Case study
St John Ambulance
The goal: Streamline creative production, create brand consistency, and drive cost efficiencies
Imagery is a powerful storytelling element for St John Ambulance—a first aid charity putting the power of first aid into everybody's hands to continuously ensure that help is always close in an emergency. Based in England, St. John Ambulance is dedicated to saving lives and supporting healthy communities through first aid education, health equipment, and ambulance services. As a non-profit organization, St John needed to be nimble and wanted to make their creative production process more efficient to:
- Keep production costs down
- Increase creative agility
- Boost performance
- Protect their brand identity
St John Ambulance knew that AI could help them make the most of their marketing resources by reducing the manual work and costs needed to design a variety of high-quality assets. They also wanted to boost performance by ensuring their assets were as relevant to their audiences as possible.
St John Ambulance is committed to ethical AI, fully embracing the development and implementation of AI that aligns with their ethical AI policy. They recognized that generative AI could play a key role in maintaining design and messaging consistency across campaigns by keeping all assets within their brand guidelines while engaging with wider audiences.
The solution: Generative AI tools for digital advertising
St John Ambulance worked with their media agency Skayl and Microsoft Advertising to optimize AI-driven advertising tools.
Ads Studio gave St John Ambulance an extensive suite of creative tools for asset creation, enhancement, and management—including generative AI capabilities from Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform.
Applying AI-powered background generation
St John Ambulance was able to customize image assets for their advertising campaigns with Copilot. This allowed their products to stand out from the competition across their ad placements in Microsoft Advertising Network.
For example, they used Copilot to help show a popular automated external defibrillator (AED) in realistic background settings, including an office and a construction site, to help audiences envision the device in their own workplace.
Original product image:
Product images with backgrounds generated by Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform:
Creating customized ads that resonate with audiences
By generating photo-realistic backgrounds with Copilot that perfectly matched scenarios of their ideal customers, St John Ambulance was able to better connect with audiences who might be looking for a defibrillator for their workplace.
- Maintaining brand identity: They were able to tailor each visual to its story by choosing from AI-generated scenes, solid colors, or gradients, ensuring every ad aligned with brand guidelines and each campaign’s message and mood.
- Embracing AI-powered creative agility: With instant background removal and replacement, they could rapidly adapt visuals across campaigns, saving time while staying responsive to changing needs.
- Boosting performance with creative assets: Using Ads Studio, the team pinpointed and replaced their lowest-performing assets. They set up A/B tests to compare their top 10 performing assets against the new assets with Copilot-generated backgrounds. By generating variations of high-performing image assets, St John Ambulance maximized the impact of their creative assets while keeping content fresh and engaging. They didn't just create stunning visuals; they integrated them into their primary Performance Max campaign in their top-performing Supplies category.
Ultimately, Ads Studio and Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform helped St John Ambulance elevate their creative assets by effortlessly making custom backgrounds to fit their brand and campaign needs.
The results: St John unleashes creativity, overcomes resource constraints, and enhances engagement
Results at a glance:
- A 22% increase in click through rate (CTR)
- A 30% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Over 50% increase in clicks
- 25% increase in impressions
Generative AI is transforming how advertisers of all sizes stay competitive and discover new growth opportunities. For St John Ambulance, it was like having a personalized AI digital marketing assistant at their fingertips.
St John Ambulance used Copilot to quickly create, refine, and publish brand-aligned image assets—saving time while producing more audience-focused ads that stand out from the crowd.
“By leveraging Microsoft Advertising’s Copilot background generation tool, our team was able to overcome resource constraints, tackle creative fatigue, and scale campaigns while maintaining consistent branding. This breakthrough allowed us to engage a broader audience than ever before, helping ensure our lifesaving first aid equipment gets into the right hands—and ultimately, saves more lives."
— Jude Pearson, Head of Marketing, St John Ambulance
These powerful generative AI tools amplified the impact of their efforts by realizing their marketing, strategic, and operational goals, allowing them to compete effectively at any budget level and team size.
St John Ambulance was able to...
- Increase efficiencies: Rapidly iterate and experiment with different backgrounds, saving time and resources.
- Enhance engagement: Produce visually appealing ads that capture audience attention, resulting in improved click-through and conversion rates.
- Produce creatives efficiently: Automate the creation of high-quality ad visuals, reducing the need for manual design tasks.
- Maintain brand consistency: Use AI-driven templates and designs that adhere to brand guidelines and messaging across multiple campaigns.
How to achieve similar success
If you want to experience the same kind of success in your own organization, follow these best practices:
- Integrate brand guidelines with automation: Customize AI-generated backgrounds with your logo, color palettes, and messaging. Establish clearly documented brand guidelines so the tool can consistently produce on-brand visuals.
- Test and iterate continuously: Evaluate which backgrounds or design elements resonate most with your audience with A/B testing. Adjust and refine based on performance metrics.
- Reach wider audiences: Use AI-powered predictive targeting in Performance Max to reach more ideal customers, dynamically assemble relevant creative assets, and optimize your campaigns according to goals.
- Leverage built-in analytics: Track engagement and conversion rates with asset-level performance data in Ads Studio. Let these insights inform how you select and refine AI-generated background templates in future campaigns.
- Use prompt best practices: Include background scenery, items near the subject, relationship between subject and items, and overall atmosphere. Prompt example: "A white linen blanket with red gift boxes and snowflake lights behind it, giving it a warm Christmas atmosphere."
- Use the right context: For a specific season, market, or audience, show your subject in a background that is most relevant to them.
As St John Ambulance has demonstrated, AI background generation extends beyond retail, travel, and auto industries. Any industry can take advantage of this feature to create the perfect scene for every story.
Talk to a Microsoft Advertising expert today to learn more.
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