.png)
.png)
The creative automation market has exploded over the past few years. Everywhere you look, there’s a new platform promising to make asset production faster and easier. Abyssale is one of them. It’s a design automation tool focused on helping teams generate banners and static visuals in bulk. For some marketers, that speed is the answer. But for teams running catalog ads, the difference between fast production and true performance infrastructure is everything.
That’s where Marpipe comes in. Instead of approaching automation from the design side, Marpipe starts with the product feed, which is the backbone of modern ecommerce campaigns. That single shift changes the game. Feeds, creative, and optimization all live in one workflow, so performance marketers aren’t stuck piecing together tools that were never designed to work together.
Tools like Abyssale show how far the category has come, but they also highlight a bigger truth: most creative automation platforms weren’t built with catalog ads in mind. They solve for production but not performance. Marpipe closes that gap — and in 2025, when catalog ads have become the default driver of ecommerce growth across Meta, TikTok, Google, and emerging AI-powered surfaces, that difference matters more than ever.
Imagine you’re running an online store with hundreds of products. If you had to make a separate ad for each product, it would take forever. That’s where catalog ads come in.
A catalog ad connects your store’s product feed, which is basically a digital spreadsheet of all your items, prices, photos, and details, straight into ad platforms like Meta, TikTok, or Google. Instead of creating ads one by one, the platform can automatically build thousands of ads from your feed. Each shopper sees products that are most relevant to them, whether that’s something they browsed last week or items similar to what they’ve already bought.
The magic is in the personalization. If a shirt sells out, the ad updates automatically. If you lower the price of sneakers, the ad reflects that change instantly. Brands don’t waste time fixing ads manually, and customers see fresh, accurate information every time.
What started as a way to retarget people who left items in their cart has grown into one of the most powerful tools for discovery. Catalog ads help brands reach new audiences, scale their campaigns, and compete across multiple platforms at once.
This is why the difference between banner-first design tools like Abyssale and catalog-first platforms like Marpipe is so important. Abyssale helps teams create static designs, but it doesn’t connect those designs to live product feeds. Marpipe, on the other hand, treats the feed as creative infrastructure, powering campaigns that are dynamic, scalable, and performance-driven.
Abyssale focuses on solving a specific problem: the time-consuming process of creating visual assets. With its template-driven system, marketers can design a set of banners and instantly generate hundreds of variations across different sizes and formats. For small or mid-sized teams without a big design department, that speed can make a real difference.
It’s straightforward and useful. Upload your brand assets, build out a few templates, and let the platform do the heavy lifting of scaling those assets. For campaigns where banners or static creatives are the end goal, Abyssale feels like a productivity boost.
The challenge is that most ecommerce brands don’t stop at banners anymore. Performance growth comes from catalog ads, where creative isn’t just about output but about syncing with live product data and adjusting in real time. That’s the part Abyssale doesn’t cover.
Abyssale’s strength is clear: it makes creative production easier. For design teams that need static banners, bulk asset exports, or quick iterations on a visual concept, it does the job well. But once performance enters the conversation—how campaigns scale, how budgets get allocated, how creative adapts to product data—the cracks start to show.
The first and most critical gap is the absence of product feed integration. Product feeds have become the backbone of ecommerce advertising because they connect the dots between live inventory, real-time pricing, and catalog ads. Without feeds, you’re essentially working blind—unable to surface the right product to the right customer at the right moment. For brands, this means either bolting on an external feed tool or resigning themselves to static campaigns that don’t scale with the realities of ecommerce. Abyssale, built without feeds at its core, forces marketers to patch together a fragmented workflow instead of providing a unified system.
The platform also carries a banner-first mentality that feels increasingly dated. Catalog ads, powered by feeds, have overtaken static banners as the engine of growth for most retailers. A single catalog can spin out thousands of personalized ad variations across Meta, TikTok, Google, and emerging channels—something a static banner workflow simply can’t replicate. Abyssale still treats creative like one-off files to be exported, while the leading players in the space are embedding creative directly into feeds so it can flow wherever discovery is happening.
