It usually begins the same way, an ambitious campaign idea, a tight timeline, and a creative team already stretched thin. Somewhere between the first spark and the final asset, the process slows, budgets swell, and momentum fades. But what if that entire journey, from a blank page to a fully produced campaign, could unfold in a single afternoon?
That’s the promise Jenny Liu brings to the table. As Head of Creative Experience at Amazon Ads, Liu is at the forefront of a shift that is not just redefining creative production, but reimagining who gets to participate in it. In an interaction with Marketing Mind, she unpacked how Creative Agent, one of Amazon Ads’ newly launched agentic AI tools, is transforming advertising from a resource-heavy function into an accessible, intelligent, and collaborative process.
But Creative Agent is only one part of a larger vision. Alongside it, Amazon Ads has also introduced Ads Agent, an AI-powered assistant designed to simplify how campaigns are planned, executed, and optimised, signalling a broader move towards end-to-end, agentic advertising.
Breaking the bottleneck: Why creative needed reinvention
“Creative production,” Liu said, “has long been the bottleneck.”
“A critical constraint that advertisers today are facing is creative production,” she explained. “High-quality creative is essential for brands of any size to stand out, build connection, and create authenticity, but it’s extremely manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.”
The tension is stark. On one hand, brands today have access to an ever-expanding universe of ad formats, video, display, audio, and streaming touchpoints across platforms like Prime Video and connected TV. On the other, the ability to produce content at the speed and scale required to leverage these opportunities remains limited.
“You have rapidly expanding opportunities across the full funnel,” she said, “but brands are unable to participate if they don’t have big budgets or large teams.”
This imbalance, she added, has historically locked smaller businesses out of premium ad formats, while even large brands struggle to scale creative experimentation.
“That is the barrier we sought to break down,” Liu said. “How do we democratize access to high-quality creative so every brand, regardless of size, can show up with compelling and engaging ads?”
From tool to collaborator: The rise of Creative Agent
The answer, for Amazon Ads, is not another automation layer, but a rethinking of the creative process itself. Creative Agent, Liu explained, is designed not as a tool, but as a collaborator. “It’s built to function less like something you have to learn and more like a creative partner you collaborate with,” she said.
Powered by Amazon’s first-party insights, spanning trillions of shopping, browsing, and streaming signals, the system goes far beyond generating isolated assets. “It doesn’t just create images or text,” she said. “It concepts and executes the entire creative build for an ad campaign.”
What makes this particularly transformative is its conversational interface. Instead of navigating complex dashboards or mastering prompt engineering, users simply describe what they want. “You can just speak to it in natural language,” Liu said. “It translates your intent into technical execution for video, display, and more.”
From there, the process unfolds almost intuitively. The agent researches the product and audience, proposes campaign concepts, builds storyboards, and ultimately produces full-fledged ads complete with voiceovers, music, and animations. “The result,” she added, “is that an advertiser can go from a blank page to a high-fidelity asset within the span of an afternoon.”
Importantly, this creative intelligence is complemented by Ads Agent on the media side. While Creative Agent focuses on storytelling and asset creation, Ads Agent helps advertisers identify audience segments, optimise campaign pacing, and even generate analytical queries, bringing the same level of AI-driven efficiency to campaign management.
AI and the marketer: Not replacement, but elevation
As AI continues to reshape industries, the question of creative ownership looms large. Is the marketer being replaced, or redefined? Liu is unequivocal in her stance. “It’s about elevating what marketers do,” she said. Rather than eliminating human input, Creative Agent removes the friction that has traditionally slowed creative workflows. “Marketers are able to spend less time on routine, tedious production tasks, like resizing assets or creating multiple versions, and more time on creative vision and storytelling,” she explained.
This shift, she believes, restores the marketer’s role to its most strategic core. “Creative Agent handles the mechanics of production,” she added, “but marketers still own the strategy. That partnership between the user and the agent is what makes this tool powerful.”
Even concerns around AI-generated sameness, she noted, are often misplaced. “The real challenge isn’t scale, it’s control,” Liu said. “Everything is crafted in real time based on user inputs and Amazon-specific data. There are no generic templates.”
Because the system draws from product-level data, audience behavior, and brand signals, each output is inherently tailored. “Outputs are never generic,” she said. “They’re always personalized to the specific inputs being used.”
Taken together with Ads Agent, this signals a shift where marketers are no longer just creating or managing campaigns, but orchestrating them, with AI handling both execution and optimisation across the funnel.
What sets it apart and what comes next
In a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI creative tools, differentiation is critical. For Amazon Ads, that edge lies in integration and intent. “The first thing is that Creative Agent is built for Amazon,” Liu said. “It uses our first-party data, understands our ad placements, and fits directly into campaign workflows.”
Equally important is transparency. “We’ve designed it as a transparent system, not a black box,” she explained. “Users can shape and control what the agent does at every stage.”
The impact of this approach is already visible. Early adopters have reported dramatic improvements in both speed and performance, with campaigns being conceptualized, produced, and launched in a matter of days rather than weeks.
“One advertiser was able to produce and launch their first video ad within 48 hours,” Liu shared, pointing to significant lifts in engagement and return on ad spend.
Yet, for Liu and her team, this is only the beginning.
“We are constantly launching new features every few weeks,” she said. “Advertisers should keep checking back for upgrades to our models and capabilities.”
Looking ahead, the ambition is clear: to make storytelling easier, faster, and more effective for every brand. “We want to continue helping brands tell their story and get their message across,” Liu said, “and make that process easier through the capabilities in Creative Agent.”
In an industry that has long equated great creative with great resources, Creative Agent signals a different future, one where intelligence replaces friction, speed unlocks experimentation, and creativity becomes truly universal.
Or, as Liu puts it, “It’s not about replacing creativity, it’s about unlocking it for everyone.”
