Creative Studio: AI, Video & What’s Ahead

Creative Studio: AI, Video & What’s Ahead Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to be sitting here with Jay. Jay, we did a podcast at Unboxed last year, I believe, where we talked a lot about the announcement at Creative Studio. And I think there's been some really exciting things that have happened within Creative Studio over the last few months. And just the industry in general, I think, has had a lot of exciting announcements. Do you just want to give us a high level intro of maybe the things we talked about then and kind of where we're at now? Speaker 2: Yeah, happy to and great to reconnect. Speaker 1: Yes, excited, especially in Cannes. I mean, what better place? Speaker 2: Yeah, few better. Oh boy, let's see. You want to pick up where we last left off? Speaker 1: I think so. Speaker 2: I think we're talking about image generation back then, right? Yes. It's the new hotness and I feel like this year it's all about video and like what could happen with video. So maybe to kind of ground the listeners With some context, most of the advertisers on Amazon are small brands, not professional marketers. They tend to struggle with lack of assets to do image ads, video ads, the kinds of creative that really helps bring their brand and products to life. They stick with Sponsored ads, kind of product shots on plain white backgrounds, appearance search and detail pages, which are great, highly effective at getting in front of customers who are already looking for you, but not as great if you want to like establish a brand, stand out from a crowd. And so really that's kind of been like our target audience. And so we started off with image generation because that was kind of like the state of the art, you know, what is it, 12 short months ago, and we've been making a lot of progress Helping brands show both products on display, imagine a toaster on a countertop, as well as more recently like products in use, so like a watch on a wrist. And now that we're able to produce these like photorealistic images, we can feed them into our next frontier video models and start to bring them to life. So like imagine like a model like wearing a watch being able to like check the time. All right and raising of the wrist, the lowering of the gaze starts to create a little bit of like eye catching motion. And what we're able to do now is create multiple of those scenes, kind of like string them together and produce these multi-scene kind of short form videos that really help create like more of a connection between the brand and the consumer. So yeah, that's what we've been up to. Speaker 1: It's incredible. And I know when we're talking about AI, something that frequently comes up, especially in our discussions is progress over perfection. And I think that's really important to hit on because we've seen how rapidly AI has advanced in the last 12 months. And I know a lot of brands are sometimes a little bit uncertain about the best way to get started and that's where I'd like to really remind them it's progress over perfection. You talked about sponsored product ads and we have the opportunity to win sponsored brands video top of search. We have the opportunity to run sponsored TV directly within Ad Console. That's not even getting into all the fun and exciting things that were announced this week, of course. But when we're looking at that and when we're really making recommendations to brands, I think something that's important for us to hit on is just the operational efficiency and the cost savings of really leaning into AI. There are a lot of brands out there that maybe have too many products to really maximize all of the creative opportunities Amazon provides them. And when you have something like Creative Studio, I don't think people realize how seamless and plugged in it is to Amazon. It's as simple as adding your ace in. And if you don't want to, you don't have to prompt. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. You can download it and you can almost immediately, seamlessly upload it to Ad Console. I think that's really important because a lot of the listeners, you know, will send me a message like, hey, you know, I've played around. I don't know how to prompt well. I don't know how to do this. And we have split tested so many different scenarios at BTR in general, where having something in that ad unit is better than nothing. And I think that's really important to hit on. Brands sometimes miss that part, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah. What was the tagline you used? Progress over perfection. I love that line. Because the pace of progress is so incredibly fast. And my team has a real bias for shipping. And so what that means is that when we launch something new, it's going to be the worst it'll ever be at the time of launch, and it'll get better and better. And so one of the challenges that we have is getting people who've like tested one of our solutions, maybe when it first launched. A few weeks later or a few months later, it's a completely different product. It's a completely different experience and we're trying to just ride that quality wave while keeping it dead simple as you were describing for customers to get up and activate it. This progress over perfection I think is a really key point and a bit of advice I would give to all of the listeners, which