Shoppers changed how they decide. Your listing should keep up.

Custom creative is a performance lever

On Amazon, standard Sponsored Products ads carry no custom creative. Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display do: video, headline and image formats you control. Most sellers do not use them well, which is why good creative still gives an advantage. A practical starting point is to keep roughly half of the budget in Sponsored Products, with more moving to Sponsored Brands once you have creative assets, and Sponsored Display for more mature brands.

Our approach to video:

1. Start from a hypothesis. Who is this ad for, what do they want to see, and what do page-one competitors show? Long-running competitor creatives are evidence of what works.
2. Tailor creative to the search family. A video for "gift for mom" is not the video for "waterproof".
3. Win the first three seconds. We test several versions of the opening, for example three that show the product in action and two that show a key feature, with the rest unchanged.
4. Keep it short. Under a minute, often 35 to 40 seconds, focused on features and benefits. Simple phone-shot video can perform well when it shows what the shopper searched for.
5. Never test one video. In one reported test, one of three variants clearly won. We plan for at least a few.
6. Budget the creative. Creative spend is linked to your TACoS target. At a 15% TACoS target, an account heading toward $100,000 of monthly sales would plan roughly $15,000 of ad spend, a meaningful share of it on creative formats.

One reported test found that intent-matched Sponsored Brands video moved ACoS from 61% to 23% over five weeks. Results vary widely by product and category.

Design for the phone

Most Amazon traffic is on mobile. We design images, A+ content and Brand Story for a small screen first: large text (30 points as a minimum in A+ images), fewer words, imagery that shows size and use, and a gallery that tells the story in the first few swipes. A+ video can go further than an ad can, showing set-up, unboxing and step-by-step use, which answers uncertainty before it becomes a reason not to buy.

Write for AI-assisted search

Amazon's AI assistant looks at more than keywords. It weighs how relevant a product is, its structured attributes, the shopper's apparent intent and what reviews say. Amazon's own research on its shopping model describes many dimensions of intent such as use, audience and occasion. Treat this as emerging practice, not settled science, but a few habits are sound whatever the details turn out to be:

• Fill every structured attribute (size, material, colour, audience, use). Empty fields are lost chances to be matched.
• Answer real questions. Pull the questions from reviews and Q&A and answer them in bullets and A+ in the shopper's own words.
• Write like a person. A title and bullets that read naturally are easier for people and for assistants to understand.
• Check it, then check again. Test how the assistant describes your product and note what it gets wrong.

Use AI for creative, with discipline

AI image and video tools let us produce and test more variants than a conventional studio can. We hold the output to one standard: it must be as good as or better than a human-made version, truthful about the product and compliant with Amazon's rules. We start from real product references, test through Amazon's own experiments before changing a live page, and never invent features, claims or reviews.

What we do

• Plan the creative around search families and buyer intent.
• Produce or brief main images, gallery, A+, Brand Story and video, with a test plan for each.
• Prepare listing text and attributes for AI-assisted search.
• Review results and retire what does not work.

Common mistakes

• One generic video for every audience.
• Opening a video with a logo or a slow intro.
• Text in images that cannot be read on a phone.
• Keyword-stuffed bullets nobody would say aloud.
• Treating AI-generated images as finished without testing them.