Amazon is launching an artificial intelligence video ad generator for sellers in the U.S. this week. With basically one click, the tool can turn a still image of any product into a customized video showing the item in action. The e-commerce giant is just the latest in Big Tech to push further into the business of generating ads instead of just selling them.
Amazon has had an AI image generation tool for ads for a couple years now. You know when you’re shopping for a watch, and see suspiciously similar photos of it superimposed on different backgrounds?
The new video tool kicks that up a few notches, said Kabir Bedi, the head of product for generative AI at Amazon Ads.
“You want someone wearing the watch. You want to see how a human sees the time by moving their wrist with the watch,” he said. All set to music with animated text pulled from product descriptions and reviews.
“We, through this tool, want to lower the barrier of entry and that’s exactly what’s happening,” Bedi said.
Meta is doing something similar and Netflix has teased using generative AI to tailor ads to the worlds of its shows.
“Computer automation is eating digital marketing,” said Garrett Johnson, a professor of marketing at Boston University.
He said AI could improve ad targeting.
“It’s very easy to have, instead of just one message to consumers, to have a pool of 10 messages and for the AI to find the consumer that’s best matched to that,” he said.
Northeastern University professor Koen Pauwels, who worked with Amazon ads, said he’s less worried about the melting faces and extra fingers that often showed up in early AI videos, and more about them becoming forgettable.
“In the beginning, it may seem very cool, and it’s efficient, and it can also sometimes even be more creative,” he said. “But the danger is that things will look all the same.”
Though he said that can be a problem with human-made ads too.