Your New Creative Coworker: Amazon’s Agentic Creative Studio

Your New Creative Coworker: Amazon’s Agentic Creative Studio Speaker 2: Welcome back to Better Advertising with BTR Media. Today, I'm incredibly excited to be sitting here at Amazon Accelerate with David Meers. David, thank you so much for joining. Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Destaney. Excited to be here. Speaker 2: We have had some incredible announcements on stage today, and one of those announcements was with a project that you have been leading for the last few months. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what that project is? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So today we announced the launch of this really exciting, agentic experience within the Creative Studio. And what's so fun about this experience is all the different things you can do with it, and we'll get into the details as we talk through here, but really what's great is you can talk directly to it and you can build projects from the simple to the really complex. It's really exciting. Speaker 2: It is incredibly exciting, and for those who are listening in, Creative Studio has been out for quite some time. I believe it was a release at Unboxed last year, maybe? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Speaker 2: And what it was really known for is creating amazing lifestyle images, adding motion to photos, and I think what made it really excellent is it just pulled everything in from your product detail page. You add an ASIN, you give it some guidelines, and it gives you something that is absolutely perfect for Amazon. And with this new launch, what is really being added is the agentic element. Let's talk a little bit about what that looks like and how the experience is now enhanced versus what it used to be. Speaker 1: The agentic piece of this is a complete game changer. It changes how we build these systems, so we can be a lot faster for the capabilities we bring everybody. We can add a new capability to this thing in a day, which is really exciting for us. And why that matters for advertisers is that it can do so many different things, and it's a lot more open-ended and creative, right? And so you just have so much more flexibility. The flow in Creative Studio that was there before, really powerful, really simple, but very linear, right? You could do one thing really, really well, and we love that. This is going to open up doing all sorts of different things for different projects. Speaker 2: I hate using the term game changer, but the first time I had the opportunity to use this, that was my thought was this was a game changer. It's a game changer for how I'm going to run my agency. It's a game changer for how brands need to view creative and advertising. And I think it's really going to unlock, like you said, speed, operational efficiency, speed, but also the output has been really fantastic. I've been surprised by it. And I think to your point, the agentic element, we will hop on a call. I will review something. And within two hours, you'll be like, oh. There was an update push through, go play with it again. So I think that's something that sellers and brands maybe aren't quite grasping is how quickly something changes and the progress over perfection model when it comes to agentic creative. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the other piece that's in here is now there really is intelligence in the system for the first time ever. So we've got these reasoning models that folks may or may not be aware of in the industry, and that's centered to the new creative studio. So that means you can really think through what you're doing. And it's amazing what it can do. It can ingest so much information and come up with these amazing ideas. And so it's really a partner. It's like a capable coworker. You go back and forth. And that's very different than these static systems that we all had before. Speaker 2: It is. And I want to talk through that flow. So for anyone who has not actually utilized Creative Studio, especially the agentic side, what it gives you the opportunity to do is hop in and say something as simple as, I want to create a sponsor brands video for this ASIN. And it's going to prompt you on a few different things. I think it typically asks you, you know, what type of the, what segment of the funnel are you wanting to target? Awareness, consideration. It'll ask you some brand guidelines, logos, things like that. Helps guide you through that process. But once you give it an ASIN, let's talk a little bit about all the information it's pulling in. How is it helping guide a brand through that process and making sure things like brand safety and Amazon guidelines are included? Speaker 1: Yeah. So in a few seconds, what it's going to go do is look at all the information about that ASIN that's on Amazon. You can also, by the way, have it go look, if you have information about that product off Amazon, it'll go do that for you as well. Speaker 2: Which is incredible. Speaker 1: Yeah. And then it has all the guidelines, basically, and what you can think about as its brain. So it knows what's allowed in ads. How to develop creative and how to meet the guidelines. And it brings all that together in like under 30 seconds, and it's going to start reacting to what you told it to do, to that brief that you provided it that you were talking about. Speaker 2: And I love that it actually takes you through the process as well. This was something that I enjoyed is I've never created a video in my entire life, maybe played around with like iMovie in high school, I don't know. But using this process, it actually shows you the thought process. So you can start understanding some of the decision making and some of the elements that are being incorporated. So if you don't have any experience with creating a video, It's going to lead you throughout the process and help you understand, look, we're choosing this because of X, Y, Z. I think that's incredibly beneficial for someone who maybe doesn't have experience, but it also helps you when the next prompt comes up, which is typically, here are my three concepts. Which one do you want to run with? Do you want to talk a little bit about how you all have guided the concept process of this? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I think concepting is one of the most beautiful starter cases for this thing, right? Because everyone is going to know their brand and their products the best, right? And so they're going to be able to put their information in and get these concepts out of it. And so what it does by default is it just gives you three simple concepts. And it's amazing what it can do from knowing all that information. The crazy thing about AI is that it can balance all this information in its head, right? And then print it out in a way that we might not think of as people, honestly. And that makes it really, really inherently creative. The other huge thing with concepts is then you can talk to it about those as long as you want. You can expand them, right? You can make them funnier. I've gotten great results by trying to get it to be like really extreme and outlandish out there. Speaker 2: Be a little funnier. Speaker 1: Yeah, keep pushing it, right? And that's really fun and you can get really cool stuff there. Speaker 2: That's the part that I think opens up a window of opportunity for brands that maybe do have in-house creative expertise as well. Something I found is the back and forth with human dialogue when it comes to storyboarding can eat up a lot of time. So being able to have a starting point and then maybe send it to your internal shareholders and be like, hey, you know, what direction do you want to go? Do we want to go a little bit more out there? Do we want to incorporate aliens? Do we want to, you know, be a little bit funnier? You can guide that whole process and it doesn't start from scratch. That's my favorite aspect is it allows you to go throughout that journey with the same original prompt. So you're not having to continuously reinvent the cycle. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And you can also like with your internal stakeholders, you could share many more versions of an idea as you implied, right? Like way more than you could have before. And so they can really choose from different things versus having like a few versions of one idea. Speaker 2: That is a concept that we need to dive deeper on. But I'm going to save that question for a little bit later in the process. Let's say you have decided on the concept you want to run with. You say, you know, this is great. Let's tweak a few of the elements. Maybe I want cats instead of dogs being showcased. You can do that. The next thing I think is really fantastic is it actually storyboards the process. So for those who maybe struggle to see the indivision for something, us non-creative people, it's going to showcase everything in a storyboard for you that is actually, again, editable, which is an incredible asset. Speaker 1: Yeah, and we felt like this was one of the first things that we had to invent in this experience. You won't see that anywhere else, right? And it was because we're all non-creatives trying to build this and be like, how do you think about a video, right? And it's best to think about it scene by scene and get every scene right, like you can start to understand the story visually, really see what it's going to look like. And most importantly, you can change every detail, right? So AI, we all know, isn't always perfect, right? So you have control over all those things scene by scene. And then you can get to perfect by working through it, which is really helpful. Speaker 2: It is incredibly helpful. I cannot describe how many times I've actually left It's an AI experience because I was so frustrated when I tried to tweak an element and then it just directs like drastically changed my image. And then I was like, no, go back to the last one. It's like, I'm so sorry. I cannot do that. That is something that I think you all really thought through. It's not just the output. I think all AI is really focused on improving that output experience. It's the operational side that I think you all did so well. You made this tool usable for anyone. The storyboarding allows you to hop in and make tweaks to every single scene. And that's something I think is going to be huge and a lot less frustrating for any brand who's using the experience. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And the beauty of it too is that often when I'm making a video, I'm like, oh, I really like the image in scene three and I can download that and use that too. And so it gives you that flexibility of how you want to use the assets you're creating along the way. Speaker 2: Flexibility is a great call out because you did create an in scene, which allows you to adjust things like your end card, your music, your voiceovers, the fonts that are being included. So it's not just something that you're stuck in this box. You can actually download it and even take it offline or use it anywhere else within your business, which I think unlocks a lot of opportunity. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: Now, one of the things that you mentioned earlier is, you know, creating multiple assets. I think this is probably one of the most exciting things about using this agentic experience is Let's just take a sponsored brand video. Your sponsored brand's video are going to be pretty much aligned with whatever you're targeting it is. So let's say I'm selling soccer equipment. I have the opportunity to create multiple different assets and target multiple different keywords and multiple different audiences in a way that is now scalable. Inherently, I think brands have struggled to overcome that barrier because video only allowed them to create one asset. So now they are almost stuck in this silo of who they're allowed to target and what their ideal audience is. With this experience, you can take a video and create multiple different iterations of it and go to market with different targeting or different messages based on the customer that you are wanting to showcase your video to. