Pencil Partners with BigCommerce & Meta to Bring AI-generated Ads to Ecommerce Merchants

Creative AI company Pencil has partnered with new-era ecommerce platform BigCommerce to provide their merchants with the latest innovation in online advertising for ecommerce, AI-generated ads. Rather than spending hours in video editing software or engaging expensive professional agencies, BigCommerce merchants can now generate original video ads to pitch their businesses in just a few clicks. Furthermore, AI-generated ads trained using data from advertisers’ Meta ad accounts via the Meta Marketing API have been shown to consistently double return on ad spend for brands and halve customer acquisition costs. BigCommerce merchants using Pencil’s AI-generated ads will be able to discover new audiences on Meta’s platforms and grow their businesses faster.

Matt Dornfeld, Director of Business Development at BigCommerce commented: “As part of our mission to help merchants sell more at every stage of growth, we are delighted to welcome Pencil into our partner ecosystem. We’ve seen that ecommerce marketers across the board know that great advertising creative is an important lever to growing their businesses. We’ve also seen that they consistently find it challenging to execute at scale. We are therefore excited to see Pencil offer BigCommerce merchants powerful AI tools to generate ad creative, thus unblocking a key driver of sales growth.”

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Pencil’s AI-generated ads work because they prioritize both creativity and data. When a merchant connects their BigCommerce store, Pencil analyzes their brand and product information and generates a wide variety of ad ideas to pitch their products. When a merchant then connects their Meta advertising data, Pencil compares the newly generated ideas to what’s worked well in the past. Those ideas similar to past winners are highlighted to the merchant. In this way Pencil helps merchants learn what works while continuously exploring fresh new creative ideas that might resonate with audiences.

Pencil analyzed over 100 ecommerce campaigns that used AI-generated ads and found the best ads delivered an average return on ad spend (ROAS) 2x that of other ads the brands were running. One brand’s AI-generated ad campaign delivered 7x higher ROAS.

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Will Hanschell, CEO and co-founder of Pencil commented: “BigCommerce is an incredibly innovative ecommerce platform used by major midmarket and enterprise brands around the world. This direct integration removes one of the biggest frictions they experience – turning the product images and videos in their stores into ads that deliver sales. We are very excited to partner with BigCommerce to further enable brands to build their businesses online.”

This partnership announcement comes hot on the heels of Pencil joining Meta’s Business Partners, a program that connects businesses to an ecosystem of advertising specialists. More than 200 million businesses worldwide use Meta’s apps to connect with customers and grow, and over 10 million of them run advertising campaigns each month.

Pencil leverages proprietary technology to generate video, derive insights and make predictions, as well as integrating the OpenAI API to generate ad copy. The OpenAI API provides access to GPT-3, one of the world’s most powerful language models. Its use requires strict criteria in AI safety and ethics.

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