Clever, well-designed ads are expensive and major agencies charge a lot for their services. Might that change with Amazon now offering AI-generated ads? — Photo: Hauke-Christian Dittrich/dpa
MUNICH: Amazon is now using artificial intelligence to generate services for the many retailers on its global online marketplace, according to Dharmesh Mehta, the Amazon vice president responsible for the marketplace.
In addition to AI-generated product descriptions, this also includes marketing texts, images and adverts, he added.
"And it's still very early days, but even in the short while that we've had some of these features launch, we've got already 30,000 sellers (in Europe) that are using these features," Mehta told dpa during a visit to Munich.
According to Mehta, in many cases, photos of the corresponding products are now sufficient for an AI-generated suggestion of a product description.
Furthermore, he said that Amazon's AI can also take on creative tasks that were previously a human domain, "So many sellers not only create product listings, they want to advertise them. And so we're generating advertisements for them."
For certain ads generated by Amazon, it is possible to record up to 20% higher click-through rates (CTR) than for advertisements based on standard product images.
The CTR is a key figure that measures the success of online advertising based on the number of clicks. Before releasing a computer-generated ad, it is presented to sellers for review, according to Mehta, "We effectively generate a suggestion for the seller."
According to the annual report by Amazon's parent company, there are now two million vendors represented on the corporation's online marketplace worldwide, including 125,000 in the EU.
In 2023, the US was the world's largest market with US$395.6bil (RM1.8 trillion) in revenue, followed by Germany with nearly US$37.6bil (RM177.3bil).
These corporate sales figures include not only online retail but also other Amazon services such as streaming subscriptions and cloud data centre operations. – dpa
