Creativity still lies in the hand of the advertisers: Kapil Sharma, Amazon Ads

For years, sophisticated digital advertising came with an implicit minimum size.

Producing video creative required budgets and production resources. Running multiple campaigns meant having the people to manage them. Expanding advertising into another country added another layer of complexity altogether.

Generative and predictive AI are beginning to chip away at those requirements, potentially giving smaller businesses access to advertising capabilities once largely reserved for bigger brands.

Speaking to exchange4media, Kapil Sharma, Director, Amazon Ads, reaches first for one of the simplest examples: how long it takes to make an ad.

“The thing which was taking, let’s say, 10 hours, now it takes only 20 minutes,” he said, pointing to AI-powered tools that allow sellers to generate video and display creatives using existing product images.

But what about the really small advertiser, in essence, the business for whom producing a video advertisement at all might once have been difficult?

“The creative agent is free of cost. Anybody can use it,” Sharma said. “It’s more democratic now.”

That democratisation sits at the heart of Amazon Ads’ latest study on AI adoption among Indian SMBs. According to the study, 87% of respondents said AI had enabled access to advertising opportunities previously out of reach, while 75% said AI-enabled advertising had supported business growth.

Also read: AI and the advertisers 

The more interesting question, though, is what happens after making an ad becomes easy.

Asked whether AI was primarily allowing SMBs to simply produce more creatives, or whether Amazon was seeing better advertising as a result, Sharma's answer was both.

Advertisers can create “compelling creatives, trying and testing the ideas, seeing which one works, which doesn’t work,” he said. Ahead of Diwali, for instance, a business can test different ideas and formats and optimise around those that work.

And creative is only one part of the equation.

Sharma pointed to Amazon’s Performance Plus, where advertisers can specify a business objective and automate elements of campaign optimisation around it.

“Let’s say somebody has set awareness as an objective, then the campaign will automatically optimise so that it can drive awareness for the advertisers,” he said.

But more ads and easier optimisation aren't necessarily the same thing as better results. Asked whether Amazon could point to performance rather than simply greater creative output, Sharma reached for a couple of examples.

WishCare, which used Smart Screen/Big TV advertising alongside search ads, “saw almost 22x uplift in their branded searches and 5x higher purchase rate as compared to the benchmarks,” he said.

Party Props, meanwhile, combined video advertising with data-driven targeting and recorded a 32% uplift in the click-through rate of its video campaign against its benchmark.

“We are seeing impact across the board on the performance also,” Sharma said.

These examples combine multiple advertising, targeting and data capabilities rather than isolating AI as the sole cause of the performance gains. They nevertheless indicate how lower creative and operational barriers can allow smaller advertisers to experiment with a broader advertising toolkit.

Which creates another question: if everybody gets access to increasingly sophisticated AI tools, what happens to differentiation?

If Amazon can give a tiny seller access to generation, targeting and optimisation capabilities available to everybody else, the technology itself eventually stops being the advantage.

“We believe in enabling and empowering all the sellers, all the businesses, irrespective of their size,” Sharma said. But “the creativity still lies in the hand of the advertisers.”

“Different advertisers come up with different ideas, different creative nuances,” he added.

Also read: Media planning evolution  

Their problems aren't identical either. A seller launching a new product might be trying to build awareness; a smaller challenger taking on an established brand may have an entirely different objective. The technology can provide a common toolkit without determining what businesses ultimately do with it.

That distinction becomes more important as automation moves beyond creative.

“Human-centric decision-making is still in place,” Sharma said. “While the advertisers and the sellers have chosen to automate certain steps, they do take control over the decisions and how the different steps will help them achieve their business objective.”

The conversation becomes particularly interesting when it moves beyond advertising within India.

Historically, taking a campaign overseas demanded resources many small businesses simply didn't possess, from understanding new audiences to managing campaigns, listings and bids across unfamiliar markets.

“Advertising outside the home country traditionally requires resources that smaller businesses did not have in the past,” Sharma said. “But with the help of AI, we’re actually reducing the friction.”

Amazon's study found 56% of respondents saying cross-border campaigns that were previously inaccessible had become accessible, while 55% said AI was helping them reach or sell in newer countries.

Sharma pointed to natural pet-care company Doxy, which used AI-powered tools to optimise product listings and campaign bids alongside insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud while competing in the US.

“They saw a 67% uplift in their ROAS, they doubled their monthly sales and they were able to expand their business,” he said.

Again, that's a bundle of capabilities rather than an isolated test of what AI alone contributed. But it illustrates the larger proposition: the impact isn't merely that an SMB can make an advertisement faster. Businesses with fewer resources can increasingly attempt things that previously demanded a larger marketing operation.

Also read: What is Commerce Media? 

Towards the end of the conversation, Sharma was asked to pick one number from the research that had genuinely stood out to him.

He couldn't quite restrict himself to one.

The first was the 55% of SMBs who said they were using AI-based tools to help sell in newer countries. “That is really fascinating,” Sharma said.

But it was another number that perhaps better captures where Amazon believes this is heading: 88% of SMBs surveyed expect to use AI-based solutions for activities ranging from creating video and display ads to expanding their businesses. “This is a story which really excites me,” Sharma said.

There is an interesting consequence if that prediction proves correct. Once sophisticated creative, targeting and optimisation capabilities become commonplace, simply possessing the technology can no longer be much of a competitive advantage.

Instead, advantage shifts towards what a business wants to say, which problem it is trying to solve, which opportunity is worth pursuing and, ultimately, which decisions remain human.

The technology may be getting democratised. Knowing what to do with it isn't.