How AI enables the creation of high-quality ads

In the world of mobile app advertising, your ability to convert users is as strong as the ads you produce. And creating high-quality ads requires winning creatives. But producing quality creatives at scale can be a huge challenge. This is where AI comes into play.

Let’s break down how AI has improved Unity’s ad design studio’s efficiency at every stage of the creative process, resulting in impactful, high-quality ads.

Developing quality creative concepts with ease

Even from the ideation stage, AI has been a game changer for our creative studio. By instructing AI to “create creative concepts based on X,” we can quickly generate a list of ideas far wider and more unique than we could have developed ourselves. This not only helps to widen our imagination, but also provides more options for concept testing.

In fact, if we want to make some tweaks on a concept, we can simply ask AI to make a few changes and get new concepts in seconds. With endless creative possibilities, we can make sure every concept fits our vision.

Building creatives from concepts in no time

Once we determine our creative concept, AI helps us bring it to life. Let’s say the winner of one of our concept tests is an image of a basketball. Then a designer decides the best way to showcase it. Animated creatives are most engaging, but usually require hours of work - but not with AI.

Instead of searching through endless stock videos, we can use AI to bring any creative to life. Within minutes, AI will generate new frames, turning a static image of a basketball into a basketball GIF/video jumping through the waves. Next, all we’d need to do is request any tweaks, and we’ve made our very own high-quality creative in record time.

It’s important to note: though AI is a very practical tool, it cannot magically solve every design problem. As a creative studio, we still need to focus on the big picture: curating each creative and ensuring each asset aligns with our business goals. But knowing which situations we can use AI in helps maximize efficiency, streamline production, and produce top creatives.

Quickly updating creative elements

AI doesn’t just help us create new concepts and creatives - we can use it to optimize the creatives we already have. Here’s a common example: Halloween is approaching and a studio would like to add some spooky elements to their creatives.

Modifying design elements is a manageable project for any designer, but developing and adding the spooky graphics might take a few days. With AI, you can see a new creative in minutes and make as many iterations as you need to develop the most eye-catching Halloween creative possible. And, of course, you can repeat this for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or any other festive occasion.

Not to mention, the valuable time your team can save with AI gives your designer time to work on other essential projects, like developing new creatives, or working on more complex, time-consuming projects. It’s a win-win situation - your studio gets a greater creative output and more options to test, which in turn allows you to find the highest quality creative options.

Elevating ads beyond visuals elements

Finally, AI allows us to expand beyond the abilities of traditional creative studios. Imagine a studio manager wants to add musical elements or a voiceover to a creative asset. Assuming there’s no sound designer on the team, the studio would typically need to search a stock music website to find something similar to their desired result. The same goes for voice overs - to get quality voice overs for their creatives, studios often need to pay external actors. This means the studio’s creatives are limited by options or budget, and in many cases both.

With AI, creative studios can quickly solve both of these problems. All we need to do is describe the music/voiceover we’d like to pair with a creative, and we’ll quickly get a high-quality result. Even if it takes a few iterations to achieve our vision, we can quickly and easily boost our creatives’ quality at no extra cost.

Ultimately, time is money, so maximizing what you can do with your time will optimize your creative production. And with better ads comes boosted conversions - increasing your UA budget and fueling a continual cycle of UA growth.

Unity’s Ad Design Studio is a one-stop-shop for developing top-tier creatives, with complementary services for Unity clients.