Recommendation Systems for Ad Creation: A View from the Trenches

Creative design is one of the key components of generating engaging content on the web. E-commerce websites need engaging product descriptions, social networks require user posts to have different types of content such as videos, images and hashtags, and traditional media formats such as blogs require content creators to constantly innovate their writing style, and choice of content they publish to engage with their intended audience. Designing the right content, irrespective of the industry, is a time consuming task, often requires several iterations of content selection and modification. Advertising is one such industry where content is the key to capture user interest and generate revenue. Designing engaging and attention grabbing advertisements requires extensive domain knowledge and market trend awareness. This motivates companies to hire marketing specialists to design specific advertising content, most often tasked to create text, image or video advertisements. This process is tedious and iterative which limits the amount of content that can be produced manually. In this talk, we summarize our work focused on automating ad creative design by leveraging state of the art approaches in text mining, ranking, generation, multimodal (visual-linguistic) representations, multilingual text understanding, and recommendation. We discuss how such approaches can help to reduce the time spent on designing ads, and showcase their impact on real world advertising systems and metrics.