is that you need to continue to learn and be curious about What the state of the art is because I can tell you as someone who like works in this day in day out Like what we could do three weeks ago Is very different than the type of experience a lot of times I'll get feedback right like the first time Oh, it was like a little bit crab It was like a work for this use case, but didn't work for that use case I was like, oh when was the last time you tried it and if they tell me Oh two months ago. It's almost like the feedback isn't even applicable anymore. Try it now. I do want to hear the feedback, but it's just such a different experience. I can't even, as someone who's in it day to day, remember what it was like. Every now and then, I kind of zoom out at events like this and I was like, okay, what did video generation look like nine months ago when we announced it? In a closed beta to like today, where it's like generally available to everybody in the US. And it's just like, it's like night and day, like, you're almost like the wait the same. Speaker 1: It's not even the same product. Speaker 2: It's not even the same product. Speaker 1: I mean, I always think of when AI started to be a little bit of a hype in general, and I think of all the fingers, like that was always the fun thing is like people would prompt something and it would, you know, a human with 20 fingers would be created. And now we're seeing hyper realism. I'm seeing animals having, you know, no issues really being inputted. And I think that's pretty incredible because you zoom out and you see how fast AI iterates when it has enough to adapt with. And then also the rate of change I would say your team is pushing as well. Like really small things. I remember logging in and being like, oh, I can now iterate on this image or I can now add different variations. That was something that was really important to me. I've struggled with outside of Creative Studio is I would upload an image. I'd be like, can you just make this one small change? Then I get a whole new image. I'm like, okay, no. But you all have found a way to, I feel like, make that much more seamless. As an operator, anyone can hop in. I mean, I've tested interns out of high school hopping into Creative Studio and launching sponsored brand images in less than an hour, which is incredible. Speaker 2: Yeah, the AI natives. Speaker 1: The AI natives. I think it's only going to get that much more powerful when we think about how quickly things are evolving in the space. Speaker 2: Yeah. You touched on a couple of key points. One, scene and character consistency is one of these areas where we've made market improvements, which was super critical, not just for images, but for video generation. Because if you're going to do a multi-scene video, You don't want the character's hair color to change from one scene to the next. How do you preserve the bits that you want to preserve while being able to change and influence all that's around it? And that's been like one of the big kind of breakthroughs over the last, boy, I was going to say months, but maybe even like weeks at this point. And then like just going back to the, that's why it makes sense to like, you know, continue to test. And one of the things we need to get better at is actually like communicating when these updates, because it happens to me too. I'll go into the tool. I'm like, wait, when, what is it? This is, this is, this is awesome. And then I'll like, you know, Slack like an engineer. It's like, oh, no, we just like push that. It's like, all right, this is great. We should like tell people that it now exists. But there's like a growing number of like Easter eggs like that that will get better. Speaker 1: Easter eggs is a really good way to put it. I get that question all the time, especially, I'm kind of known for pushing the updates on LinkedIn and talking about new products and things like that. And the first question I get is, how do you know about things? And I'm like, You just log in. Like every day, part of my morning routine would be I'd drink coffee and I'd open every single tab of ad console, which is a little bit nerdy, but I would, you know, targeting tab, budgeting tab, every single ad type, and I would just look for small tweaks because it was a major advantage for our agency, but also for brands who I think test and learn on those opportunities really early on. AI is only 10x-ing that, but it's always a really fun, I think, way to gamify everything going on with Amazon ads. It's like, who could find the nearest Easter egg or the newest one? Speaker 2: Yeah, there are a lot out there. And that's largely how we try to operate as a product development team. I want to build almost what we call consumer grade. Even though we're building tools for professionals, we want them to be as easy to use as a consumer novice going through for the first time. Which requires us to really kind of eat our own dog food. So we spend a lot of time just building ads for Ourselves and trying to run the experience. And as you know, because you've been with us on this journey, like, it's often frustrating in the beginning. But if you kind of like live with that frustration, as someone who can do something about it, you very quickly start to solve your own pain points. And the product then kind of reveals itself to the end customer in a way that hopefully is got way fewer rough edges around it. