I spent more than ten years working in digital at a niche fragrance retailer in Barcelona. During that time, I learned to look at campaign photography from a perspective that doesn’t always receive much attention: what happens to the images once they reach the retailer.
By then, the brand has already made most of the creative decisions. The photographs have been selected, retouched and approved. The retailer receives the materials and has to make them work across product pages, promotional banners, email campaigns and other digital placements.
That’s where the limitations of an otherwise excellent campaign sometimes become apparent.
Picture a fragrance campaign with a beautifully composed hero image. The bottle sits in the centre of the frame, surrounded by carefully arranged materials. It works perfectly on the brand’s website. But the retailer needs a wide promotional banner with space for a headline and a price. Cropping the original photograph either cuts off part of the composition or leaves the product in the wrong position.
The retailer could use a standard packshot instead. It’s functional, although much of the creative work invested in the campaign disappears from that placement.
The retailer has a different production brief
Fragrance houses invest in a distinctive visual identity, and that identity matters enormously in niche perfumery. When you’re selling products from several houses through the same e-commerce environment, the imagery is part of what allows each one to retain its character.
But retailers operate within their own constraints. A brand might provide beautiful editorial photography without the horizontal composition needed for an email header, or a new bottle size might become available without accompanying lifestyle imagery.
There are also practical requests that appear after the original production has finished. A retailer prepares a seasonal promotion. The merchandising team needs a different composition for a specific category page. A local market needs room for translated copy. Paid Media requires a vertical version that cannot be achieved by cropping the existing photographs.
Reopening a conventional production for these requests involves a budget discussion, scheduling and another round of approvals. Some assets simply aren’t important enough individually to justify that expense.
The usual workaround is to adapt whatever is already available. Sometimes the result is perfectly acceptable. Sometimes a campaign ends up looking noticeably weaker in the retail environment than it does on the brand’s own channels.
Having worked on the retail side, I pay particular attention to that gap when looking at a brand’s photography today.
Using AI photography after the main campaign
My interest in AI-assisted photography comes partly from recognizing these familiar limitations.
If a brand already has an approved campaign, much of the creative work required for additional images has been done. The product is documented, the visual direction has been established and the original photography provides a reference for further executions.
Take the earlier example of the fragrance banner. With the necessary product references and an approved visual direction, AI-assisted production offers a way to create a wider composition specifically for that placement. The environment can be reconstructed or extended, with the bottle positioned to accommodate the retailer’s text and layout requirements.
The same approach applies when a campaign needs another product variation or a different aspect ratio that requires more than cropping.
I’ve explored this through speculative work for niche fragrance brands. Earlier this year, I sent two visual directions for two fragrances to a perfume house. The marketing contact replied with questions about image and video production, how I worked and what I charged. I subsequently shared motion examples, although the exchange didn’t lead to a commissioned project.
That wasn’t a test of campaign-extension economics, and I have no production savings to report from it. What I would want to establish in an actual assignment is more specific: which images are missing, where they will appear, what already exists and what the brand needs to approve.
There are technical constraints as well. In perfume photography, a bottle’s proportions, cap design, typography and glass characteristics are part of the product identity. If an AI-generated variation changes those details, the image has failed its brief, however convincing the surrounding scene looks.
Conventional post-production remains the obvious solution when the required change is straightforward. A new photoshoot is also appropriate when the original references cannot support a convincing extension or when the creative concept genuinely needs to change.
For the additional images that fall between those situations, AI photography introduces another production option. Whether it is worthwhile depends on the full cost of preparing, correcting and approving the final material, as well as the deadline it needs to meet.
Check what happened after your last launch
If you’re managing visual content for a fragrance brand, I’d start by looking at the requests that arrived after your previous campaign was delivered.
Go through the emails from retail partners and the additional requirements from your e-commerce or marketing teams. Identify the images that were produced, the requests handled with imperfect adaptations and the ones that were never completed.
Pay particular attention to the last group. Were those images unnecessary, or did they go unproduced because another shoot would have cost too much or taken too long?
Those are the requests I’d examine before deciding where AI-assisted photography belongs in the next campaign.
