Using Generative AI for Micro-Season Ad Campaign Creatives

At #CanvaCreate2024, Canva announced a new integration: the Amazon Ads / Canva Connector. This beta solution allows advertisers to connect Canva to their Amazon Ads creative library to import or export brand content. There’s also a way to make sure that the content?meets Amazon standards as soon as it’s designed. It’s fast and easy - and that’s the name of the game for advertisers in 2024. That might be the most significant part of the integration for Amazon advertisers: Canva gives users access to powerful AI tools to help scale ad creative better than ever.?

GenAI is popular already -? according to the Artificial Marketing Benchmark Report, 61% of marketers have used AI for marketing activities and 44% have used it for content production. By optimizing ad creative with GenAI, you can be more agile at every point in campaign activation. AI-powered ad creative opens the possibilities for a new kind of media planning strategy: the micro-season.?

From Timeline to Tentpole ?

You know the drill: seasonal ad campaigns? are a must. The holiday season is the biggest opportunity of the year. #primeday comes in a close second. More than 375 million items were purchased during Amazon Prime Day 2023 (July 11 - July 12).

Prime Day is a good example of how hard it is to activate (retailer-specific) tent pole ad strategies on time, because Amazon is the only one who knows when it’s going to happen for sure. Most seasonal ad creative has to be ready months in advance. So if you’re planning multiple campaigns with different variations for different holidays, it can quickly become hard to think about ad creative for every potential holiday. If you want to run a campaign for Father’s Day or Independence Day this summer, you might have a hard time concurrently creating the right creative for separate campaigns as you get busy planning for Prime Day.?

This is where GenAI can help you build out a micro-season ad strategy: by using AI to generate ad creative specific to different seasonal events, you can build a much more dynamic media plan with more contextually relevant creative for every seasonal opportunity, not just tentpoles.??

To test the power of GenAI for a micro-season creative strategy, we ran a test with one of our enterprise customers that measured the performance of a campaign with traditional ad creative and a campaign with AI-generated creative.

Here’s what we found:?

• An ad with a micro season theme converts better than a non-seasonal ad during a seasonal timeframe: Even adding a Christmas tree in the ad of an everyday item like a battery drives higher conversion during Q4.
• GenAI drives unparalleled efficiency: Traditional creative can take two or three months from brief to approval, while GenAI only takes a few minutes and a week of brand approval review?

GenAI provides a new golden opportunity for smaller businesses that don’t have the resources of big brands: if you can more agilely scale ad creative and campaigns with AI-generated creative, the efficiency and time savings can pay for itself. Dayexi Tomko summed it up well responding to a post by Destaney Wishon which you can find here : "Working for a big brand, it’s hard to imagine how we could put this into place due to the many layers/people that it takes to get one piece of creative to the finish line. From the person who requests it, to briefing, to actual execution which could be done by several different designers, then branding + legal approvals. There are so many variables, I'm curious to see how it could be done. Definitely something I want to bring to our team and see if it would help or just add another layer of complexity."

Amazon has made it easy within their ad console to create these seasonally relevant creatives with thematic templates - in the example below, you can place a Pumpkin Spice candle on a Thanksgiving table using the theme "Pumpkin Spice" which given our testing, should convert better than just an ad with the candle during Thanksgiving.

As we head into the back half of the year, there are a lot of opportunities for brands to test out this strategy: Father's day, 4th of July, Back to School, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Holiday to name a few.

Please comment and share your own results!

About the Author: Melissa Burdick is an ecommerce expert having spent a decade at Amazon and then co-founded the market-leading commerce acceleration platform Pacvue to help brands, sellers, and agencies optimize their returns efficiently & effectively and win online.