Ads

Ads are the creative output of Ad Studio. This page walks the workflow end to end: start a chat, choose a starting point, generate concepts, refine them, add sizes and motion, then launch to your ad platforms.

What you'll learn

• The workflow every ad follows
• How to start a chat
• Which starting point to choose
• How to refine what you get
• How to add sizes, motion, and multiple ads from one video
• How to find and group your ads
• How to launch and hand off

How ads work in Ad Studio

Every ad follows the same six steps:

1. Start or open a chat for the campaign you're working on.
2. Choose a starting point (optional) — a brief, a product, an existing ad, a competitor ad, or a trend. You can skip this and just describe what you want.
3. Prompt the agent to describe what you want.
4. Review the generated concepts and pick the ones worth keeping.
5. Refine them in the chat or the visual editor.
6. Launch to an ad platform, or open the ad in Figma.

The rest of this page expands one step at a time. For prompt patterns and copy-paste templates, see the Prompting guide.

Start a chat

Each chat is where you create ads for a campaign or creative initiative. Select New chat in the sidebar, describe what you want, and the agent generates concepts in that chat. The chat keeps its conversation history and the ads generated in it together.

To give the agent reference material for a single request, attach files directly in the chat. For material that should inform every ad you make — brand guidelines, logos, fonts, and reusable assets — add it as durable context in Context Hub and Assets instead of re-attaching it each time.

Your ads aren't locked inside one chat. Folders and the sidebar collections let you find and group any ad regardless of which chat made it.

Create ads

Every ad starts in a chat. Set your brand and style, then describe what you want or pick a starting point to work from.

Select a brand and style

Set two controls in the chat before you generate, and change them on any round:

• Brand — Which brand profile the agent draws from: its business context, guidelines, logos, and fonts. You never have to describe your brand in a prompt, and your default brand is selected to start.
• Style — The visual direction. Leave it on Auto to let the agent decide, pick a saved style to lock a defined look, or choose No style. Styles are filtered to the selected brand, so switching brands resets the style to Auto.

Your uploaded assets, synced ads, and product catalog are also available for the agent to draw on when you reference them.

Choose a starting point

Describe what you want in the text input, and Ad Studio combines your prompt with your brand, guidelines, assets, and selected style to generate concepts.

For a more guided start, select one of the five creation modes. Use this table to pick one:

Upload a brief

Use this when you already have a campaign brief or creative brief. It's the most open-ended starting point and the most common way to create ads.

1. Go to Ad Studio → Ads and select New chat.
2. Select Upload a brief.
3. Upload the document, or describe the campaign in the text input.
4. Add any extra instructions, such as how many ads you want or which part of the brief matters most.
5. Review the generated ads.

Ad Studio pulls the audience, message, and selling points from the brief and combines them with your brand context and uploaded assets.

Choose a product

Use this when you want ads built around a specific product. Ad Studio pulls product images, descriptions, and pricing from your product catalog.

1. Go to Ad Studio → Ads and select New chat.
2. Select Choose a product.
3. Search or browse your catalog and select one or more products.
4. Review the generated ads.

Upload an ad and create variants

Use this when you have an ad worth testing against — usually your top performer. Ad Studio holds the core idea and varies the parts you name.

1. Go to Ad Studio → Ads and select New chat.
2. Select Upload ad and create variants.
3. Upload an ad, or select one from your library.
4. Name what should vary: headline, imagery, format, CTA, or a combination.
5. Review the generated variants.

Riff on a competitor

Upload a competitor ad to generate new concepts inspired by its layout, messaging, or visual direction. Ad Studio applies your own brand context instead of copying the original creative.

1. Go to Ad Studio → Ads and select New chat.
2. Select Riff on a competitor.
3. Upload or describe the competitor ad.
4. Review the generated ads.

You can also browse competitor ads in Insights → Competitors and start from there.

Ride a new trend

Use this when a cultural moment, trending topic, or timely event is happening and speed matters.

1. Go to Ad Studio → Ads and select New chat.
2. Select Ride a new trend.
3. Describe the trend or moment.
4. Review the generated ads.

Start from an idea

Ad Studio generates a weekly feed of ad ideas drawn from your performance data, competitors, and cultural signals. Open Ideas in the sidebar to browse the feed, or select Generate ideas now to run it on demand. New ideas are checked against the last 30 days, so the same concept doesn't come back twice.

Each idea has a name, a short rationale, the evidence behind it, and source tags that show where it came from, such as Competitors or Customer voice. Every idea ships with editable mockups, so you see the concept instead of only reading it.

When an idea is worth pursuing, select Use idea. Ad Studio opens a new chat, writes a brief from the idea, and generates the ads for you to refine. Select Discard to remove one that isn't relevant.

Review and refine

Ad Studio never launches an ad without your approval. Review what the agent generates, then refine it until it meets your standards.

Prompt the agent

You land in the editing workspace once the first batch is generated. The creative preview and variant thumbnails are on the left; the brief, concept description, and chat are on the right.

Describe the change you want in the chat. For example:

• "Make the headline more direct and lighten the palette."
• "Swap the product image for the blue variant."
• "Resize this for Instagram Stories."

The agent explains what it changed, so you can judge each round in context. Name what must stay the same on every round, or regenerated ads can drift from the version you approved. See Iterate on results in the chat for the patterns that work.

