Amazon debuts AI ‘creative partner’ to aid with campaign development

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Dive Brief:

• Amazon is expanding its suite of generative artificial intelligence products targeted at marketers with a new conversational assistant, according to an announcement shared with sister publication Marketing Dive.  
• The chat agent, positioned as a “creative partner,” draws on Amazon’s troves of retail data and cloud-computing muscle to assist with tasks like product and audience research, brainstorming and storyboarding, and producing display and video assets that can be deployed across Amazon Ads. 
• The tool is launching in beta on Amazon’s Creative Studio portal at no additional cost to advertisers. Like many AI products, it promises to improve speed and efficiency for marketers that are contending with tighter resources but higher demands for efficiency and performance. 

Dive Insight:

Amazon’s new chat assistant joins a growing fleet of AI agents, or agentic AI, that are designed to enhance productivity while cutting down on cost. The feature — described in a blog post as a digital “creative partner and strategist” — works with marketers across the campaign-planning journey, analyzing shopper data, product pages and other sources of information to help with everything from preliminary research to finalizing creative assets. Ads can be run across Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brand Video. 

As with its other generative AI bets, Amazon is positioning the assistant as a democratizing feature for small- and mid-sized brands that may not have the budgets to develop or manage high-gloss ad campaigns on their own. The announcement emphasized that marketers do not need any specialized AI or design training to make use of the solution, and that “granular” controls are in place for giving feedback each step of the way.   

“This is about more than speed — it’s about giving every advertiser and agency access to the kind of strategic, high-quality creative support that once only large brands could afford,” wrote Jay Richman, vice president of creative products and technology at Amazon Ads, in the blog post.

That said, large marketers like Nestle Health Science were among some of the chat’s beta testers, praising its impact on workflows and ideating in press materials. The chat consistently turned up insights that Nestle Health Science hadn’t previously considered based on its product set, said Dayexi Tomko, brand manager, in a statement.

In a use case for the agent illustrated in Amazon’s blog post, a fictional outdoor gear retailer works through a product launch, brainstorming taglines with different tones, lifestyle imagery, background music and finally multiscene ads that play as a couple watches TV in their living room. The agentic capabilities work off of Amazon Bedrock foundation models, including Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude.

The assistant helps round out Amazon’s generative AI suite for marketers as the e-commerce giant continues to build a significant advertising services business. Previously, the company introduced text, image and video generators, with the latter getting a major upgrade and wider availability earlier this summer.