This is a true story. Mostly. It’s based on absolutely true facts about what Smartly can do and what customers have used it for. Only the particulars about our customers have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

From basic to lit

As part of a brand refresh, a large shoe retailer wanted to completely re-imagine their product catalog ads. Their creative team challenged themselves do something totally new with their assets.

Those assets included their product catalog, which contained basic product images shot against a nondescript studio background. Initially the company thought that upcycling the product images would require a lengthy, expensive photoshoot. 

How wrong they were! With Smartly, they would soon have their entire product catalog enriched with new images, showing their products both with individual studio backgrounds and in real-world scenes.

Tailored ads

After taking Smartly’s AI Studio into use and experimenting with it, the shoe retailer’s marketing team realised they could very easily remove the existing background from a large number of photos very fast. 

This took away some of the pain, but the next question was, what would they put in the background instead? Maybe a color? Maybe some text, too? What was more, they also didn’t want to spend days picking colors and copy-pasting pictures of shoes.

So they did something more innovative: they combined the power of AI Studio with the versatility of the Smartly Template Editor to enrich their product catalog. 

With suitable prompts, the AI Studio was made to come up with background and text color codes and insert them into the feed source file. Then they created a new template in the Template Editor with a dynamic background, product titles and prices. And voilá! A huge selection of ads was created. 

By the way, the drop shadow is a dynamic element, too. That’s how it changes to match the shape of the shoe.

Shoes in real life

But they weren’t done yet! The studio-like images were very nice now, but they wanted their ads to really pop. What if they were to let consumers see their shoes in a lifelike setting, in the actual environment where they would be used?

Their product catalog already had a description of the product features. The team used AI Studio to create a prompt for each individual line item in the catalog, and then used that prompt to create a full-fledged background scene relevant to the product.

And now, their product catalog ads can also feature the shoes in their natural environment!

Ready to go

But catalog ads come in three different formats. To accommodate multiple channels and formats, they used AI Studio again to create a set of images in other aspect ratios.

And the finale - video magic!

When these results were presented to leadership, they came back with an ask (of course they did!) for videos. After a brief moment of panic the team got in touch with Smartly, who pointed out that they could create videos by animating static assets in the Template Editor. And so they did.

Needless to say, leadership was more than pleased with the final result, and the very short time in which dozens of smashing product videos were produced!

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