Edit with the visual editor

Switch to the visual editor when you want to adjust the creative directly instead of prompting the agent. Every ad is a layered composition — headline, CTA, imagery, background — so you can edit each element on its own without regenerating the ad.

In the editor you can:

• Reposition or resize any element on the canvas, or set its exact position and opacity.
• Edit copy directly in a text layer.
• Reorder layers.
• Animate a layer with entrance and exit effects — fade, slide, scale, blur, and more — each with controls such as start time, duration, and easing. Scrub the timeline to preview frame by frame.

On a video ad, the editor is also where you control exactly where each clip starts and ends. Right-click a video layer and select Split (or press ⌘B) to cut at the playhead. Drag either end of a clip to trim it. You can also move, resize, and crop video layers directly.

Edits in the editor and the chat stay in sync, so you can move between them at any time.

Favorite, queue, and export ads

The toolbar above an open ad is where you act on it once it looks right. Favorite an ad to collect it under My favorites, queue it for launch, or download every generated size at once. An overflow menu holds the rest: edit the ad, file it in a folder, open its chat or edit history, and delete it. To hand off to your design team, open the ad in Figma.

Create more formats

Generate additional sizes

Select + in the Size variants panel to add aspect ratios. The defaults are 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 1:1, 4:5, 3:4, 2:3, and 9:16, and your list also includes any custom channels and sizes configured for your workspace. Select Create all sizes to generate every format at once.

Size variants appear beside the primary creative so you can review them together.

Animate a static ad

Select one or more static ads and prompt the agent to animate them. Your typography, logo, and layout stay as designed, so the agent only solves for movement.

For example: "Animate these ads, make them cinematic," or "Turn this into a motion ad with moving text and a product reveal."

Create motion ads from scratch

Prompt the agent for motion video directly from a brief, the same way you would for statics. For example: "Create 5 new motion video ads based on these concepts."

Motion ads support 1:1, 9:16, 16:9, 4:3, 3:4, and 21:9. Ask the agent for other sizes in the chat.

Detailed prompting matters more for video than for statics. See Create motion ads for templates.

Turn a long video into multiple ads

Attach a long video, such as a brand film, product demo, or customer story, and prompt the agent to cut it into standalone short ads. Ask for cuts on natural scene breaks and an end card on each clip, so every ad carries one message instead of reading as an excerpt.

The agent creates a separate editable ad for each clip, so you review, resize, and launch them individually. See Turn a long video into multiple ads for the prompt.

Organize your ads

Your ads live across every chat you create, so Ad Studio gives you a few ways to find and group them from the sidebar:

• All ads — Every ad in the workspace, across all chats.
• My ads — Ads from the chats you created.
• My favorites — Ads you've favorited with the heart icon in the toolbar, gathered in one place.
• Folders — Group related ads no matter which chat produced them. A folder can hold ads from multiple chats, and its own Launch tab lets you launch all of a folder's ads together.

Launch ads

Queue ads for launch

Select Queue for launch in the toolbar to add an ad to the queue. Then open Launch in the sidebar, select the ads you want, and select Launch ads. The queue spans every chat, so you can launch ads from different chats together.

Launch tracks two states: Queued shows ads waiting to go out with their platform, status, and date, and Launched shows the ones already sent.

Select a campaign

1. Select the destination ad platform.
2. Select the ad account, page, campaign, and ad set.
3. Select Continue.

Use Refresh from Meta, or the equivalent for your platform, to pull the latest campaign structure.

Configure and launch

1. Fill in the platform fields for each ad: ad name, headlines, primary texts, descriptions, calls to action, destination URL, and URL parameters. Required fields and character limits vary by platform.
2. Select the aspect ratios you want to launch.
3. Select Launch 1 ad, or the equivalent for your selection.

Open ads in Figma

Bring a finished ad into Figma when your design team wants to polish the layout in their own tools. The ad arrives as a fully editable, layered frame — text, imagery, and background as separate layers — so they refine it in Figma instead of rebuilding it by hand. It's available on static ads.

The import runs from the Hightouch plugin inside Figma, not from Hightouch: selecting Open in Figma in the toolbar shows the setup steps rather than exporting a file. Figma export isn't available in every workspace — if selecting the icon shows a prompt instead of the setup steps, it isn't enabled for yours.

Set up the plugin

You only need to do this once:

1. Install the Hightouch plugin from the Figma Community.
2. Create an API key in Hightouch. This requires a workspace Admin.
3. In the plugin, select Set API key and paste your key.

Import an ad

In the plugin, search your Hightouch workspace and import any ad by the name it has in Hightouch. Each one lands as a layered frame you can edit directly.

Avoid common setup mistakes

• Prompting before setup is complete. Brand profiles, guidelines, reference assets, and ad platform connections all change what the agent can produce. Configure them first.
• Skipping the output shape. Say how many concepts and variants you want, or the agent decides for you.
• Comparing unlike formats. When reviewing performance, compare static to static and video to video.

What's next

• Prompting guide: What to put in a prompt, and templates for every format
• Styles: Define a reusable look for generated ads
• Insights: Find fatiguing creatives and competitor activity
• Custom agents: Save prompts for recurring work
• Reports: Schedule analyses and deliver them to Slack or email