Dentsu Digital Drives Next-Generation Marketing Using Amazon Nova Foundation Models

To help its clients grow, Dentsu Digital seeks out digital innovations to transform user experiences while enhancing workflow efficiencies. But in an ad landscape where consumers are inundated with content, the company recognized a need for new strategies to help brands cut through the noise. “Our clients require us to use cutting-edge technology for excellent performance to help them reach customers effectively,” says Satoru Yamamoto, chief AI officer of Dentsu Digital.

Determined to maximize results from marketing campaigns while minimizing time-consuming manual tasks, Dentsu Digital created an integrated creative-production engine, called Mugen AI—the Japanese word Mugen means “infinity.” The engine connects brands with customers through generative AI–powered solutions that span content generation, ad assets, and personalized assistants for customer service.

Dentsu Digital saw the opportunity to harness consumer insights across various marketing channels. “This hub is a new generation of marketing,” says Yamamoto. “Before large language models, it was almost impossible to automate analyses—especially in a conversational manner.” The company aims to expand human abilities and power interactive marketing experiences. “Combining the creativity of humans with technology is very important for us,” says Yamamoto.

Dentsu Digital knows that creating high-quality assets sets clients apart from the competition and delights their customers. But designing, editing, and optimizing ads to meet market and user needs can be a painstaking process. It can take months from planning to distribution, including valuable time that designers and marketers spend deciding a highly effective creative approach. Using Amazon Nova Foundation Models, though, the entire process takes 5 days.

“Amazon Nova Foundation Models provide powerful support for creative production,” says Yamamoto. “This technology is completely changing marketing.” After gaining early access to the models, Dentsu Digital worked closely alongside AWS to carve out a competitive advantage. The company uses the models through Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models—facilitating the development of accurate, fast, and cost-efficient AI applications.

Dentsu Digital is now using Amazon Nova Foundation Models for core tasks, including keyword identification for ad taglines and banners, creative generation, performance predictions, and improvement suggestions. For example, to verify that creative outputs resonate with and reach consumers, Mugen AI Ads (a part of the Mugen AI series) offers performance predictions and insights.

The company empowers its solutions with several Amazon Nova Foundation Models, such as Amazon Nova Pro, Amazon Nova Canvas, and Amazon Nova Reel. By using the ad distribution data available through Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova Pro can learn the relationship between distribution results and creative elements. It can then provide suggestions on which approach will create a great impact.

When a user creates a prompt, Amazon Nova Pro interprets it through metadata extraction, multi-image analysis, and complex reasoning capabilities. For a banner ad, the model might suggest changing the background color or adding a specific type of image to help maximize the win rate. The model then passes the task to either Amazon Nova Canvas to generate images or Amazon Nova Reel to generate videos. The result helps users feel confident in pursuing a creative strategy.

Using Amazon Nova Canvas, Dentsu Digital’s teams can create and edit professional-grade banner ads by entering text instructions and image prompts. This significantly simplifies tasks such as adjusting color schemes, backgrounds, and layouts and even replacing people within images to localize creative assets across global markets.

Dentsu Digital is also accelerating the creation of high-quality video ads with natural language prompts through Amazon Nova Reel. Users can even shape the visual style and camera motions—from the pacing to rotations, zooming, and more. The company can use Amazon Nova Foundation Models to rapidly explore and implement highly effective and creative strategies—empowering individuals with creative control while automating labor-intensive tasks. (See figure 1)

Within Dentsu Digital’s Mugen AI marketing hub and Mugen AI chat solutions, consumer data informs how ads are designed. The solutions generate insights that are based on user feedback to suggest visual approaches that might appeal to specific personas. The company reports that for one client, the solution increased impressions by 255 percent and clicks by 367 percent. Dentsu Digital can now create these impactful ad assets rapidly and reliably across its vast client base while maintaining its exceptional quality.

Dentsu Digital can confidently and securely use AI: Amazon Nova Foundation Models come with controls to support safe and responsible AI use, including content moderation. Combined with the built-in advanced security features in Amazon Bedrock, these benefits are critical for mitigating potential risks, maintaining client trust, and keeping customer data secure and safe. Amazon Bedrock also routes each task to the right model, which helps optimize outputs and costs.

Using Amazon Nova Foundation Models, Dentsu Digital has gained undisputable benefits. The company’s banner-ad conversion rate increased by 861 percent for one client, and the cost per acquisition of the same campaign fell by 73 percent. “Amazon Nova Foundation Models are extremely cost-efficient, and the accuracy and performance are really unique compared with other models,” says Yamamoto.

Additionally, by incorporating Amazon Nova Reel into its creative process, Dentsu Digital can rapidly produce mock-ups and high-quality video content, transforming the production workflow. “The stability and quality of video generation on the model are really high—this was very surprising,” says Yamamoto.

Beyond balancing performance, efficiency, and safety, Dentsu Digital can create more engaging consumer interactions—and it’s not stopping there. “We want to make it even more seamless and simple to provide new experiences to consumers,” says Yamamoto. Continuing to enhance its offering by using generative AI, the company is excited to explore how it can transform its customer support by using Amazon Nova Sonic, a state-of-the-art speech-to-speech model for conversational AI. Dentsu Digital sees huge potential in harnessing complex, unstructured data—from customer voice and chat data to SMS insights.

Going forward, Dentsu Digital plans to connect all its AI solutions through multi-agent AI systems. The company sees its collaboration alongside AWS as critical in realizing the business’s mission to inspire people, create value for clients, and improve how the marketing world works. “The infrastructure is the basis of our business,” says Yamamoto. “AWS is our first choice when we develop something for our clients.”