A template is an approved master video whose changeable parts are marked as slots. Bind a product’s data into the slots and you get that product’s video — same craft, personalized content.
The AI Template Studio
You don’t have to design templates by hand:
- Pitch first. Give a brief (or just your brand URL) and the Studio pitches three concepts — short descriptions with draft storyboard sketches. Concepts cost cents, not full generations.
- Pick one. The chosen concept is produced as a full master video on the normal generation pipeline — brand grounding, style, quality gates, everything.
- Slots are extracted automatically. Wavemaker walks the approved master and proposes slots: the headline, the price, the product image, the end-card copy, spoken lines. You confirm the proposal on a review card.
Templates are versioned and immutable — editing one creates a new version, so a running campaign never changes under you. Seasonal variants (holiday wardrobe) can be authored ahead and scheduled.
Slot types
| Kind | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
text | headline, subtext | max-length + fit strategy per slot |
price | ”Now $39.99” | must match your feed data — fabricated prices are blocked |
image | the product shot | fed by the item’s prepared images |
spoken | a re-voiced VO line | per-product voiceover in the master’s designed voice |
endcard / logo / badge | closing card fields | logo slots never receive product photos — a row without its own mark keeps your brand logo |
clip | the hero scene | hero-tier products get a generated shot from their real photo |
Binding expressions
Slots bind data with a small, safe expression language:
{display_title}
Now {price|currency}
{title|truncate:40}
{?sale_price}Was {price}, now {sale_price|currency}!{/?}- Formatters:
currency,number,spoken,titlecase,upper,lower,truncate:N. - Spoken formatting turns “$29.99” into “twenty-nine ninety-nine” so voiceover reads like an ad, not a spreadsheet.
- Null-safe conditionals —
{?field}…{/?}drops the whole segment when the field is missing, so “Was , now $29.99” can never ship. Rendering a raw empty value is a hard block, not a warning. - Fit strategies per text slot — shrink (responsive type), truncate (ellipsis), or wrap — declared once, enforced on every product.
Hooks: structural variety for free
A template can carry 2–3 hook variants — alternate opening scenes authored once. Products are assigned a hook deterministically, so a 10,000-product catalog isn’t 10,000 structurally identical videos, and fatigue rotation has pre-staged alternates ready.
The robustness probe
Before a template can be approved, it’s test-rendered against your catalog’s worst cases: the longest and shortest titles, the highest and lowest prices, items missing optional fields, the worst-scoring image, and non-ASCII text. Every probe must pass. This catches the classic catalog-ad failures — overflowing text, ugly image crops, blank interpolations — once per template instead of hundreds of times per catalog.
Routing multiple looks
One campaign can route different products to different templates with ordered rules — category = jewelry → template A, price > 500 → premium template, default → template B — so a multi-category catalog isn’t forced through one look.
The price-in-video policy
Ad platforms overlay live prices from your feed at serve time; a price baked into the video can go stale between syncs. Price slots are therefore flagged volatile: enabling one on a rarely-synced campaign warns you at save time, and evergreen (price-free) templates are the default for most catalogs. Spoken prices are best for stable-price catalogs or fixed-end-date offers.