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I think I kind of want to zoom out a little bit. I've been asked a few times, what is the value of, you know, attending CAN or Amazon port? And for me, it's really been to have a better understanding of the long-term vision. Because when you're able to connect all of these small tweaks within product that are happening weekly, but understanding the long-term vision and what we're working towards, I think it's really a good roadmap for brands. From an adoption perspective, for understanding how to build their teams, you know, small things like we had really big announcements this week with Amazon on different partnerships with video. And that's a really good tell to the direction the industry is going. And I think it's a really big opportunity for brands to maximize those things. So, you know, we have the Disney partnership, the Roku partnership. That's expanding inventory a ton. That's addressable inventory for brands to touch customers on multiple points of the journey. You can make an assumption that video is going to be incredibly important along that journey, naturally. And knowing those things and the brands that are staying close to that pulse are going to be able to then, hey, let's start testing and learning early on. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect just yet. We're all first movers in this industry. But knowing that roadmap and being a part of CAN has really helped us say, you know, as an agency, we need to value video more. We need to lean in these different areas. And I think that's a really cool thing that you all do so well. It's telling that story so you can understand the day-to-day operations and the small things that need to be done. Speaker 2: Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show. That's another one of these challenges when you have so many irons in the fire. How do you avoid losing the forest for the trees? When I zoom out and I look at Amazon's vast and sprawling network, your listeners are probably most familiar with the types of ads that appear in search and detail pages, even on home, within a store context. In between, you've got all these other premium placements, whether it be Fire TV ads, Twitch streams, the big screens that appear atop the Whole Food Market aisles. We've got 300 million ad-supported users in the U.S. alone spread across all of these different channels. One of the big opportunities is to help brands of all sizes be able to meet their consumers and their prospective consumers wherever they're at. And then the challenge is that how do you develop creative that can like liquidly flow. I didn't even mention Alexa and all the great things you could do around audio. Across all of those placements, publishers and unique specifications. So this is like a really big challenge that we see small brands that are trying to kind of move up the funnel from search-based advertising to large brands that are investing a lot in like awareness-based creative but are having difficulty kind of connecting the dots towards mid and lower funnel. But a lot of those constraints of how do you take an existing ad and kind of shapeshift it or how do you take a format like display and turn it into a video are starting to melt away with these new AI capabilities. So I'm really excited about a world where creative is no longer an obstacle for reaching your consumers where they're spending their time. And turning it into an opportunity to not just reach but help drive real benefit and outcomes for both the shopper and the advertiser. Speaker 1: One thing that you really hit on there that I think is important is the opportunity for every brand here. A lot of people will tune out if they think that, you know, oh, this doesn't make sense for me. But where AI comes into play is the creative alignment and audiences, right? So on the small brand side, you have an opportunity to really level the playing field. Maybe you didn't have the budget to go have a national media campaign created and you are really, you know, struggling to get creatives at all. On the flip side, maybe you're a large brand and you have a large campaign, large budget, but you haven't been able to iterate it for every single spec that's needed across the board. Having AI being able to kind of You used the word fluidly. I think adjust to each audience is going to be really important for something bottom of funnel metrics. You have your click-through rate, you have your conversion rate, but also I think driving more awareness and really touching customers on every single point of that journey. We haven't even got into audience alignments, which I think is a big opportunity as well as we start talking about AMC, but it's just incredible. You built something that I think can be incredibly beneficial. Anyone who's listening, you can kind of pause the podcast and go do this now, which is incredible. Speaker 2: Yeah, well thanks for that. You're always saying it better than even I could. Speaker 1: So one thing I think we should hit on is the AMC opportunity because I think that there is a lot of correlation here. What's possible with Creative Studio? What's possible with AMC and audiences in general? What do you see the future of that looking like? Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, one of the things that we're seeing is that as the cost to produce these ads goes down, like the total quantity of them goes way up. That doesn't mean that advertisers are seeing more ads. It just means that there's a lot more creative diversity available to target against specific audiences that could be based off of Amazon data, it could be based off of the advertiser's data. The intersection of the two, I think we may have even talked about a few of these fledgling examples the last time we were on the show together. I think I may have given the example of the sofa being staged in different living rooms based on the taste profile of who the ad is being served to. That stuff is very quickly becoming a reality. It's funny, the things that we were dreaming up last time we got together are almost like ho-hum. We're way beyond that. Yeah, so you can imagine the kinds of personalized creative experiences that are going to be made like newly available, like viable as a result of just like having content that could be produced almost like to infinity. And so I find that like really exciting. I start to think about a world. Sure, you can imagine that in like digital or mobile, but what about TV? Why aren't the ads on TV as personally relevant as the ones that I see in my social media feed? You can reason about that. There are only so many customers in that marketplace. If the total number of advertisers is measured in the hundreds, then there's only so much you're going to do to mix and match. How do you lower the barriers so that more I'm a mid-market and eventually small brands could start to participate in that auction. All of these self-serve capabilities are lending way so that not everything is dictated by some large upfront managed service, which is great and we're going to scale that. In addition, there's all these other customers that would love to be able to create awareness on the biggest of Then you kind of think about the creative challenges we've been talking about. Where's that great content going to come from? These tools are on such a great trajectory that you don't need to suspend too much disbelief to say they'll get there and at some point we'll be able to really democratize access to TV advertising the way that we're able to do that to video display advertising. On your audience point, be able to do it in such a way where now you've got this proliferation of contents, this proliferation of active advertisers, then it just becomes like a mixing and matching problem and opportunity. Then you wake up one day and it's like, oh, of course, TV has been completely transformed. Now I actually really value all of the messages because they're tailored To my taste, they're contextually relevant to the content that I'm watching. I'm really excited about that world. I think it's going to be incredibly beneficial for everybody who participates in that ecosystem. Speaker 1: Absolutely. I think you mentioned infinite possibilities and I don't even think that a lot of the brands listening are going to understand how impactful this can be or how big it can be. You know, we did talk last time about something as simple as a sponsored brand image, updating your custom images for tentpole events, right? Making it slightly more seasonal, you know, iterating on maybe, like you said, someone's personal aesthetic. We can now potentially do this with video if you have the appropriate systems and the appropriate team in place. And I think like, you know, thinking really big here, Super Bowl. Take a brand like Doritos and think about the opportunity to based off geography, adjust the commercial to their favorite team preference. Those are things that I think is going to be a part of this in the future. You can take an audience like NFL teams and then you can align a video that's going to create such a high alignment for that in customer, but also I think more brand loyalty, more brand evangelism as well. Speaker 2: These things I don't think are all that far into the future and I can already, as you described this really compelling picture, think of some incremental steps that we could start to take along the way. But yeah, we're definitely driving to somewhere quite bright. Speaker 1: It's a little scary. I mean, the possibilities are truly endless in my opinion, but I think what we're doing is incredibly powerful. And I think brands have so much opportunity. Like I said, you can pause the podcast right now and go do some of the things that we mentioned. But again, also just going back to the fact that this is the roadmap, this is the future. How do you start preparing yourself now? I think that's really important for brands. Even if it doesn't feel possible, it will be. Speaker 2: That's one of the big insights I've had over the last two and a half years. Amazon is very known for being customer obsessed and working backwards from the needs of the customer. While that remains every bit as true and solid as it ever has, you need to, in this very quickly evolving space, equally work forward from the technology and what it will soon be capable of six, nine months ahead, and you have to place bets, and they're not always right, but you have to place bets on where you think the technology is heading. You don't want to be too far out ahead because then, you know, you will have just kind of like wasted an opportunity, and if you want to be too far behind because you will have