• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

Launching a new product in a competitive market typically requires a long, costly creative production cycle to build momentum.

WD-40 Company, a San Diego, California brand, planned a January launch directly after the holidays for its Specialist Professional Degreaser on Amazon’s marketplace in France.

The company needed consumers to pay attention to the new product without a pre-existing sales history or months of traditional video shoots.

"We brought customers through the funnel, which became super important," Nikhil Nanivadekar, principal engineer of generative AI at Amazon Ads, told MediaPost.

The campaign launched in January immediately after the holidays, so company executives felt the need to move quickly to introduce the product and its promotion using a generative AI video tool the team at Amazon Ads built.

"The French marketplace is hyper-concentrated," he said. "You already have pretty well-established players. For any new product to break through that ceiling to breakthrough to customers requires a concerted strategy."

As a result of the way Amazon serves the ads to the shoppers, it is careful not to bombard them with ads, but instead leads the person down through the funnel, he said.

Amazon DSP supports specific ad formats. It optimizes the ad, sometimes changing information to ensure the ad resonates with the shopper. 

The idea of the campaign was to capture momentum and market share from the holiday season using AI-powered video assets optimized for Amazon Ad

WD-40 Company partnered with Bizon, a France-based ad agency, to deploy Amazon Ads generative AI Video Generator.

By combining these AI-generated videos with a targeted Sponsored Brands video and Amazon DSP strategy, the company proved generative AI can directly power growth of its product.

The campaign supported more than 50% increase in average daily sales after launching the video activation. Daily unit volume tripled, and the 88% new-to-brand acquisition rate demonstrated that the AI creative successfully brought new consumers to the brand.

Amazon Ads data shows that rather than full-funnel approaches being used, it leads to a more impactful outcome, he said.

The campaign also produced a 45% higher click-through rate (CTR) than category benchmarks, with video completion rates reaching nearly 90%.

Amazon’s AI-based video ads lowered the cost to create these assets at a much faster rate, Nanivadekar said.

He did not provide details on cost, because the costs are accrued by Amazon Ads. However, he said that on average it takes up to a few weeks to create a typical ad video, but with this AI tool it took minutes. The brand goes to the video tool, selects the product, and Amazon creates the videos.

WD-40 Specialist Line launched in 2011 to target trade professionals with industrial-strength formulas, including the Professional Degreaser, EZ-REACH flexible straws, and high-performance greases. It laid the foundation for the January Amazon France campaign.

Before this line existed, consumers exclusively associated the brand with its iconic blue-and-yellow multi-use spray.

Knowing that data to use that resonates most with the brand’s customers also helped to drive performance

"The idea is the advertiser doesn’t know all this happens behind the scenes," he said, adding that the advertiser just clicks a few buttons and the ad is ready to use.