• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, Yesterday

Amazon Ads has launched an upgrade to its video generator for U.S. advertisers as it takes the company's advertising model deeper into generative AI-powered tools.

Advertisers can now create realistic motion shots for their products with Video Generator in Sponsored Brand. With one click they can combine real product shots with synthetic images and transform them into moving videos that appear in searches and product detail pages.

These GIF-style video ads depict the product in action, which helps shoppers better understand the product benefits.

AI prompts to create the ads are generated automatically by the platform, said Jay Richman, vice president of product and technology at Amazon.

“In 2024 the ads were quite basic,” Richman said. “Now transitions are smoother and the duration of the ad much longer.”

Richman said it is always a fine balance for Amazon Ads, which means determining how many features the company should build in and how simple it should keep the platform.

Most small companies that sell on Amazon do not have the time and resources to build out a video campaign. That is the main reason why Amazon wants to keep it simple and easy to use.  

“Many more brands would like to bring their products to life in video, but they couldn’t because of the time, scale and resources,” he said. “We’re seeing that those who are using the tool are advertising the products for the very first time.”

On average, ads with video drive a clickthrough rate on Amazon that is 30% higher, he said.

The platform supports enhanced motion and realism with multi-scene video ads as well as the ability to add images of humans and pets. It also generates six different videos that advertisers can choose from, providing more creative variety for ad campaigns.

Advertisers upload existing videos — whether from social media content, demos, or tutorial videos — and Video Generator identifies key clips, extracts them, and summarizes the clips to create optimized ad content. From there it generates a new video for an ad campaign.

“Background music is selected from commercially available tracks,” Richman said.

Brands can upload their logos into videos and soon Amazon will also allow advertisers to add brand guidelines and key selling points. Editing tools allow advertisers to modify headlines and adjust logo placement.

Amazon introduced Video Generator in beta in September 2024. It allowed advertisers in minutes to create eight-second, low-motion video ads from one product image.

Over the past nine months, the company has updated the platform to create more sophisticated, high-motion video ads, where products blend into actions and scenes.