Smartly's AI Studio Expands Product Availability to Help Advertisers Elevate Creative with Gen AI

In June 2023, we announced the Smartly AI Lab, an internal team dedicated to driving development of generative AI features within Smartly. We knew that AI would transform the ways that we create and consume ad creative. With almost a decade of experience building Creative and AI tools, we committed to being a leading voice in the space.

Our mission was to add AI to every step of the advertising workflow to take our clients from idea to ad with intelligence. Along the way, we kept enterprise advertiser considerations in mind: high-quality, low-risk model choices, and guardrails for quality and brand alignment.

In the months following, we rapidly launched our AI Playground, a hub for experimenting with AI features like background generation and text personalization. It provided and early performance lift with clients like Foot Locker and Emma Sleep.

Going into 2025, we’re proud to announce that we’re moving our AI features to GA and out of the playground under a new name: AI Studio. In addition, we have new feature launches, new case studies, and an exciting 2025 roadmap ahead.

Smartly AI Studio By The Numbers:

260+ customers activated on AI Studio

1.9M+ creative assets generated

30x faster creative process

27% average performance lift

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See what’s Under the Hood:

Generation on Feeds: Personalized, Beautified Creative at Scale

In an increasingly crowded landscape, today’s consumers expect more. 75% of consumers want brands to demonstrate that they understand their needs (source), and the #1 thing they’re looking for in ads is authenticity, according to Smartly’s State of Digital Creative Report. To achieve this across audiences, languages, and formats, advertisers need personalization at scale.

Generation on Feeds enables advertisers to apply generative AI across their Automation Feeds or Product Catalogs on 10,000+ rows at a time. This enables high-quality, insight-informed variant production at a previously impossible scale. Some use cases we’ve seen include:

• Translating text to 3+ languages across hundreds of copy variants
• Personalizing value propositions to different audience profiles and interests
• Cropping and resizing approved creative to fit different aspect ratios and platform formats
• Removing backgrounds of product images to enable creative freedom, then adding animations in Smartly Templates with Product-Level Video
• Reshooting products in new lifestyle scenes with consistent style and composition across tens of thousands of products

Uniquely Smartly:

• Generation on Feeds fits seamlessly into Smartly Creative and Smartly Media suites, which powers cross-platform creative and campaign production.
• Generations, even at scale, can be as hands-off or highly-controlled as needed – customers can review every result by hand before it goes live and lean on AI or human cleanup offerings, or run recurring generation to keep an always-on generative AI column in their feed.

Video Ad Assembly: Your AI Video Editor

It’s no secret that video – short-form, CTV, and more – is the future of advertising. According to Personify Corp, by the end of 2025, video will account for 82% of internet traffic. Yet, compared to traditional image or text creative, video takes significantly more time and resources to build.

Video Ad Assembly was built with the goal to help advertisers get as much life and scale as possible out of their existing video assets. Unlike some other offerings, Video Ad Assembly uses Smartly AI to deeply understand the content of your input videos, and applies a mix of techniques – from pure clip rearrangement to new text overlay additions – to produce sensible, on-brand outputs.

Video Ad Assembly can support with:

• Cutting long-form videos (e.g. TV spots) to short-form video ads
• Assemble raw, unedited clips into a cohesive story
• Make iterations of existing edited content

Uniquely Smartly:

• Like Generation on Feeds, Video Ad Assembly connects seamlessly to Smartly Creative and Smartly Media to power cross-platform creative and campaign production. Within Smartly Video Editor, advertisers have access to powerful features like text to speech, fine-grained scene splitting controls, keyframe animations, scaling text with feeds, and much more

Brand Controls: Stay True To Your Brand’s Quality and Repertoire 

For brands already using creative AI tools, brand consistency is a major challenge, Generative AI can be unpredictable, and it’s challenging to maintain consistency of brand look and feel across newly generated creative, especially at scale.

At Smartly, we offer strong brand controls at every step.

• Style Mimicking learns from existing brand assets and passes style information to scene generation. This ensures on-brand generation and offers more control than just text prompts.
• Composition Control enables advertisers to define the position of objects generated within scene generation. A popular use case is drawing a line to define where the ground should be, or replacing the ground with a round platform. In addition, users can add props to the environment like hands or leaves.
• Text Guardrail enables AI to review itself. Prompt it to ask what mistakes to look for, and it will fix it on its own.
• Cleanup Interface ensures that nothing goes live without human approval, even at scale. To save time, bulk approvals and cleanup services are available.

We deeply believe in keeping humans in the driver’s seat and allowing for enterprise-level controls at every step. Scale is only possible because of these guardrails.

A Range of Creative Tools

AI is pushing creative boundaries. It can help us save time, personalize creatives, and drive performance lift – but it can also help us try new forms of artistic exploration, generate new ideas, and enable new forms of storytelling.

Beyond Generation on Feeds and Video Ad Assembly, we offer a range of individual AI Editing Tools, many of which are in more experimental phases. Once you find an individual tool that you like, you can scale it within Generation on Feeds, or use it within other areas of the platform like Smartly Video Editor.

In the last few months, we’ve added new AI editing tools like image upscaling, video auto-crop, generative expand, and an upgraded text-to-speech model. (So much more is coming soon – see the end of this blog post for a teaser.)

Brands Stepping Up The Creative AI Game

It’s an exciting time of innovation and ingenuity for the creative charter, and Smartly is immersed in best practices development working with more than 230 customers testing these tools to realize a 27% average performance lift.

• Foot Locker wanted to scale the look of their branded website assets across their 10,000+ product catalog. With Generation on Feeds, they did this in a few clicks, driving +32% CTR and -28% CPA
• Kavak needed to diversify their creative across multiple markets, audiences, and channels. Using scene generation, they created tailored lifestyle backgrounds and drove +46% CTR and 30x faster go-to-market time
• JustFab wanted to refresh the look of their DPA ads for the new season. Using Background Removal, JustFab removed white backgrounds across their product catalog, then designed a new seasonal template around it using Smartly Template Editor. The result: -9% CPA on AI-enhanced assets compared to BAU. In addition, the highest-performing ads in their Black Friday ASC campaigns came from Smartly AI Studio.

Looking Ahead

We’re just getting started. Just as Smartly covers the end-to-end workflow across media buying and creative scaling, Smartly AI will cover every part of the workflow as well. We’ve already made strides in this direction: Video Ad Assembly and Generation on Feeds are scalable workflows that connect directly to Smartly Creative Templates. This is our first step to moving “out of the playground.”

In 2025, you’ll see AI integrated more deeply throughout Smartly Creative Suite, with integrations planned in Editor, Producer, Reporting, Creative Insights, Asset Library, and much more. In addition, Smartly will continue rapid rollout of new AI Studio features like Text to Image and Image to Video.

Smartly users have immediate access to all AI Studio features, including Generation on Feeds on up to 10 rows at a time. Paid subscription is available for larger scale generation features. Visit the AI Studio page for more information.