Automated Ad Creative Generation (2022)

Abstract: Ad creatives are ads served to users on a webpage, app, or other digital environments. The demand for compelling ad creatives surges drastically with the ever-increasing popularity of digital marketing. The two most essential elements of (display) ad creatives are the advertising message, such as headlines and description texts, and the visual component, such as images and videos. Traditionally, ad creatives are composed by professional copywriters and creative designers. The process requires significant human effort, limiting the scalability and efficiency of digital ad campaigns. This work introduces AUTOCREATIVE, a novel system to automatically generate ad creatives relying on natural language generation and computer vision techniques. The system generates multiple ad copies (ad headlines/description texts) using a sequence-to-sequence model and selects images most suitable to the generated ad copies based on heuristic-based visual appeal metrics and a text-image retrieval pipeline.

## introduction visually appealing ads with a compelling message will promote the brand image and lead to a better click-through rate. however, the ad composition process is time and labor-intensive, severely limiting the number of unique ads for each campaign. the ads' effectiveness deteriorates as the users are repeatedly exposed to the same ads, referred to as ad fatigue @xcite . it underlines the importance of generating ad creatives automatically at scale. this demo paper presents autocreative, a novel system for ad creative design which combines ad copy generation using a sequence-tosequence transformer model and ad image selection using object/scene detection and aesthetic appeal scoring. figure 1 presents example ad creatives generated by our system. 2 system overview autocreative takes only the advertiser's url as input. it first crawls the textual content and images from the advertiser's website. the ad copy generation module generates ad headlines and description texts conditioned on the content of the advertiser's website. the candidate images first go through a visual quality filter, then match against the generated ad copy using a text-image retrieval pipeline. figure 2 overviews the framework. ## feedback from account team and clients we deployed autocreative to production in march 2022 and integrated it to knorex xpo foot_3 , a self-serve cloud marketing automation platform. the system has enabled over 30 advertisers to generate ad creatives across various campaigns. the feedback we received from our internal account team and various clients was overwhelmingly pos-itive. the technology was especially appreciated by small advertisers, who cannot afford an internal creative design team. before the system was deployed, our creative designer team used to take more than a day to produce a set of ad creatives (including the communication overhead and the overhead of working on multiple creative design tasks simultaneously). our system drastically reduced the turn-around time to a few minutes. advertisers can now generate a set of appealing and diverse ad creatives from the ui without any creative design or copywriting knowledge. critical feedback mostly relates to the cases where crawling is blocked on the advertiser landing page or no suitable image is available. ## conclusion we introduced autocreative, a novel framework to automatically generate ad creatives. it has been deployed to production and used by clients of a global digital advertising company.