With Shutterstock and Amazon Ads, businesses can now simplify the process of getting great visuals for their ads.
This article is co-authored by Amazon Ads.
Images matter. Imagery helps highlight certain aspects of your brand, like your values, your product’s applications, and your brand story. These aid in building lasting connections with customers.
For example, images that represent your brand values (ie: images that represent recycling or handmade products), images that represent your customers and their lifestyle (ie: runners, family reunions), or images that relate to seasonality or key shopping events (ie: winter decor, people shopping, gifts) can help a brand connect to their customers on a personal level.
And, this is relevant for business owners across all industries—home goods, apparel, beauty, groceries, toys, and even pet products.
Furthermore, the impact of imagery has been largely explored in scientific research, which has supported the Picture Superiority Effect. This research shares that people are 65% more likely to remember information when it is coupled with an image¹.
All of these aspects of image processing and recognition mean that images are more “sticky” in our memory, i.e. we remember them longer. Hence, why advertising is in search of “sticky” memories that can help encourage customers to engage with brands.
And, in an era in which memory is overloaded and rapidly depleting, the fight to create better advertising requires not just great text, but compelling and memorable visuals. Indeed, long-term research from Kantar demonstrates the power of creative, finding that creative accounts for 49% of driving ROI.²

Amazon Ads and Shutterstock collaborate together to bring high-quality custom creatives to Amazon advertisers
With this knowledge, Amazon Ads and Shutterstock have collaborated to help Amazon advertisers drive performance, enhance their brand presence, and adopt creative decisions faster with free, easy access to Shutterstock’s library of 390+ million high-quality images and videos directly from the creative assets tool in the advertising console³.
Every asset in the Shutterstock library is reviewed for quality and technical execution to maintain high standards. Further, thanks to Shutterstock’s global network of more than two million contributors from more than 150 countries worldwide, you’ll have access to assets that showcase different perspectives and aesthetics from around the world, ensuring content resonates at global, national, and local levels.
This means that now those businesses that sell and advertise on Amazon have free access to Shutterstock’s collection of high-quality licensed photographs and videos to be used across custom image placements from Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns, to their Store, to help capture customer attention and drive engagement globally, leveraging authentic, diverse, and inclusive assets.


License these images via IVASHstudio and Mbuso Sydwell Nkosi.
With this integration, small and medium businesses who may struggle to create complex assets now have an easy way to infuse stunning visuals into their ads.
Here’s how to get started
- Visit the creative assets application within the Amazon Ads console.
- Navigate to “Search stock assets.”

- Enter the keyword related to the theme you are searching for.

- Choose your preferred assets and save them to your creative assets, and implement them across your ad campaigns and Stores.

According to Jamie Elden, Chief Revenue Officer at Shutterstock, “Shutterstock has one of the world’s largest libraries of images, footage, 3D, and music tracks that give you millions of ways to tell your story. This is more relevant than ever for Amazon Ads users as they branch out from traditional ad formats to Amazon’s powerful, personalized ad products.”
Together, these compelling Shutterstock visuals across Amazon’s array of ad formats will help businesses create engaging and impactful ads that can make their brand, value proposition, and product offerings stand out.
About Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads offers a range of options to registered sellers, vendors, book vendors, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) authors, app developers and/or agencies (refer to each product’s page for eligibility criteria) to achieve their advertising goals.
Learn more at advertising.amazon.com.
¹ Data Visualization & Human Rights, “Lessons from Visualization Research”
² AdAge, “The power of creative: How ad quality improves ROI,” (March 2022)
³ To have access to the advertising console, you need to register for Amazon Ads via this link.
License this cover image via Joshua Resnick.