AI Ad Creative Testing Works; Everything Else Is Noise
CPG marketers are struggling to find genuine value within the current AI marketing landscape. Many initial strategies feel like hype, but a few specific applications – like AI-powered ad creative testing and large-scale customer feedback analysis – are proving to be impactful for driving results and uncovering valuable insights.
SOURCES (60)
“we basically used AI to scan 2 million products that had sales data. Out of this we extracted patterns that led to higher sales. What we found: there are things you can do in your product images, number of images, addition of video, that move…”
“https://preview.redd.it/8akylrix8fnh1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c6752dca46546d4986c5694ad05616cd70bf619 Ok so that Domino's AI ad thread last week got me thinking, because a lot of people didn't seem mad that AI was used. They were mad that the food was fake. Which... honestly, fair. So I ended up building this whole fake pizza campaign in Framia just to see where I'd personally draw the line. Delivery rider, apartment, couple, pizza close-ups, brand card, ed”
“The engagement-shaped output point is the real one. I noticed the same drift with a tool I was using for newsletter drafts, not tweets, but the mechanism was identical. It started fine, then a few weeks in every draft had a hook, a rule of three, and a call to reflect at the end, regardless of what the actual content was. The fix that stuck for me was smaller than I expected. I stopped asking it to write in my voice and started asking it to imitate a specific piece I had already written, picked”
this is a great insight, I was not considering blog posts > social. makes more sense as I can track keywords intent in a better way then I can do using IG…
“ran my idea through a couple of those ai validation tools last month. both came back positive. nice looking reports, market size, competitor breakdown, the whole thing. felt great reading them. then i sat there and realised neither of them had talked to a single person. it was just a confident summary of stuff i could have googled. i built anyway and found out the hard way that one of the "competitors" it listed had already shut down. so genuinely curious how other people handle this p”
“sounds like a neat tool, interface clarity is everything with medical stuff, too many apps bury the important bits under layers of menus”
“claude's great for research but id put most of that effort into blog posts answering specific questions instead of Instagram. early stores get way more buyers from someone searching 'best ultralight rod for small stream trout' than from social posts. your own photos are the real asset here since the Canvas stuff looked fake anyway. use Claude to write the guide, drop your actual pics in it, and let that sit on your site as evergreen content. social can wait”
AI is genuinely good for this now, but the trap is letting it generate a big generic site. What worked for me as a non-technical owner: write the content yourself first (what…
“I use AI to build my websites too. The distinction is whether it looks like a generic Claude-built website with no thought put into it, or something intentional and unique. Someone who uses AI properly will signify that by being meticulous in their work, in both their product and their website. My point is that vibe-coded websites have a certain look to them that is easily noticeable. I don't trust vibe-coded projects. But I would trust someone using AI properly”
“the screenshot trick fades for the same reason the tool drifts in the first place: it's a one-time instruction fighting a reward that re-points at engagement every single generation, so after a few days it just gets outvoted. what actually held for us was making the tool answer to a per-post approve gate instead of a prompt, so the drift can't compound past one draft before a human catches it and it never gets to slide. written with ai”
“I am starting a fishing gear online store and I am using Claude. My focus is to sell ultralight material aiming small/medium fishes. AI worked well to run a product research, product description, create content ideas and build some posts for my Instagram. Didn't have much success trying to build images with Canvas mcp, everything was looking super artificial. Decided to follow with my own pictures and stuff I have. I am in very early stages and wondering how others people are doing AI to run”
“I'd start by comparing what the AI can confidently say about your product, not just how much brand presence you have. Product descriptions, specific use cases, comparisons, reviews, FAQs, and other third-party mentions seem to matter a lot because AI is trying to build an answer, not just rank websites.”
“Firstly, super cool. The outfits look seamlessly applied and look extremely natural. Now for the qualms, can't see a reason for individual shoppers to pay so retailers are definitely a good target. I'd probably lean closer to the second hand retailers at that. Excited to follow your progress. Would love to see how it works with full body shots!”
Business/company/product wise is readily available.I'm curious where HN gets their news for (new) AI technology.It feels like every day every concept is already old, so would be nice to have 1 or…
“There are definitely tools now that go beyond just spitting out generic copy or pictures. Didoo AI actually analyze your past creatives, ad performance, and brand tone to generate tailored ads and audience tests automatically. It’s like having an AI media buyer that keeps optimizing for you without you needing to re-prompt every time. This can be a huge time saver compared to manually tweaking or hiring extra help, especially for Shopify stores trying to scale. While the tech is rapidly improvin”
“If you make a good AI native product it still receives good attention. Just take a look at HiggsField. It's a literal slop factory. But since they made it easy to access frontier image/video models, they got a lot of attention.”
