Objective

Under Armour used its Back-to-School campaign to elevate Dynamic Product Ads beyond standard catalog imagery, shifting to more eye-catching, on-brand creative. The goal was twofold: scale premium templates without the manual burden of background removal, and directly link those creative upgrades to measurable performance gains.

Solution

Under Armour partnered with Smartly and its agency partner OMD to remove creative production bottlenecks at the source, introducing AI-powered Gen on Feed at scale with Smartly. 

Turning a catalog constraint into a creative advantage

Under Armour’s e-commerce feed included more than 20,000 products, all photographed against a standard default background. While this setup was efficient, it limited the brand’s ability to build visually elevated templates, especially across Meta’s templated DPA and DABA formats, where creative differentiation is essential to standing out.

With Smartly’s Generation on Feed capability, OMD uploaded the product feed directly into Smartly and automatically removed backgrounds from 1,500+ images for the Back-to-School assortment. What previously required 130+ hours of manual design work was completed in minutes, just days before campaign launch.

Creative adaptability at speed

Once backgrounds were removed, Under Armour unlocked immediate creative flexibility:

• Products could be placed into seasonal, lifestyle-inspired templates
• Designers could experiment with new layouts, colors, and messaging hierarchies
• Creative could be refreshed quickly without altering the original catalog
• New templates could be launched and iterated within Always-On campaigns

This allowed the team to move from a single static design to multiple premium creative expressions, without slowing down media execution.

Performance-led creative experimentation

To ensure creative investment translated into business impact, Under Armour ran an in-platform split test, comparing:

• BAU Smartly templates using default-background product imagery
  vs.
• New AI-enhanced Smartly templates built with background-removed products and Back-to-School design
  
  

The uplift in creative quality and visual diversity gave Meta’s algorithms richer options to test, match, and optimize, driving stronger delivery to high-intent audiences.

From last-minute fix to scalable creative model

What began as an urgent, pre-launch request quickly evolved into a repeatable creative workflow:

• AI handled repetitive production work
• Designers stayed firmly in control over creative direction
• Media teams gained faster iteration cycles
• Stakeholders could more clearly connect creative quality to performance outcomes
  
  

This approach showed that creative scale and personalization, when executed efficiently, are powerful performance levers, even without increasing media spend.

Smartly didn’t just accelerate production. It reshaped how Under Armour approaches creative for performance marketing. It demonstrated that investing in scalable creative infrastructure enables brands to move faster, test smarter, and drive incremental growth, without compromising brand standards.