Need web banner ads? Here’s how to quickly create them using AI

Small budget customers are an untapped resource for many media organizations. This is normally because those small companies don’t have the marketing resources that the big companies do. They may want to advertise, but maybe they may not have a full-time marketing person or the budget to hire an agency. Whether you’re a sales rep and this sounds just like one your customers or you’re a marketer or a designer with a full plate who’s looking to save some time, this article is for you.

Overview of AdCreative.ai

There are a lot of design tools out there that you can use to create banner ads. The tool I’m reviewing in this article is AdCreative.ai. To quickly summarize, AdCreative.ai is an AI-powered ad creative platform that allows you to generate high-performing ad assets, including both ad copy and visuals (images and video). Fundamentally, it’s an LLM that has been has been trained on large amounts of ad performance data. It uses that data to produce ad designs that perform well in both ad hosting platforms like Google Ad Manager and on social media platforms.

AdCreative.ai is a paid product, but it comes with a seven-day free trial which gives you 10 credits to start. You can earn some additional credits by watching educational videos on the platform.

It All Starts With Your Brand Identity

When you first log in to the platform, you’re prompted to start by creating your brand via a four-step process. The platform performs the first three steps automatically if you input your website URL. Once you do this, it will scan the surface-level elements of your website to pick up your brand colors and logo. On a deeper level, it reviews the content of your website to gain a better understanding of your business, which it will later use to generate ad copy. You also have the option to do this manually or to make adjustments.

The advanced setup allows you to change your font and connect your social media accounts. Per the brand setup video available in the platform, this allows the AI to understand your ad history and see what has or hasn’t worked in the past. Once you’ve done that, you click Create Brand, and the AI does the work.

Your AI-Generated Asset Collection

After your brand settings have been set, you’re brought to a landing page where the platform offers you a number of different content types to choose from. Many of these are consumer in nature, but B2B companies can still certainly benefit. You can create any of the following with a standard account:

• Stock images – Allows you to create royalty-free images for use in the platform.
• Social posts – Generate social posts that are AI optimized for engagement.
• UGC style videos – Create a video and select an avatar to showcase your product or service.
• Fashion photoshoots – Upload a product image (such as clothing) and the platform creates a realistic video featuring the product.
• Ad creatives – You can generate ads in a number of different sizes by uploading an image.

Product Photo ads, Stock videos, Fashion video shoots, and Storytelling ads are also available for Pro accounts. I did not explore these.

Stock Image Creator

In order to create my ad creative, I needed an image, so I went to the stock image creator.

You can create your image using the text-to-image, image-to-image, or Get Inspiration options. I chose text-to-image. It gives you a number of sizes to choose from. I chose the landscape option and was prompted to input my text. I used the text from the AI enablement section of my website. The output is below:

Creating Social Media or Display Ads

Once I had the stock image created. I went to the Ad Creatives section to create a banner ad. It presents you with the following size options.

For social media ads:

• Post Size – 1080×1080
• Landscape Size – 1200×628
• Story Size – 1080×1920
• Portrait Size – 1080×1350
• Pin – 1000×1500

For display ads:

• Medium Banner – 300×250
• Leaderboard – 728×90
• Wide Skyscraper – 160×600
• Half Page – 300×600
• Large Leaderboard – 970×90

For this exercise I went with the 300×250 banner because it’s the most widely used display ad size due to it’s high visibility and has a higher click-through rate than other display units.

Once you select an ad size, you are queued to add a headline, punchline, a call-to-action and a call-to-action icon. You can input this yourself or have the AI create the content for you, which is what I did. When I clicked Generate Texts, it scanned my website again, and gave me the option to Save and Generate.

The AI then generated multiple options to choose from for each field. I selected from the options and moved to the next step, which was to upload my image. Once selected, the AI created more than 150 options.

Minor Adjustments Needed

After reviewing the AI generated images, I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the way my logo was rendering or with the awkwardness created by the additional copy that was auto-generated on the image I created earlier. That said, I went to Nano Banana to remove the copy from the image. It didn’t look like there was an option to do this in the platform. I also replaced the logo pulled from my website with another version with black lettering and repeated the steps above, and it created 150 more options using the new images I uploaded. Here are a few of those:

Creative Studio Editor

Needless to say, out of 150 options, it’s pretty easy to find two or three that would work. I went back to the top of the page, changed the size a 728×90 leaderboard ad, and had it create 150 more versions for that ad size. For this version, the image placement was a little awkward so I tested the Creative Studio Editor. Here is the original.

I made some minor image alterations, I shortened the arrow and tip, repositioned the image and voila. Done. here are the final two ad options that I thought worked the best.

Conclusions

AdCreative.ai is extremely easy to use and utilizes AI during every step of the creative process to save a designer or marketer time, while still being flexible enough that if you have a clear direction of what you want your message to be, you can incorporate that into any ads you would create. While the first drafts weren’t perfect due to the quality of the input images, those images were very easy to edit and the Creative Ad Studio allows for additional easy editing for AI generated ads that are close to production-ready. If you ever have a need to create ad units, I highly recommend trying the platform for yourself. I plan to come back and do a deeper dive on some of the other features I didn’t try today. AdCreative.ai is clearly a very powerful branding and ad creation tool.