# Catalog to Ads: Turn a Product Feed into Ad Creative | Xeli AI
> Connect a Shopify or Google Merchant Center feed and generate on-brand image and video ads for every SKU, sized for Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest and Snap.
- Canonical: https://xeli.ad/platform/catalog-to-ads
- Type: platform
- Updated: 2026-07-01
- Entities: Dynamic Product Ads, Shopify, Catalog, Product Feed, Brand Guidelines, Commerce Manager, Aspect Ratio
- Topic coverage: 68% · AI citation readiness: 80%
Most brands have far more products than creative. A 400-SKU catalog usually ships with maybe a dozen ad concepts, so the long tail of the catalog runs on a raw product shot and a price. That is the single largest untapped source of performance in most accounts.
Xeli reads your feed the way a designer would read a line sheet: title, category, price, margin, imagery, availability. Every SKU becomes a brief, every brief becomes a set of channel-ready creatives, and every creative is checked against your brand rules before it leaves the system.

## Why catalog creative stalls
- Design capacity is fixed while the catalog changes weekly, so new arrivals launch with placeholder creative or none at all.
- Resizing one concept across nine placements is a full day of work that produces zero new ideas.
- Feed fields drift. A price change or a discontinued colourway quietly makes live ads wrong.
- Nobody can tell which SKUs never got creative, because the gap lives in a spreadsheet nobody owns.

## How it works
1. **Connect the feed** — Point Xeli at a Shopify store, a Google Merchant Center feed, or a CSV. It maps fields, flags missing images and normalises categories.
2. **Learn the brand** — Brand DNA ingests fonts, palette, logo lockups, tone rules and legal disclaimers so generation starts inside your guardrails rather than being corrected afterwards.
3. **Brief every SKU** — The strategist agent writes an angle per product: hero benefit, objection to kill, offer to lead with, audience to talk to.
4. **Generate and resize** — Image and motion agents produce concepts, then export each one across the placements you actually buy, with text kept inside the safe zones.
5. **Score and ship** — Candidates are ranked before spend, low scorers are regenerated, and approved creative is pushed to the ad account with consistent naming.

## What you get
- **Feed-aware copy**: Headlines and primary text pull real attributes: shade names, fabric, capacity, price band. No generic 'Shop now' filler across 400 products.
- **Every placement in one pass**: 1:1, 4:5, 9:16 and 16:9 exports generated together, so a concept is never held up waiting for a resize.
- **Change detection**: When price, stock or imagery changes in the feed, affected creatives are flagged and can be regenerated in place.
- **Bulk plus surgical**: Run the whole catalog, a collection, or a single SKU. The pipeline is the same either way.

## Where it stops
- Generation quality is bounded by feed quality. Products with a single low-resolution image on a cluttered background produce weaker creative than products with clean packshots.
- Regulated categories such as supplements, alcohol and financial products still need human legal review before launch.
- Xeli does not invent product claims. If a benefit is not in your feed, your brand kit or your brief, it will not appear in the copy.

### What feed formats are supported?
Shopify product exports, Google Merchant Center XML and TSV feeds, and plain CSV with a title, image, price and category column. Anything else can be mapped manually.

### Does this replace dynamic product ads?
No, it feeds them. Dynamic product ads still handle the auction-side matching. Xeli improves the asset each DPA impression renders, which is the part the ad platform never fixes for you.

### How do you keep 400 ads from looking identical?
Concepts are generated per category and per angle, not per template. Two products in the same collection get different hooks, layouts and crops while sharing the same brand tokens.

### Can we edit before anything goes live?
Yes. Everything lands in a review queue with per-asset approve, regenerate and edit actions. Nothing publishes without a human pressing publish unless you turn on auto-publish.

## Related
- [Commerce Manager](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/commerce-manager): Where catalogs, feeds and shops are administered.
- [Product Feed](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/product-feed): The structured product file every automated ad product reads from.
- [Meta & Google Product Feed Validator](https://xeli.ad/free-tools/product-feed-validator): Validate your Meta / Google Merchant Center product feed against required fields and rules.
- [Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)](https://xeli.ad/glossary/dynamic-product-ads): Ads that automatically pull products from your feed and personalize to each user.
- [Product Feed](https://xeli.ad/glossary/product-feed): A structured file of your catalog used by ad platforms for dynamic ads and shopping.
- [vs AI ad generators](https://xeli.ad/compare/xeli-vs-ai-ad-generators): Prompt-in, image-out tools are fast and cheap. An agentic pipeline adds brand enforcement, catalog scale, scoring and channel handoff. Where the line sits.
- [1:1 ratio](https://xeli.ad/aspect-ratio/1-1): The universal square — 1080×1080 px — accepted by every marketplace and the safest fallback ratio.
- [Ad Creative Automation](https://xeli.ad/glossary/ad-creative-automation): Using templates and data to generate many ad variants quickly.
## Entity graph
- [Dynamic Product Ads](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/dynamic-product-ads): Ads assembled per-shopper from your catalog instead of hand-built per SKU.
- [Shopify](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/shopify): The store platform most ecommerce catalogs live on.
- [Catalog](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/catalog): Your SKU inventory as the ad platforms see it.
- [Product Feed](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/product-feed): The structured product file every automated ad product reads from.
- [Brand Guidelines](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/brand-guidelines): Machine-readable rules that keep generated creative on-brand.
- [Commerce Manager](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/commerce-manager): Where catalogs, feeds and shops are administered.
- [Aspect Ratio](https://xeli.ad/knowledge/aspect-ratio): The frame shape and safe zones each placement demands.
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Source: Xeli AI — the Agentic Creative OS for ecommerce. https://xeli.ad