“Research agents are the part I’d trust most in that loop. The useful shift is moving from “who has the same product?” to “who is solving the same problem from a different angle?” A good research agent can scan reviews, forums, competitors, changelogs, job posts, papers, and patents, then cluster the signals so you can decide what’s actually worth testing. For R&D-heavy ideas, I’ve used Patsnap Eureka as that research layer because patent filings often show where companies are heading before”
“If you're trying to make a whole ad from one prompt, honestly just stop lol. I kept getting pretty shots that had no idea how they were supposed to fit together in the same ad. So for this one I split it into four basic scenes instead: beach lifestyle → coconut/ingredient shot → product close-up → model with product. and yeah, that actually worked way better. once I had those four scenes laid out in framia, the ai ad maker part felt way less like finding some magic prompt and way more like j”
I used to help brands on tik tok sell female clothing as a guy. You don't have to follow me but I use AI to create an avatar, have the avatar wear…
“I’m not unbiased, but I think there’s way too much obsession in vendor-space with accelerating the creative work (copywriting, visual design, illustration) and way too little interest in providing better visibility into processes, simpler mechanisms for handoff, and better tools to capture and maintain important decisions along the production process. It’s stuff that helps actual humans, and coincidentally it’s also what kost agents need as a foundational task control layer. But it’s not demo-se”
“I’m looking for a few people who regularly do market research, competitor research, product research, or business research and would be willing to test a research workflow. The main thing I want to learn is where people still feel friction when using AI for research. For example: finding reliable sources checking whether claims are actually supported comparing information from different sources organizing findings into something useful I’m much more interested in honest criticism than “looks goo”
“How many of you are regularly trying to use AI for creatives etc ie for ads, videos, photos, marketing material etc? I’m really curious how much folks living and doing ecommerce daily actually leverage ai. I know some apparel brands where every single image is ai. Others who if you even suggest it go on a tirade about how ai is evil. Such a mix bag submitted by /u/Animexstudio [link] [comments]”
“Yeah, I think your “outcomes, not marketing” approach is probably the right way to look at it, especially when there’s already a top-down mandate to “implement AI.” If it were me, I’d try to turn that mandate into a few measurable problems rather than making a checklist of AI features. Something like “reduce the time attorneys spend finding prior work product by X%” is something you can actually measure and test. “We need AI-powered search” can easily turn into an expensive feature that sounds g”
“The AI-discovery point matches what I'm seeing too, and I think the mechanism is worth naming: models cite pages that are structurally easy to extract from, not just well-written. Clean semantic HTML, one clear claim per section, real headings, and content that's server-rendered so it exists before JS runs. A lot of Next.js sites accidentally hide their best content behind client-side fetches and then wonder why they're not cited. If you haven't already: check View Source, not De”
“Hi all! I was bored with those things where you answer two questions and they randomly tell you which is best for you, and furthermore, they are often limited to one brand. SO, I did this (with AI) Feel free to share …”
“you mentioned that most of your users came from ai recommendations. really interesting and which AI platforms are sending you traffic? Do you see gpt, perplexity or other ai referrals in your analytics, and roughly how many of the first 100 users came from them?”
“I mean...it sounds like you're an apple in a barrel of harness coded AI projects? You even admitted it. But regardless...marketing can only get an app so far. If people hate it they leave it and it eventually dies. If your project is truly that great and better, sure it might die in obscurity, but if your customers actually love the app, they would start spreading the word, slowly but surely.”
“Love this question. I think the best line is automating production, not taste. Things like resizing, first drafts, visual variants, repurposing, and reporting can move much faster with AI. But the parts I would keep human are the concept, point of view, customer insight, and final creative direction. That is usually what separates useful content from output that just fills a calendar.”
“I have a little demo ready, do you have a category you'd like to test first?”
“the ai-generated product images are the real risk here. if you're showing furniture that doesn't exist yet, customers will expect what they see. ai still struggles with consistent details (grain patterns, joinery, proportions) and you'll get support headaches when the real piece doesn't match. better to photograph a small starter collection or use 3d renders from actual CAD models if you're already designing custom pieces.”
“the website part is totally doable, thats the easy part. the harder question is whether retail furniture buyers will trust AI-rendered product images enough to place an order on something that doesnt physically exist yet. have you validated that with any potential customers?”
“I think the bigger issue is going to be people becoming skeptical of the presentation , not necessarily online products as a whole. When every product has perfect AI lifestyle shots, perfect testimonials and a dramatic video, people eventually start wondering what's actually real. For a legit product, I'd lean harder into the stuff that's harder to fake - unedited product footage, detailed specs, real customer questions, clear returns and showing the product being used in normal situ”
“Love the idea of tracking decisions and their reasoning. It’s like creating a mini playbook for what works and what doesn't. Plus, it totally helps avoid repeating the same mistakes in future projects. It’s wild how much we forget between rounds if it’s not documented!”
