Right now, all eyes are on artificial intelligence resources like ChatGPT with their ability to create some reasonable text content for marketing. Can you create full-blown, ready-to-publish blog posts using AI? Sure, if you don’t mind vapid sections linked by trite flourishes. How about digital ad copy? That’s where it gets quickly interesting. First of all, Google and Facebook have been assembling ads on the fly with just snippets of copy for years. Tell an AI engine the narrative selling points of your product and, at the very least, you will have some decent first-draft digital ad copy.
But visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures.
But largely just experiments. Until now.
Beautiful Visuals for Ecommerce
A startup out of Singapore, KittyKat (disclaimer: I am currently advising KittyKat), specializes in delivering all of the visual needs for ecommerce brands and has cracked the code to use artificial intelligence for next-generation visuals.
They are perfecting "prompt engineering” – the art and science of getting specific and beautiful results from visual AI – to multiply a single product image nto dozens of variations. And not just any variations but the ones people are more likely to stop and notice in their feeds, click on, and even drive them to “add to cart.”
Check out these compelling variations for a beauty product that places the product within different tabletop settings, from flowers to crystal-clear water.
Product photography, animation, and videography have been ripe for disruption for years. Traditional shoots are bespoke and expensive. Marketers either choose between the economics of the established photographer industry (expensive) or dodgy quality from the unknown creative, often halfway around the world.
A few startups and entrepreneurial photographers are trying to create visual “factories” – low cost, high volume – specifically for ecommerce businesses. This is a dead-end that will always wind up sacrificing quality for cost.
The real disruption happens when you get methods like KittyKat’s Assisted Artificial Intelligence™ into the hands of creatives. This isn’t about putting photographers or stylists out of work but giving them new creative tools to augment what they can do. And do it at a step-change lower cost.
KittyKat uses visual AI to create beautiful product images (and soon videos) that perform well – more clicks, more purchases. And they are expanding creative quality while improving the economics for ecommerce brands that need an endless supply of visuals to drive customer engagement and sales.