used like an architecture or a technique that will have quickly gone, you know, passe. I think about the One of the hotly debated topics we had around image versus video generation like two years ago. We're having a conversation, probably not too dissimilar to this, kind of like navel gazing at what the future holds. It was very clear that the world was moving towards video, that video was a format that was able to communicate more in less amount of time in a more kind of compelling and emotionally connecting way. When we were having those debates two plus years ago, the technology was too far. A field for us to really be placing that bet. So instead we chart a course on an image and I feel like in hindsight that was like the right one because we were able to really drive value on the path to video where we're at now and as it turns out, but wasn't obvious at the time, was being able to generate great photorealistic images is one of the breakthroughs that actually enables these like multi-scene videos to be as compelling as they are. Because we're actually starting with, we'll generate a great photorealistic image and feed that into a video model and prompt it to animate, which we've seen be a lot more effective than trying to go straight from a text-based prompt to a video. And I don't know that we would have learned that if we hadn't made the, where's the technology going to be six months from now bet. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And I think that's a really good point that I want to iterate on just for the audience. We've talked a lot, visionary, high level on the future direction. One thing I've seen with Creative Studio or just with AI in general is you have to have a good product or a good base if you're going to have good output. And that's, you know, one of my biggest arguments when I'm looking at people's output is, okay, but maybe your PDP wasn't that fantastic. So it is, it's taking those stepping stones. And I think that story can be told across all of Amazon. You want to be successful in Amazon, maybe have a fantastic product. If you have a great PDP, if you have great main images, your prompting and your output is going to be so much better. So it is definitely a stepping stone. As everyone's listening, getting incredibly excited about our idea for, you know, geotargeting with commercial ads, it's like, let's start with the basics. Let's make sure we have our fundamentals in a really good spot and then we can build upon that. Speaker 2: Yeah, you couldn't be more right. Maybe just to give a little bit like an inside as to how the tool like actually works for your audience to really kind of double down on the point that you made is that The image and video output is a reflection of the brand and the product, and our understanding of the brand and the product is reflected in the detail page and the quality of the product shots, the lifestyle images, whether there are product demo videos that we could find, little usable snippets, the details themselves that describe The product, how it's used, its dimensions, the customer reviews. We analyze all of that data and then generate a prompt from it. And then that prompt is fed into an image model, which is then fed into a video model on repeats such that in the course of a couple of minutes, you've got six videos from which to choose that you've done little more than click the generate button in order to produce. But it's all based on the foundation, as you were just describing, of that PDP. And so the richer, the more assets there are from there to choose, the more descriptive, the richer the customer. Reviews, the more information we have to inform, the more of the product and the brand's uniqueness will come out in the creative output. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, we talked a lot about the future. I think we also went very hands on keyboard and gave some actionable recommendations on Creative Studio. Jeff called it out on our last podcast, but we did a full guide on Creative Studio, so I'll make sure to drop it here as well. And I recently did some videos on the sponsor brand's video generator, which I want to give a shout out to as well. Even if you're not familiar with Creative Studio, you've done a lot directly with an ad console to, I think, just escalate brands' ability to get some of these things up and going. So thank you so much for that and everything you've done for all of the brands in the space. Is there anything last minute you want to throw in that maybe we've missed? Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, thanks for being such a great evangelist and such a great partner to have worked with. We're very proud of the tools that we've put out there. And the pace of their progress. I mean the number one bit of advice I'll give to the audience and you've already given it so I'm just kind of double voting it up is that Come back to the tools. See how they evolve over time. Don't allow an initial imprint to carry forward. Just realize that there's more and more stuff and there's a team that's working incredibly hard behind the scenes to move at the pace of science, which is itself on this rocket ship of a trajectory. So the best is yet to come and the iterations are flying out faster than ever. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Progress over perfection. Speaker 2: There you go. Love it.