How to use AI to generate ad creatives that are actually usable.
Seven steps from campaign brief to published banner set, plus the checks that keep AI output on brand, legible and correctly sized.
The seven steps
- 1
Start with a brief, not a prompt
A one-line prompt gives you a picture. A campaign brief gives you an ad. Write down the objective (awareness, traffic, conversion or retention), the product and its real benefit, the audience and market, the offer, and the exact call to action. Everything downstream — copy length, tone, layout, colour weight — is decided from these fields.
- 2
Lock your brand before you generate
Store colours, heading and body fonts, logo files, voice and tone notes, phrasing to avoid and any mandatory legal line once, as a brand kit. AI output drifts off-brand when brand rules live in the prompt each time; when they live in a reusable kit, every creative starts consistent.
- 3
Feed it real product and reference material
Generic AI imagery is the fastest way to look like everyone else. Upload actual product shots, packshots or approved campaign photography and reference them in the brief so the generated visual is built around your real SKU rather than an invented lookalike.
- 4
Generate copy per placement, not once
A 320x50 mobile banner, a 1080x1920 story and a push notification have very different character room. Ask for copy per placement so lines fit without truncation, and keep three or four headline and subhead alternatives to test rather than settling on the first one.
- 5
Adapt sizes instead of stretching one master
Rescaling a single master crops the product or pushes the logo off the canvas. Compose each size at its own ratio, with the key visual and text re-placed for that frame, so a square feed post and a wide skyscraper both read cleanly.
- 6
Check readability, safe zones and truncation
Before publishing, confirm the headline does not sit over the subject's face, that text never overlaps the logo, that nothing important is inside the trim margins, and that the file weight suits the channel — display images stay under 150 KB, rich push media is far smaller.
- 7
Publish, measure, and feed results back
Tag every asset with campaign, platform, size and variant so click-through can be attributed to a specific creative rather than a whole campaign. Retire what underperforms and re-brief around the patterns that win — that loop, not the first generation, is where the quality comes from.
Mistakes to avoid
- Treating an image model as a full ad: no hierarchy, no CTA, no brand.
- Letting AI invent product details, prices or claims you cannot support.
- Baking text into the image so it cannot be corrected or localised later.
- Building one size and stretching it into every placement.
- Skipping variants, so there is nothing to test against.
Questions
Run the loop on your next campaign
One brief becomes copy, visuals and every placement size you selected — with your brand kit applied and editable text layers on export.