Amazon is launching an artificial intelligence video ad generator for US sellers this week. Essentially with one click, this tool can turn still images of any product into customized videos showing items in action. The e-commerce giant is the latest leading technician to further advance the business of generating ads rather than selling them.
Amazon has been using AI image generation tools for advertising for a few years. When shopping for a watch, and did you know that a suspicious similar photo of it is layered on a different background?
Kabir Bedi, product head of Amazon Ads' Generation AI, said the new video tool is kicking it up into several notches.
“I want someone to wear a watch. I want to see how humans see time by moving their wrists with the watch,” he said. Everything is set to music with animated text drawn from product descriptions and reviews.
“We want to lower the barrier to entry through this tool, and that's exactly what's going on,” Bedi said.
Meta does the same thing, with Netflix using generated AI to tailor the ads to suit the world of the show.
“Computer automation eats digital marketing,” said Garrett Johnson, a marketing professor at Boston University.
He said AI can improve ad targeting.
“It's very easy for AI to find the one message that's not just one message for the consumer, but a pool of 10 messages, and it's not so easy for AI to find the one that suits it best,” he said.
Professor Koen Pauwels of Northeastern University, who worked at Amazon Ads, said he wasn't too worried about the melting faces and extra fingers that often appeared in early AI videos.
“It may seem very cool at first, it can be efficient and sometimes even more creative,” he said. “But the danger is that everything looks the same.”
Though he said it could be a human advertising problem.