“I think the value with your AI will be, create a browser extension for it. When people watch the video, automatically skip the part that is ads? Similar like adsblock, but since now the ads is in the video, automatically forward the video until ads end.”
“Generative AI is already prominent on the visible layers of many stores in the form of images, product descriptions, automations, etc. But the more interesting shift is the use of agentic AI for the customer experience. Over at Elastic Path we've been thinking about how AI agents can be integrated like that. Of course you'd need to have a structured and machine-readable store and the agent can query inventory and pricing in real-time via API calls. Check out can be programmatic as well.”
“Curious to find out what niche do y’all use AI ugc influencers for. I heard there are good returns on clothing brands but food and skincare doesnt work. submitted by /u/TurtleOP [link] [comments]”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”
“Maybe I'm overestimating the market, but one good effect of LLM chatbots (which doesn't outweigh all the cartoonishly bad effects of them) is that it's induced the sloprepreneurs to out themselves in a way that is impossible to disguise.”
“That makes sense. I have been using a similar approach, but for AI generated visuals I found Ryla ai useful when I need the same character to stay consistent across different posts. Having the character already established saves a lot of time compared with recreating everything from scratch.”
“Seen a lot of content on that on twitter. Am interested in knowing what feedback there’s for this”
“Hey, I noticed a lot of people here have really cool ideas but often let the AI handle copywriting for landing pages or your website as well. It makes sense if you are a solo builder and marketing is not something you can pursue, before the product actually becomes viable. But I think everyone can benefit from good, clear writing that shows their product in the best light, this is particularly true to stand out when almost everyone defaults to AI. Share a landing page/app website you created and”
“That’s the core part of what I’m building. Anyone can just aggregate the data and stick it in an email. My tool is about connecting the dots and and trying to interpret what it all means. For example, if hiring is up, that could mean different things. But increased hiring with employee complaints, social comments from employees looking for other jobs and complaints from customers about poor response times? That gives you a much a better idea of what is happening.”
“If they’re mainly monitoring where your brand appears, I don’t really see the point. An agency seems worth it only if they’re actually taking action to improve your visibility, not just giving you reports”
“When launching a product like this there are two worlds. 1) The world as your brain sees it 2) The world as your actual customers see. And sites like G2 are a glimpse into the world of your customers.”
“short clips are probably the right cheap test, i've been leaning on posts because they cost nothing but a wall of text never made anyone sign up. for an AI tool the 5 second demo showing the actual workflow might do more than anything i write. worth trying before i draft another long post.”
“That narrow developer audience is actually a good test. For a portfolio-style site, Marka should not invent a customer or business model. It should extract what is verifiable, flag the audience as unresolved, and ask one focused question before generating commercial content. Generic SaaS copy would be a failure case, not an acceptable fallback.”
“I blame influencer culture and social media. Nobody actually consumes any of that content they just ride the hype wave blindly. AI is just another manifestation of this, let it generate your hype for you and surely other people will find it fascinating, right? It's an obvious example of brain rot.”
“ok so i was pretty skeptical of ai generated "ugc style" ads for a long time bc the early stuff all looked the same but ran a test a few months back against actual creator ugc and the gap closed way more than i expected. it's a legit option for filling the testing gap now instead of waiting weeks for creator content to come back. what's everyone else's read on ai ugc right now? feels like the sentiment shifted a lot in the last few months. Also, what tools are people using?”
“this is the kind of feedback you actually want tbh if you share it, make sure you say what stage you’re at (mvp vs almost launch) so they don’t nitpick stuff you already plan to fix”
“Personally I think AI is the great equalizer for small businesses to compete with large brands. No need to pay for professional photo shoots, get high-end video adverts for Meta ads, running your google ads, expensive website customisation, SEO optimisations, etc. I think what you mean is low quality AI that people are falling for and getting burned. That has nothing to do with how you use AI in your business to get ahead. If you’re using AI ethically, not misrepresenting your products and so on”
“I’ve been working on an early project called Qwelto, and I’m trying to solve a problem I’ve personally had with AI design tools. I can usually recognize a visual style I like, but describing it accurately in a prompt is much harder. For example, I might know I want something modern and minimal, but when I try to explain exactly what I mean, I end up going through lots of prompts and regenerations. So I’m experimenting with a different interaction. Instead of starting with a prompt, Qwelto lets u”
“Solo founder in Antwerp. Marketing Commander is in Google Play closed testing and I'm looking for people who'll actually open it, not just park it on a home screen. What it does: you describe a campaign once, and it prepares the pieces across channels with the strategy still attached, instead of you starting cold for every channel. Content Studio for the assets, Social Planner to take one source into platform-native drafts. What it deliberately does NOT do: publish anything by itself. Th”
“This is actually a pretty crowded space already but the spintax engine with real delivery speed adjustment sounds like the real differentiator here. most tools just blast and pray what kind of volume have you tested this at? like how many DMs per day before meta starts flagging”