1小时前
· Decrypt
How to Make Product Ads With AI for TikTok and YouTube—For (Almost) Free
TikTok Shop, the ecommerce platform that allows users to buy and sell things directly on TikTok, moved <a href="https://technode.global/2026/02/11/tiktoks-southeast-asia-doubles-gmv-year-on-year-to-45-6b-in-2025/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow external noopener" class="sc-adb616fe-0 bJsyml">>$64.3 billion</a> in merchandise in 2025, nearly doubling from the year before. The U.S. alone accounted for $15.1 billion of that, and most of it was driven by short, cheap, face-to-camera videos of someone holding a product and telling you why you need it.
Those videos used to require a person, a phone, decent lighting, and several takes.
These days, though, all you need is a product photo and three AI tools—most of which are available for free. Here's an entire workflow, step by step, no technical background required, so you can start your marketing empire.
<strong>Step 1: Get a clean product image</strong>
Before anything else, you must know what you want to sell. For this, you have a few options: Either choose something you are passionate about, or simply go ahead and find the hottest items on the TikTok shop and download whatever you think will click.
Download a photo of the product you want to sell—a piece of clothing, an accessory, a gadget, whatever. If you're selling a specific product or are affiliated to a company then use your own supplier photos. Then crop the image so only the product is visible, with no model, no background clutter, and no watermarks.
In our examples, we picked this green top for TikTok (vertical format) and this Ledger crypto wallet for YouTube (horizontal format).
That crop matters more than it might seem. The AI will treat this image as the source of truth for the product, so the cleaner the reference, the more faithful the result.
<strong>Step 2: Put a model in your product</strong>
This step is important if you are promoting clothing and accessories since they involve a more human approach.
Open ChatGPT and upload the cropped image. You want <a href="https://decrypt.co/366408/openai-gpt-image-2-vs-google-nano-banana-2-review" target="_blank" class="sc-adb616fe-0 bJsyml" rel="nofollow">GPT Image 2</a> for this step—in <i>Decrypt</i>'s own head-to-head testing, it beat Google's Nano Banana 2 on photorealism and product fidelity, which is exactly what an AI-generated ad needs to not look fake.
Then imagine the scenery you want for the ad, and turn it into a quick prompt.
You can use something like this: <i>"Generate a vertical 9:16 photo of a Latina woman in her late 20s wearing this exact garment, posing for a casual smartphone photo in a bright apartment. Preserve every characteristic of the product exactly as shown in the reference image: shape, proportions, color, fabric texture, stitching, and fit. Do not redesign, recolor, or alter the product in any way."</i>
Swap the demographic details—ethnicity, age, body type—to match whoever your target audience actually is. Change the setting the same way: a gym for