| Audience | How you'll use this article |
|---|---|
| Marketers | Learn what Ad Studio makes, how the workflow runs, and how to get from a brief to a launched ad. |
| Data teams | Learn how Ad Studio connects to your ad platforms, and what workspace setup your marketers depend on. |
Ad Studio generates ad creatives from your brand guidelines, product catalog, and ad platform performance data. You describe what you need, review what comes back, refine it with the agent or a visual editor, then launch to your connected ad platforms.
What you'll learn
- What you can make in Ad Studio
- The workflow every ad follows
- Where each part of Ad Studio lives
- What to set up, by role
- When to use Ad Studio instead of another Hightouch product
- How Ad Studio connects to the rest of the platform
What you can make in Ad Studio
Marketers and creative teams use Ad Studio to produce paid media creatives: static image ads, motion ads, and short-form video for their connected ad platforms.
You start from something you already have: a campaign brief, a product in your catalog, an ad that's performing, a competitor ad, or a trend. The agent generates concepts from it using your brand profile, guidelines, logos, fonts, and asset library. You review every concept before anything leaves Hightouch.
Ad Studio also reads performance data from your connected ad platforms, so you can find creatives that are fatiguing, see what competitors are running, and generate replacements from what you find.
Example: Refresh a fatiguing ad
Your Meta prospecting campaign has run the same creative for three weeks and CTR is falling. In Insights, you find the fatiguing ad and select Create ad. The agent generates fresh variants from your guidelines and asset library. You pick the strongest, adjust the headline in the visual editor, and launch it to the same campaign without leaving Ad Studio.
Example: Respond to a competitor ad
A competitor launches a campaign promoting a feature you also offer. You upload a screenshot, select Riff on a competitor, and the agent generates your own version using your brand context, product messaging, and assets. You review the copy, iterate, and launch.
How ads get made
Every ad follows the same six steps:
- Start or open a chat for the campaign you're working on.
- 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.
- Prompt the agent to describe what you want.
- Review the generated concepts and pick the ones worth keeping.
- Refine them in the chat or the visual editor.
- Launch to an ad platform, or export to Figma.
See Ads for the walkthrough, and the Prompting guide for what to put in step 3.
Open Ad Studio
- Go to app.hightouch.com.
- In the left sidebar, select Ad Studio.
Where things live
| Go here | To |
|---|---|
| Ads | Create ads, refine them, and launch them to an ad platform. |
| Prompting guide | Learn what to put in a prompt, and copy templates for each format. |
| Insights | Check performance, find fatiguing creatives, review competitor ads, and read signals. |
| Assets | Upload the images, components, and video the agent builds ads from. |
| Context Hub | Configure brand profiles, guidelines, logos, fonts, styles, your product catalog, and channels. |
Get started
You can create your first ad as soon as one ad platform is connected. Everything else improves what the agent produces, and you can add it over time.
Set up the workspace
Platform admins usually do this once. Connecting an ad platform is the only hard requirement.
| Do this | To get |
|---|---|
| Connect your ad platforms | Required. Somewhere to launch ads to, and performance data to read from. |
| Create a brand profile | Ads that reflect your business, products, audience, and goals. |
| Upload brand guidelines | Colors, typography, and logo usage the agent follows. |
| Upload logo files and fonts | Your real logos and typefaces in generated ads, rather than approximations. |
| Set guardrails | Control over which image modifications the agent is allowed to make. |
Ad Studio doesn't need a CDP deployment or a warehouse connection. Brand profiles, guidelines, and channel connections all live in Context Hub.
Start creating ads
Marketers and creative teams seed the inputs the agent draws from, then start generating. You can refine these as you learn what works.
| Do this | To get |
|---|---|
| Upload assets | Your own images, logos, and video used directly in ads. |
| Configure a product catalog | Accurate product images, descriptions, and pricing in product ads. |
| Add context cards | Metric definitions, campaign formats, and other organizational knowledge. |
Then go to Ad Studio → Ads and select Create ad. Most teams start with Upload a brief: describe a campaign and review what the agent generates. From there, try Insights to find opportunities, and the other creation modes as your workflow develops.
Choose between Ad Studio and other products
Use Ad Studio when you need paid media creatives for a connected ad platform: display ads, social ads, and similar formats.
| To do this | Use |
|---|---|
| Create ads from a brief, product, or existing ad | Ad Studio |
| Generate variants of a winning ad for testing | Ad Studio — Upload an ad and create variants |
| Find fatiguing creatives and replace them | Ad Studio — Insights |
| Create lifecycle content for email, push, or SMS | Lifecycle Studio, which exports to an ESP rather than an ad platform |
| Decide which message, channel, and timing each customer gets | AI Decisioning |
| Build audiences from warehouse data and sync them to ad platforms | Customer Studio |
| Measure campaign performance across channels | Intelligence |
| Ask natural-language questions about your customers or campaigns | Agents — a separate chat from Ad Studio's ad generation |
Ad Studio and Lifecycle Studio cover different channels
Both products generate marketing content with the agent, and both read from Context Hub. They differ in where the output goes: Lifecycle Studio exports email, push, and SMS content to an ESP, and Ad Studio launches display and social creatives to ad platforms.
Ad Studio and the Agents chat do different jobs
Hightouch has more than one agent, so it helps to know which one you're talking to:
- Ad Studio's agent makes ads. You prompt it to generate and refine creative, and it works only inside Ad Studio.
- The Agents chat analyzes your data. In Agents → Chats, a separate surface, you ask natural-language questions about your customers, audiences, and campaign performance.
A single workflow often spans both: ask the Agents chat what's working, or to sanity-check a line of copy, then return to Ad Studio and prompt its agent to generate the ads. Neither does the other's job — Ad Studio's agent doesn't analyze your customer data, and the Agents chat doesn't generate ads.
Hightouch has other agents too, such as the audience-builder Agent in Customer Studio. See Which agent should I use? to tell them apart.
How Ad Studio fits into Hightouch
Ad Studio sits between your brand context and your ad platforms. The agent you work with here is Ad Studio's own, dedicated to creating ads — separate from the Agents chat you use to analyze data and campaigns.
What Ad Studio uses
- Brand profiles and guidelines — Business context, visual rules, logos, and fonts from Context Hub → Brands.
- Context cards and guardrails — Metric definitions, organizational knowledge, and image modification rules from Context Hub → Context.
- Ad platform performance data — Campaign metrics from connected channels in Context Hub → Connections, shown in Insights.
- Product catalog — Product names, images, descriptions, and pricing from your product data source.
- Assets — Images, logos, and video from Assets that the agent uses directly in ads.
What Ad Studio sends
- Ad creatives to your ad platforms — Finished ads launch to the platforms you connect in Context Hub → Connections.
- Editable files to Figma — Creatives you hand to your design team for final layout work.
Permissions
Access runs through custom roles. In the custom role builder, open the Agents tab and set the Access Agents and Configure Agents grants. A user needs at least Access Agents to open Ad Studio.
See Roles for the full grant list, and Agents data governance for how column and row-level access apply to the data the agent can read.
You approve every ad before it goes live. Ad Studio never launches an ad on its own.