers hundreds and hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars potentially of what we used to have to pay professional studios. We really appreciate it. Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Speaker 2: We'll see you guys in the next episode. Thanks again, Jenny, for coming on the show. So I hope you guys are excited about that feature. You know who else is excited about that feature and some of the others at Unboxed? It's our own Destaney, who is no stranger to the Serious Sellers Podcast. And so I had the opportunity, again, at Unboxed to interview Destaney about some of her favorite updates for what was released at Unboxed. Let's hear from Destaney. All right, so we are here live at, I was about to say Amazon Accelerate. This is not Amazon Accelerate. This is Amazon Unboxed in Nashville, my first time here. And we're here with one of the top experts in the world on all things advertising, Destaney, to talk about all of these releases that have gone on over the last couple of days. And there's been a lot of them. So I want to start this off with, there's probably like 10 announcements, but I want to start it off with what is your number one thing that you're most excited about? Speaker 3: You cannot have me pick one. So for those who are unfamiliar, the reason Unboxed is so exciting is it's Amazon's keynote advertising conference. So Amazon Accelerate is, you know, the full scope of selling and retail business. Unboxed is my wheelhouse. It is only advertising announcements, so we did have a ton of them. I would say the one I'm most excited about is the Creative Studio agentic partner. I'm a little bit biased. I spoke on stage about it this morning, but it's definitely the rollout that I think can be most beneficial for any size of seller or brand on Amazon. Speaker 2: Somebody who just got access to it or just found out about it right now, maybe they're a smaller seller and they didn't have the budget in the past to be able to do a lot of creative assets, be it video, be it custom, sponsored display, creative photos. What should they start with based on what was announced? How should they get their feet wet? Speaker 3: You can log into Creative Studio immediately and it's going to actually help prompt you for any asset you need. And it's tied to your Amazon listing, which is incredible. So the LLM is actually pulling in all of your product detail information. All you have to do is Put your ASIN in the chat box and then you can ask it, I need a lifestyle image for this format. I need a sponsored brands video. I need a streaming TV video. You can ask it to create a commercial that could be played at home on your TV. And I think the part that I like about it best is because it's trained on all Amazon advertising philosophies and again, your Amazon listing, you enter your ASIN, It scans your own product detail page and helps build the prompt for you. Where if you're using an external AI tool, you really have to write a pretty direct prompt of, hey, this is what a sponsored brands video is. This is what my product is. This is what my category is. Creative Studio is doing all of that heavy lifting for you. So you don't need to be a prompt master. It's actually guiding you in storyboarding the whole process for you as a brand or seller. Speaker 2: Creative Studio is just one of the many things. What's the next, another thing that you can talk about that you're excited about that was released? Speaker 3: I'm going to have to say Sponsored Products Video. That is one of my favorite announcements because everything that we've done with Sponsored Brands Video has been pretty exceptional. It's one of my favorite ad types. It gets some of the best real estate on the page. The problem is it's been a little bit difficult to scale. You run a sponsored brands video ad, everyone's bidding on the same keywords, not as many placements. Video being rolled out to sponsored products means we're gonna get a lot more inventory on the page. So things like CPCs could potentially decrease a little bit as we're getting more accessible inventory. And the sponsored products video is actually a little bit different than the sponsored brands video in that it's being segmented into kind of like tiles. So, let's say you have a protein and you have protein for working out and you also have these nutritional benefits. Those are going to show up within the video and a customer on Amazon is going to be able to select the portion of the video that most aligns with what they're wanting to watch. So, it makes Sponsored Products Video a little bit more engaging than potentially maybe even Sponsored Brands Video. Speaker 2: Where are they going to show up? Speaker 3: So from everything we've seen, it's going to be throughout the traditional search results. So it looks like there may be some overlap with a sponsored brands video placement. I'm not a hundred percent sure. Haven't seen it live just yet. Speaker 2: Awesome. So there's plenty of other announcements, probably at least eight or nine that I can think of that are outlined. Check the link below. There'll be a link to a post where on LinkedIn, we talked about all of these announcements and follow Destaney on LinkedIn. She's been live. I don't want to say live tweeting. What do you call it when you're doing live LinkedIn? Live posting on LinkedIn about some of her favorite announcements, but a lot of exciting stuff for advertisers out there. Thank you, Destaney, for sharing your thoughts with us. Speaker 3: Of course. Thank you all so much for having me. Speaker 2: All right. Thank you very much for that, Destaney. All right, there you have it, guys. Unboxed Amazon Accelerate, all these events year after year. Amazon always releases a lot of cool stuff. Make sure you try and get there the next time. See some of these things in person. For those of you who can't make it, we'll keep giving you guys updates and exclusive interviews with a lot of the key individuals at Amazon in the e-commerce space to be able to talk about these new features. But don't just be in awe about, oh, isn't that pretty cool how you can do sponsored product video ads? Isn't it cool how I can make a video with AI? Actually implement these things, guys. Don't just talk about it, be about it. So make sure to go ahead and start playing with these new features. Probably by the time we listen to this episode, everybody should have access to at least some of these features like the Creative Studio. So I would love to hear in the comments below how you guys are utilizing these new AI tools. See you in the next episode.