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the most exciting things about the tool. So for a video, for example, you can switch out the characters in it if you wanted to target a different age group, for example. Change the setting or the season, all of those things are pretty easy to do. You can also feed an existing asset. So if you had like a previous campaign you wanted to refresh, maybe an old video that you wanted to work with, it'll splice that apart, for example, and you could remix it with new content. So that's really exciting. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Speaker 2: No, it's such a great example of like, let's say you have an incredible asset that you created and you've really leaned into, but age group's a good one. I'm selling soccer equipment again. Maybe I want a video that I already have being targeted towards a younger demographic. Maybe I want to go target, you know, Kids soccer balls on Amazon. I have the ability to create a video specifically for that audience. And that's going to typically increase click-through rate. It's going to increase your conversion rate because anytime a customer sees something that is more relevant to what they're searching, you're going to really align the creative with that outcome. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And I always think about that as you want to connect with your shopper, right? They only have a second to see your ad. And if they see themselves in it or their life in it some way, this tool is going to really help you put that in there, which is really exciting. Speaker 2: Absolutely. So we've talked about the creative element and I think all of the opportunities there. Let's talk a little bit about the kind of operational side. How do you see brands leaning into this in terms of Who in an org chart should be using this tool? Can anyone use this tool or do you think it's typically someone with a creative background or what are your recommendations there? Speaker 1: Anyone can definitely use this tool and I think what I've seen is we've got we've had a lot of really creative users using it but most the users are not creative people by training right and I think they get excited about different parts of it. So like you were saying about yourself like I'm the same I'm not creative I don't know how to create a concept or anything so I love like that first part of it right I need the idea and I need to execute the idea. For a creative, we've seen them come in with like a big script they wrote because the creative is going to come in wanting some control and you can execute that as well. So I think it really depends on how your brand's organized and how you operate, right? Like I would recommend somebody who really understands the business objective is now going to be able to use this, which I think is powerful because you can kind of cut out the separation between the business objective and the creative that's getting built, right? So they're going to know the nuance of what they like. What they need to accomplish, what the brand voice is supposed to look like and do that. And that can be many different functions within within your company, depending how it's organized. Speaker 2: That is a great call out and something that I will constantly reiterate as we talk more and more about AI is your output is only as good as your input. And if you're hopping in and only spending 20 minutes to create a really low risk, quick, efficient video, then your results may be as expected. But if you're going in with a vision of this is what I want to accomplish, this is the audience that I want to attract. And you take the time to develop the appropriate assets and to really go in through all of your scenes and edit, that's where you're going to really start getting the stronger outputs, the stronger videos, I would say. Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree. The more context you can give it, it's going to understand you more. So think about it as a coworker who's super capable, but doesn't know anything about you yet until you feed in all that information. Holds all that information in your head about your whole business, your products, everything like that, right? And so you want to feed all that in. And if you have creative direction, if you have brand guidelines, give those to it as well. It's going to do a great job executing on those. Speaker 2: I've played around quite a bit with that function of, you know, let's include external elements. Let's include external guidelines or a website. If I see a really good landing page that I like, I've uploaded it and be like, you know, pull all the elements from this and create me a video for XYZ ASIN. And it does a really fantastic job of it. I think that something that I've talked to a lot of people in the industry with is that, you know, they go in and they want immediate results because you sometimes get that with AI. And I don't think that's the right way to view this tool. If you're wanting a professional Output, you're going to need to take a lot of time to do the work and I want to continue to hit on that because I've seen that across the board. Every time a team hops in and starts testing it, they're like, well, this is my video. I'm like, it took you 10 minutes. What did you expect? You need to take more time and that's something you all have also thought through the process. You have the ability to export your chat and share it with other team members. You have the ability to build separate projects. Which I think is really valuable because now you can work on multiple projects at once. So if time is something you're struggling with, with how long it takes to reason, which you have the ability to control, which was a really great feature, I would say, that's a way to kind of overcome that hurdle and work on multiple projects at once. Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree. And it's a good thing to hit on. This is for people who want professional grade assets and couldn't get them before, couldn't make them themselves before. It's still going to take some time, right? We have other experiences to click one button and get the simple thing, right? We talked about the other great stuff in Creative Studio, that's still there. But what's gonna amaze people, I think, is if you spend like an hour on a video, then you're gonna be like, oh my gosh, I've created something that I never could have created before. I've had that feeling with the tool. I know you have as well, because I wouldn't know how to create a video. So you're gonna want to sit with that. But yeah, the good news is you can always walk away, leave it, come back, open it back up, you know, like you can go back and forth, like, you know, you don't have to do it all in one session, whatever makes sense. You can go back and forth on it too. Speaker 2: We've mentioned quite a few use cases here for different ways that you can maybe take your core video and make some slight adjustments and tweaks so maybe it fits a different season or a different audience. What are other things that you think brands are maybe not thinking of or considering when it comes to agentic AI and how we can use creative for better audience alignment? Speaker 1: I think those are really exciting use cases that you can do really well with this thing. You can also just experiment with any detail of the creative, right? Like create alternatives. And so I would just try different things and have the system actually come up with those for you as well, right? Like ideas you might not have thought of, and then try running those as a avenue of experimentation. Because we never quite know what's going to resonate, right? Like we have hypotheses, but different ways to talk about a holiday or an event or a product might resonate with different groups. I would encourage that because there's so much creativity inherently in this system. And again, that's one of the things that's brand new here that's going to be really different. It's really unconstrained. And so I'm excited about that. Like when I work on a project in it and I create many different versions, I'm like, oh, if I was an advertiser, I'd love to run these, right? And just see which version of this thing is better. And they're subtly different. They don't even have to be radically different. So you can do that or you can make them radically different and have a totally different idea. You know, just like working with an agency that might come with radically different creative concepts for a campaign. You can do that literally in this tool yourself. Speaker 2: That's a great call out. A lot of people are too close to their brand, I would say, and maybe have a little bit of built-in bias around what type of creative that they should be using. So being able to have that creative partner, which I think was the experience you all were really going for here. If you want a quick video, log into Ad Console, create a sponsor brand's AI video that's aligned with your ASIN. But if you want something that can think a little bit bigger, maybe challenge your original ideas that you may have, I think this is the tool for you. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And again, you can give it all that context, right? So we understand brands have rules that need to be followed. Put all that in there, right? Talk about the must-haves and the negotiables, and it will work with that as well. Speaker 2: We have a few minutes left, so I'd love to really hit on maybe some quick hitting pro tips that we've seen. I think one of the areas I've seen brands have issues with is their product doesn't look exactly like their product in the final output. Hands on keyboard, someone's opening up Creative Studio right now. What are your best recommendations for getting a good output? Speaker 1: Yeah, and product fidelity is the most challenging thing in the industry, right? So we have the best there is there, but yeah, we're still going to work through that. So one, if you already have beautiful assets of your products or of anything, honestly, that you want to faithfully render, just hand that to the system. There's a big plus button there. Put that in. That'll help a lot. Another thing is if you tell the model, if you see any problems, just tell the model that to remind it and it will try. It has many different methods to go do this and it can fix that. Those are really the biggest ones. It's kind of that simple. And then spend a little bit of time with it. Iterate on it. You can always simplify the shot too. So that's another one. So if there's a ton of motion and things like that that are complicating that and causing those errors, just ask it to simplify it and go from there. Speaker 2: One last question on that note. What is the memory like? If you upload all of your brand guidelines, then you log in a week later, do you need to reset expectations with that prompt or within that channel? How does that work? Speaker 1: Right now, it's going to be within one chat. You can open as many chats as you want and split it out. For now, I'd recommend people organize their work that way. If you have all that information, Put it in a chat and then you can keep using that chat. And then if for whatever reason you want to move on, you can just, you know, summarize and drop it back into a new one. Speaker 2: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for the time today. We are incredibly excited to lean in and hopefully have a lot more case studies on utilizing this tool. But this has been a fantastic conversation. Again, thank you so much. Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's great.