Cuisinart ran the AI ad against its agency ad. The AI won.
Equal spend, same month, real campaign. And the reason it won is not the one you'd guess.
The week is almost over, don’t panic!
Every AI creative conversation this year has been vibes and screenshots. Here is an actual test.
Cuisinart, through parent company Conair, beta-tested Amazon’s video creative agent and then did the obvious thing almost nobody does: equal spend behind an in-house-produced video and an AI-generated one, identical campaigns running concurrently for a month. The AI video won on click-through and on-site conversion.
AdExchanger doesn’t publish the size of the lift, so neither will we. “Won on both” is what’s known.
The winning ad is not impressive. Two adults and a kid in a kitchen, a narrator talking about last-minute dinner prep, some near-still product shots of a 14-cup food processor. The text on the appliance buttons is still slightly wrong, which is the tell that has been the tell for two years.
The reason it won is the part worth your time, and it isn’t creativity. Amazon’s agent ingests everything the brand has run before, plus which of those performed, then produces something adjacent to the winners. New enough to escape ad blindness. Familiar enough to keep working. It is a variation engine wearing a creative director’s coat.
Which tells you what the job is now. Feed it a catalog of proven work and clear brand constraints, and it will farm the space between them forever. Feed it nothing, and it will produce the average of your category, and the platform will show that to people who have already scrolled past it eleven times.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Nikhil Nanivadekar, principal engineer for generative and agentic AI at Amazon Ads, on what the agent is doing: the tool is “grounded in the signals” a brand provides, so it reflects the company’s video catalog rather than “producing something bold or outlandish.”
An Amazon engineer saying out loud that the creative agent is not creative. Keep that quote for the next time someone in your building says AI is coming for the agency. It’s coming for the fourteenth cutdown, which the agency also hated making.
NUMBERS MATTER
120%. Year-over-year growth in unique contributors to Snapchat’s Spotlight feed, cited by Snap as evidence its authenticity push is working. Platforms have started publishing human-supply metrics, which is a strange new thing to be proud of and a fairly clear signal about which way the incentives are pointing.
DAILY PROMPT
Here is 12 months of creative performance data: [paste creative name, format, spend, CTR, CVR, and first/last run dates]. Act as a paid media analyst. Identify which creatives are fatiguing, using the point where CTR declines while frequency rises rather than raw age. Then tell me which three winners are worth generating variations from, what specifically made each one work, and which two I should retire because the performance was the placement, not the creative.
Use this before you brief anything new. Generative tools reward you for knowing which of your old ads actually earned their keep, and most teams brief from taste and calendar instead.
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CMO CORNER
The best way to speed up your team is to slow down your instructions.
The Cuisinart result is a brief result. The agent was given a catalogue, performance signals and brand constraints, and it produced something usable. Vague in, average out, and average now gets buried. Whatever you’re about to hand a model, spend the extra twenty minutes on the input. It’s the highest-leverage twenty minutes in the workflow.
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TOOL UPGRADE
Amazon’s agent only makes ads for Amazon. If you want the same volume everywhere else, you build it. Three for generating video at production scale:
Synthesia best for on-brand explainer and product video in many languages without booking a studio. Try Synthesia here →
Fliki best for turning an approved script straight into a branded cut with voiceover, in an afternoon. Try Fliki here →
Zebracat best for spinning existing static assets into the volume of short-form variants that paid social eats. Try Zebracat here →
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LEARN THIS
If the brief is the variable, get better at briefs: The Prompt Playbook for Modern Marketers. Twenty-five pages built around P.A.C.T. — persona, ask, context, template — which is the structured version of what Amazon’s agent gets fed automatically and your team mostly doesn’t. Useful as a standard for new hires so prompting stops being a personal talent.
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That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
