Busy marketers can get a lot of benefit from using AI to help create ads, especially during a fiercely competitive time like the holiday season. AI can help advertisers keep up with demands without compromising creativity. Brands taking advantage of generative AI can produce high volumes of quality ad content across a range of formats, while also personalizing messaging to specific audiences or product lines.
SMBs and mid-sized e-commerce brands, in particular, benefit tremendously from using AI. These advertisers often don’t have massive creative teams, yet still need to produce platform-specific ads at scale. AI helps close that gap, producing work like product carousels, native ad headlines, landing page copy, and more. During the holiday season, the stakes are higher, and the timelines are tighter, so AI can give marketers a head start when they need it most, delivering rapid ideation, first-draft copy, and campaign variations in minutes.
The essential skill to master when you’re using AI in creative ways for advertising is the prompt. Here’s what to know to use this tool for holiday season success.
First Things First: Aligning Brand With Your Audience
As with other marketing and advertising tools, it’s essential to understand your audience when using AI. As you’re planning for the holiday season, use all the available data to anticipate who you’re targeting and what their shopping and buying needs are. From there, you can tailor and align your brand messaging with your audience (or various audience segments) to create the ideal set of content and messages that people will engage with.
AI excels at structure, speed, and ideation. You bring the strategy, empathy, and edge that makes it convert.
How to Make Prompts Work for You
Maintaining consistency across all your ads and formats during the holiday season starts with the prompt. Treat your prompt like a creative brief: include tone, audience, product focus, and desired action.
AI may not always deliver a polished, final ad, but it can get you about 70% of the way there — a huge time savings, especially for lean teams. AI doesn’t think like a human, but it does learn from us. When you prompt a generative AI tool, you’re not giving it instructions in the way you would a colleague: Instead, you’re feeding it patterns to predict likely responses based on its training.
So, think of prompting like programming a conversation. The AI tool scans your input for structure, intent, keywords, and tone. It draws on billions of data points — past writing styles, ad language, customer behavior — to generate the most statistically relevant output it can. But, it doesn’t necessarily know what your brand sounds like or what will convert best for your specific audience unless you tell it.
With that in mind, here’s what you’ll likely get back from AI once you’ve entered a solid prompt:
- A strong first draft.
- A range of viable headline or call to action (CTA) options.
- Consistent tone (if prompted clearly).
- A solid base for further human editing.
These outputs are a significant head start for marketing and advertising teams creating ads at scale, especially during peak moments like the holiday season. The trick is knowing how to shape the final 30% with your brand insight, emotional nuance, and performance data.
The 5 Core Principles of Effective AI Prompt Writing
Whatever the season, follow these principles when prompting to get the best outcomes.
1. Be Specific
The more context you provide in your prompt, the better that AI can tailor the content. Don’t use, “Write an ad:” Instead, try something like, “Create a native ad headline for a holiday gift guide featuring budget-friendly beauty products.”
2. Define the Audience or Persona
Clarifying who the end user is can help the AI strike the right emotional chord. Instead of, “Write something for shoppers,” use “Target busy moms shopping last-minute for stocking stuffers under $25.”
3. Set the Format and Length
These constraints help guide the AI and save you time on editing later. Don’t write, “Give me ideas.” Try something like, “Generate three ad headlines, each under 60 characters.”
4. Specify Tone and Style
Include adjectives that match your campaigns and goals, such as bold, premium, casual, witty, nostalgic, or informative. Don’t tell the AI to “Write it nicely” — instead, say something like, “Use a playful and upbeat tone with a holiday spirit.”
5. Mention the Goal
Telling the AI tool up front what success looks like will improve the clarity of the CTA. Don’t prompt, “Write a landing page.” Try, “Write a landing page that encourages sign-ups for a limited-time holiday offer.”
How to Prompt for Different Holiday Ad Formats
Getting specific on formats when you’re prompting AI will bring you better up-front ideas and possibilities. Remember that you can reuse key input elements like product descriptions, benefits, or audience personas across formats. You can even prompt AI to do something like, “adapt this native ad headline into a display ad CTA,” to maintain alignment while adjusting to format constraints.
Holiday ads tend to follow emotional and thematic patterns (urgency, gifting, nostalgia, savings), which generative AI models are particularly good at replicating if prompted well. If you’re writing for multiple formats (display, native, landing pages), keep the brand voice constant by specifying tone adjectives (e.g., “premium,” “playful,” “no-nonsense”), and refer back to shared value propositions across outputs.
Here’s what else to know about writing AI prompts for different ad formats.
Display Ads
What matters: Display ads need to communicate value instantly. You have limited space, so every word — and every pixel — counts. A strong image, bold headline, and focused CTA are essential, especially during the noisy holiday season.
Prompting tip: Keep your prompt tightly structured. Include details like product type, value prop, tone, urgency, and any visual elements you want highlighted (e.g., product shot, holiday theme).
