eBay is experimenting with generative AI for ad personalization

eBay has been experimenting with GenAI over the last six months to drive ad personalization at scale.

“A lot of where we’ve focused our AI and personalization activities in the past has been in predictive modeling, really understanding more of what you want, when you might want it, how you might want it,” said Adrian Fung, eBay’s global CMO. “But then there’s always limitations, right? We might even be able to get it to very granular data. But how do we actually produce content that is appealing to you based on what you want?”

Early experimentation with generative AI ad personalization for eBay has seen the company creating more banner ads, more personalized suggestions and subject lines for emails for its owned and earned channels as well as working with YouTube on different video edits for its paid ads. The challenge for eBay is not only producing content that will appeal to its customers on a personal level but also managing the roughly two billion items on its site with content written for those items by the item’s sellers and finding ways to make that more appealing. 

“We can create multiple versions of that banner and start optimizing and testing which ones might work the best,” said Fung, adding that the hope is to have hundreds of banner ads that it can test and optimize to someone personally. “Right now, we are going through and getting from less than 10 at a time into dozens at a time. The aspiration is to get even higher than that.” 

Full story at Digiday.