Amazon Unveils Video Generator Exclusively for Ads

Amazon has introduced a new video generator specifically for creating advertisements. This tool allows brands to easily produce engaging video content to enhance their marketing campaigns. By simplifying the video creation process, Amazon aims to help businesses effectively showcase their products and services, ultimately improving audience engagement and ad performance. This innovative feature underscores Amazon's commitment to supporting brands in the evolving advertising landscape.

Similar to its competitor, Google, Amazon has introduced an AI-driven video generator — but it's currently only available for advertisers and has certain limitations.

During its Accelerate conference, Amazon debuted Video Generator, a tool that transforms a single product image into a video presentation of the product after processing. Amazon claims the tool can create "custom" AI-generated videos that highlight a product’s features at no extra charge.

According to a blog post, Amazon notes that videos generated by this tool utilize the company’s exclusive retail insights to vividly bring a product’s story to life in ways that resonate with customers.

Jay Richman, Amazon Ads VP, stated that Video Generator, currently in beta for select U.S. advertisers (specifically for Sponsored Brands campaigns), will be refined in the coming months before its broader release.

“Video Generator represents another important innovation leveraging generative AI to spark creativity and provide more value for advertisers and shoppers,” Richman said. “We’re working hard to develop AI tools that enable advertisers to produce visually appealing, high-performance ads.”

Additionally, Amazon announced another related feature, live image, which generates short animated GIFs from a still image. Like Video Generator, live image is also in limited beta and forms part of Amazon’s AI-powered image generation suite for marketers.

However, Amazon hasn’t shared sample footage from Video Generator and initially disclosed few technical details about the tool or live image.

Later in the day, an Amazon spokesperson responded to some Video Generator-related questions from TechCrunch via email.

The spokesperson explained that clips generated by the tool are 6-9 seconds long at 720p resolution (24 frames per second). The videos are automatically created "based on" a seed product image — "inspired by the product and its details" — and take up to five minutes to produce. Users are offered four different variations to choose from.

Video Generator outputs typically follow a consistent format: two scenes with headlines (e.g., “Nourishing Lavender Moisturizer”), background music, and a call to action. Users can customize the font, soundtrack, and brand logo, which appears in the upper-right corner of the video.

Amazon’s move into generative video comes amid other companies unveiling their own video-generation technologies. Startups Runway and Luma recently launched generative video APIs, while Google is beginning to incorporate its video generation model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts. Adobe also announced that video generation would be available in its Creative Suite by the end of the year, and OpenAI is expected to launch its video generation tech, Sora, later this fall.

Like all generative AI systems, there are risks tied to using these tools.

Video-generating models are trained on vast amounts of video data to learn patterns, which they use to generate new clips. Some companies use copyrighted videos in their training sets without proper authorization, and when these models produce content that resembles copyrighted material, users may face intellectual property lawsuits.

Amazon, like other companies, has committed to protecting customers accused of copyright infringement from content generated by its models, in line with its indemnification policy. The company has been asked if Video Generator and live image will be included in this protection.

Regardless of the legal outcomes, it's becoming evident that generative AI is poised to disrupt the film and television industries. A 2024 study commissioned by the Animation Guild, representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, predicts that by 2026, over 100,000 U.S.-based entertainment jobs could be affected by generative AI.

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Source: techcrunch‍