Prompt example: “Write a high-impact display ad headline (max 30 characters) and supporting text for a holiday flash sale on premium skincare gift sets. Emphasize luxury, limited-time urgency, and gift appeal. Include a three-word CTA. Suggest a visual direction for the image.”
Example output:
- Headline: “Glow for the Holidays”
- Subtext: “Limited-Time Gift Sets – 40% Off”
- CTA: “Shop the Sale”
- Visual direction: A soft-focus image of elegantly wrapped skincare products on a marble vanity with warm golden lighting, subtle snowflakes overlay, and a red ribbon tied around the hero product.
Refinement tip: If the tone feels generic, revise the prompt to include adjectives like “premium,” “soothing,” or “gift-ready.”
Native Ads
What matters: Curiosity, storytelling, and contextual alignment with the surrounding content.
Prompting tip: Frame your prompt like you’re briefing a copywriter. Add the target persona, emotional hook, and platform context (e.g., Taboola, mobile feed).
Prompt example: “Create three native ad headlines (max 60 characters each) for a holiday campaign targeting busy parents shopping for educational toys. Use a warm and helpful tone.”
Example output:
- “Savvy Moms Are Buying These Toys”
- “5 Top-Rated Gifts for Curious Little Minds”
- “Smart Toys Parents Are Rushing to Buy This Holiday”
Refinement tip: Prompt the AI to focus on a specific feature (e.g. STEM, sensory play, age range) to align better with campaign targeting.
Landing Page Content
What matters: Clear structure, persuasive copy, and aligned tone throughout the page.
Prompting tip: Specify the structure you want — headline, subheadline, product description, CTA — and the goal of the page (e.g., conversion, education, email sign-up).
Prompt example: “Write landing page copy for a holiday deal on noise-canceling headphones. Structure it with a headline, subheadline, short product description, and CTA. Use a confident, tech-savvy tone.”
Refinement tip: Ask the AI to rewrite for different personas (e.g., gift giver vs. self-purchaser) to match different funnel stages.
5 Best Practices for Prompt Refinement
As discussed, a good AI prompt will get you about 70% of the way there. But, refining your prompt with human insight can take you the rest of the way.
The most common mistake in writing ad prompts for AI is being too vague. Prompts like, “write an ad for our product” give AI very little to work with and typically result in generic, uninspired copy. Try these tips to refine your holiday ad prompts:
1. Start Broad, Then Narrow Down
Begin with a general prompt to test how the AI interprets your request. Then revise by adding clarity around tone, audience, and format.
2. Change One Variable at a Time
When refining, avoid rewriting the entire prompt each time. Isolate one aspect, such as tone, CTA, persona, etc., so you can learn what changes actually improve performance.
3. Add Context Without Overloading
AI performs better with context, but too much information in one prompt can confuse it. Use clear, plain language and only include what’s essential.
4. Use Examples as Guardrails
Guide the AI with samples of what “good” looks like. You can include one or two reference headlines or tone descriptors to nudge the model in the right direction.
5. Review and Re-Prompt With Feedback
AI outputs are not final drafts. Treat them like a first round of copy: If something feels off, prompt again, this time with explicit feedback.
Key Takeaways
Using generative AI in holiday ad campaigns can save marketers a ton of time and lead to better outcomes, helping a small team scale faster and far beyond what they could do alone. The key to success is writing great prompts: Be specific, include goals, ensure consistency, and include tone when you’re writing AI prompts. Then, refine and re-prompt to get the best results.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How can I use AI to write high-converting holiday ad copy for a Dyson vacuum cleaner?
Combining the capabilities of AI with insight into current market trends can help you create the right ad copy for the product you’re marketing. Use the prompt advice above to input what you know about the audience, campaign goals, and tone, and ask for several versions of headlines and copy. You can then perform A/B testing.
You can also explore current headline trends in Realize’s real-time Trends dashboard, and enter several options to see what’s likely to get the highest CTR. For a Dyson vacuum cleaner ad in particular, include holiday themes and language, and highlight Dyson’s unique selling points and giftworthiness.
Discover What Your Audience is Interested In
How can I use AI to create multiple holiday ad variations for A/B testing?
With the right prompts, AI can generate multiple holiday ad variations that you can then A/B test ahead of the busy holiday season. Prompt AI to create several variations that are distinct from one another, making sure to specify which element should be emphasized in each variation. You can also ask for copy optimization if you have some options created already. Realize’s Trends dashboard can help you see which ad variations have the best chance of high click-through rate (CTR), as well as show data-driven insights into what’s trending in your particular market or industry.
How can I adapt evergreen ads for the holiday season?
The busy holiday season requires reuse and adaptation to succeed without starting from scratch. Evergreen ads can often be adapted with just a few tweaks, with the benefit of those ads already being on-brand visually and on-message in terms of copy and language. For an even more efficient approach, Realize’s Social Importer tool helps users recycle successful existing assets into new display or native ads to scale much faster.
