Leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence to Create Visual Content in Digital Advertising

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) for image synthesis has the potential to transform the digital advertising industry. However, a wide range of uncertainties persists regarding its integration into traditional advertising processes, including finding effective implementations, training methodologies, and achievable performance gains. Specifically, two core challenges limit its practical adoption: a search problem of finding high-performing visuals in a vast creative space, and an alignment problem of ensuring brand and campaign compatibility. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end framework that combines a generative AI with two predictive Bayesian neural networks to identify high-performance and brand-acceptable visuals. We develop a cost-effective Bayesian active learning approach solving simultaneously the dual objectives of performance and alignment. We test the framework in a live advertising campaign for an outdoor activities company. Our system generated a portfolio of visuals achieving a higher mean click-through rate and more consistency (lower variance) than creatives from both a professional human designer and a competing AI model optimizing purely for aesthetics. This research provides a validated methodology that bridges the gap between the theoretical potential of generative AI and its practical application, offering a cost-effective solution to the critical search and alignment problems in creative design.

History: Olivier Toubia served as the senior editor.

Funding: This research was entirely funded by the authors’ institution.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2024.1130.