How AI Can Help Manage E-commerce Product Photography

Our team at ACV has been exploring ways to use AI to address the problems our customers face in today’s digital marketing space. Many brands struggle to keep up with the demands of creative development in this hectic world of DTC consumer goods. Their budgets are struggling to keep up, too. With time and money at a premium, AI tools are emerging as a solution that could bridge the gap and enhance a creative team's efficiency without sacrificing quality.

Case Study: Streamlining Image Design Workflow for a Footwear Brand

We recently worked with a global shoe brand dealing regularly with up to 5,000 SKUs. They faced serious difficulties keeping up with the demand for product images and videos to meet the increasing needs of their social media team, email marketing program, and catalog schedule. 

Tools for Every Scale

We looked at two great tools, AdCreative and Genus, to see if we could help. Both tools are designed to address the challenge of adding range and capacity to a creative team managing an extensive, ever-changing image portfolio. With a starting price point of $29/mo for AdCreative vs. $1000+/mo for Genus, they are meant to address the needs of brands at slightly different scales. Genus is a more sophisticated product and is more adapted to catalog creation, market segmentation, and analytics. However, AdCreative does a great job for the price and has an analytics feature that promises to increase conversion rates by 3x.

Although both of these tools need a human touch to keep them on target, they definitely take much of the work out of producing quantities of lower-funnel creative, and this puts that energy back into actual creativity and strategic initiatives, which in turn, gives budgets a break and stretched-thin creative teams a boost.

Adoption is Key

Teams that try to adopt these types of creative management tools early will have an advantage as the technology evolves. We have found that, although it may take a few months for the whole team to use these tools efficiently, they pay off in time saved almost immediately. 

We have been collaborating with Siara Nazir, an award-winning AI-ML marketing science accelerator and recognized digital transformation leader. Siara recently built an engineering team of AI experts, Inovient, to help marketers envision AI-powered tools to solve challenges specific to their business. She has watched AI become a primary topic across investor calls, board rooms, and company leadership in an unprecedented way. Siara has seen a considerable uptick in AI use in marketing during the past 18 months, "There's immense pressure on enterprises, whether they're established companies or startups, to understand and integrate AI into their operations."

Competitive Advantage

No one can afford to be left out of this evolution, and in some ways, the uses of AI as a marketing tool are limited only by human imagination. With visual creative assets, anyone taking advantage of AI will reap a pretty hefty competitive advantage;

• Faster Optimization: By generating and testing a wider variety of ad creatives, brands can identify the most effective variations quicker. This leads to significant improvements in conversion rates compared to traditional testing methods.

• Increased Efficiency: With even partial automation of the design process, valuable time and resources are freed up and can be applied to other areas of marketing. This allows marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives like campaign planning and audience analysis.

• Data-Driven Insights: These AI platforms provide systematic insights into competitors’ visual ad strategies that are hard to come by in the human-driven world, allowing brands to stay informed about current trends and adapt their campaigns accordingly.

In short, the savings from getting comfortable with these tools will create a true differential between the AI haves and have-nots. 

Again, humans are an integral part of this equation. There are many layers of creative intuition and strategy that can't be delegated to AI without losing critical quality. What these image management tools do for a marketing team juggling thousands of SKUs is free up more time for applying the human element. At the same time, these tools bring more order to massive image catalogs and image-heavy workflows than most brands can humanly manage. 

If you are interested in integrating AI into your marketing workflow, click here to set up a discovery call with us or schedule a workshop for your team.

About Aaron Carpenter

As former VP of Marketing at Levi Strauss and a transformative CMO at The North Face, Aaron has guided some of the world’s most dynamic brands into the digital era while helping to shape their unique brand identities to meet the evolving global marketing environment. Today, Aaron lends his expertise to a wide range of brands through powerful fractional work while maintaining his position as an influential global lifestyle marketing figure.

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