🧠 Gen-AI Creative Surge & P-Max Transparency

Weekly briefing for AI-first marketers. News, tactics, and tools that move the whole funnel.

Author

Rohit Maheswaran
May 14, 2025

Hey Funnel friends✌️,

Platforms are dropping generative upgrades faster than you can say “creative fatigue.” This week’s brief covers the biggest launches, why they matter, and exactly how to turn them into lift before your competitors finish their morning cold brew.

On the Menu🧾

  • Meta’s Advantage+ Visual Touch-Ups cut creative fatigue by 19%

  • TikTok’s Symphony Avatars scale global ads in 30+ languages

  • Rise of the AI Agents: How conversational AI is reshaping product discovery.

  • Google Performance Max finally shows channel & asset-level data

  • Shopify’s Sidekick spots revenue dips—then fixes them

  • Klaviyo’s Segment AI writes your next A/B list in plain English

Meta’s AI-Powered Creative Makeover 🎨

Meta pushed three new Advantage+ Creative tricks into Ads Manager background generation, image expansion, and single-image-to-video animation. Early pilots see – 19% CPA versus untreated variants.

🧐 Why it matters:

  • Fresh variants extend ad life cycles just when CPMs spike.

  • Built-in previews reveal tweaks before you flip the switch.

👇 Try this

  • Duplicate your top ROAS ad.

  • Toggle Visual Touch-Ups → choose “Image Animation.”

  • Run a 7-day split; keep versions beating blended incremental ROAS (a unified MMM suite like Lifesight surfaces that delta automatically).

TikTok Symphony Avatars: Multilingual in Minutes🌏

TikTok’s Symphony suite now offers Digital Avatars—stock or custom spokespeople that lip-sync scripts in 30+ languages. Brand betas logged +28 % watch-through in non-English.

Playbook 📖

  • Stock first: Test low-risk actors for market fit.

  • Custom next: Clone your founder for launch messages across regions.

  • AI Dubbing: Re-voice hero UGC in 10 languages without reshoots

Hook tip: “Teach-me” intros rank highest in TikTok’s 2025 trend report—pair with avatars for an instant local feel.

Conversational Commerce & Intelligent Agents 🤖

AI agents and conversational commerce are revolutionizing the way customers discover and interact with products. Imagine AI shopping assistants embedded into websites and apps, capable of understanding natural language queries, providing personalized recommendations, and even assisting with purchases. 

These AI agents act as digital brand ambassadors, available 24/7 to enhance the customer experience. For instance, retailers are already using AI to guide customers via interactive kiosks or smartphone apps in physical stores, seamlessly blending online and offline channels. This shift means product discovery becomes more intuitive and interactive, moving away from static search bars towards dynamic, helpful conversations.

Try This: Explore implementing an AI-powered chatbot or virtual assistant on your e-commerce site to handle initial customer inquiries and guide product discovery. Start small and iterate based on customer feedback.

P-Max Transparency Arrives 🔍

Google’s April update cracked open the black box with channel-level and asset insights, plus a Search Themes beta to steer queries.

15-Minute Cleanup⏱️

  • Pull the new Channel Performance tab; pause losers >2× CPA.

  • Tag evergreen queries as Search Themes—Google now flags whether they’re useful.

  • Exclude display placements draining spend.

Early adopters trimmed 12 % of media waste in one week. Audit incrementality with causal holdouts to make sure newfound clicks are net-new revenue.

Shopify Sidekick: Your Commerce Copilot 🛒

Sidekick’s May upgrade adds multi-step reasoning—it mines sales, inventory, and marketing data to suggest fixes when revenue dips. Merchants in the closed beta saved 6 hours/week on analytics triage and recovered 5 % of lost sales.

Quick win
Ask, “Why did conversion drop yesterday?” Sidekick investigates discount codes, load times, and traffic shifts—then drafts an email + promo code to patch the leak.

Klaviyo Segment AI: Natural-Language Lists 📋

Type “churn-risk VIPs who bought in Q1”, and Klaviyo’s Segment AI builds the audience in seconds. Users report +11 % email revenue per recipient thanks to hyper-specific flows.

Best practices 🛠️

  • Include consent conditions in prompts to dodge spam rules.

  • Use AI as a starting point, then refine conditions—Segment AI tags outputs so edits are easy.

Tools of the Week 🔧

What it does: Marketing design tool that enables teams to bulk-generate on-brand content such as emails, social media posts, and ads from spreadsheet data right inside Figma.
Fast payoff: Shaves hours off campaign creative.

What it does: A lightweight AI tool by Stability AI that turns text prompts into short audio clips, music or sound effects. Also available as an open-source model - Stable Audio Open Small.
Fast payoff: Saves 100s of hours finding the right music for your video.

What it does: Transforms text prompts into 4K video clips, with consistent characters with high visual fidelity and realistic motion.
Fast payoff: Replace stock B-roll & cut studio costs by 70 %.

Giveaway of the Week 🎁

AI Social Media Copywriter, an extension to our last week’s AI social media manager that analyzes your social creatives & videos to write a compelling, search optimized and hashtags-friendly social media caption for your posts. Stores it into a Google sheet, which later can be posted/scheduled on your desired channel via 'Postiz'.

To receive the workflow, simply refer one friend to the Full Funnel newsletter!

Parting Shot🎯

Gen-AI ads, avatars, and auto-segments mean more knobs to twist—but also more ROI to unlock. Unified measurement (hello Lifesight) keeps causality clear when the shiny stuff hits spend.

See y’all next week  👋

If this saved you a research rabbit hole, forward Full Funnel to a mate still exporting CSVs. See you next week!

— Full Funnel Team