Even where it shines in production, Abyssale leaves marketers stranded on the next step: optimization. Performance advertising isn’t just about producing more assets. It’s about filtering out products that eat up spend without converting, prioritizing best sellers, and shifting budget dynamically based on performance signals. Abyssale doesn’t help answer those questions. Marketers are left with creative files but no guidance on how to make them perform once deployed. That disconnect makes it feel more like a design tool than a growth platform.
Finally, there’s the issue of future-proofing against new discovery channels. TikTok Shop is rewriting how social commerce works. Google’s AI-driven search is increasingly powered by structured data from feeds. Conversational shopping experiences—whether inside large language models or voice assistants—are only as strong as the data they’re fed. In each case, feeds are the infrastructure that allows ads and products to surface contextually. Abyssale, by focusing narrowly on design templates, puts itself at a disadvantage in this next era of commerce.
For teams that care primarily about design, Abyssale can be a helpful utility. But for performance marketers responsible for revenue growth, it feels like half a solution. The missing feed integration, lack of optimization, and limited adaptability to new channels make it difficult to justify as the core of a modern ecommerce advertising stack.
Marketers evaluating these platforms often discover they’re not really competing in the same arena. Abyssale is positioned as a design tool, while Marpipe has been built from the ground up as a growth platform. The difference comes down to whether creative exists in isolation or as part of a connected performance system.
Where Abyssale focuses on exporting static creative, Marpipe treats the product feed as creative infrastructure. Every template is linked directly to inventory, pricing, and attributes, which means ads update automatically as the feed changes. For brands, this transforms creative from a fixed asset into a living, data-powered system that can scale across channels without manual upkeep.
Marpipe also bridges the gap between creative and performance optimization. Instead of handing off files to be tested in a separate workflow, Marpipe builds in the ability to filter out low performers, elevate best sellers, and direct budget toward the products that drive the highest return. That loop, where creative adapts to performance signals, is what allows campaigns to compound over time.
And perhaps most importantly, Marpipe is future-ready. TikTok Shop, AI-powered search, and conversational shopping are reshaping how people discover products. Because Marpipe starts from the product feed, its creative can flow naturally into any new channel that adopts feed-based infrastructure. Abyssale, locked into template exports, doesn’t offer the same adaptability.
For creative teams who need quick banner variations, Abyssale can play a role. But for performance marketers charged with scaling revenue, Marpipe is the platform that connects feeds, creative, and optimization into one workflow.
Abyssale isn’t the only player in this space, and most marketers considering it are also looking at a handful of other tools. What we’ve seen across the landscape is that nearly every competitor tackles one component in creative automation, but everything stops short of connecting the full loop between product feed, creative, and optimization.
The pattern is clear. Whether it’s Smartly, ROI Hunter, Confect, Hunch, Socioh, or Abyssale, most tools do one job well—design automation, data reporting, or creative templates. Marpipe is the only platform designed to unify them: feeds, creative, and optimization in a single workflow, purpose-built for catalog-first advertising.
AI is reshaping how products are discovered. Platforms like Google are leaning heavily into AI-powered search, with results that blend organic listings, paid placements, and dynamic product recommendations. Meta’s Advantage+ and Performance Max campaigns already rely on product feeds to deliver personalized ads at scale. Conversational shopping, whether through chat-based product discovery or voice assistants, is only as strong as the structured data it can pull from. If your product feed is not connected to your creative, you are invisible in this new landscape.
Social commerce is moving faster than ever. TikTok Shop is the clearest example: a platform where entertainment, community, and shopping merge. TikTok does not reward static banners. It rewards feeds that can populate immersive, swipeable ad units that feel native to the platform. Brands that rely on banner-first tools risk falling behind in an environment where catalog-driven campaigns are table stakes.
Optimization has become the new creative frontier. In the past, winning at ads was about who had the most eye-catching design. Today, growth comes from knowing which products to promote, which to pull back, and how to reallocate spend in real time. That level of decision-making is impossible without feed-driven creative that connects directly to optimization tools.
This is where Abyssale’s banner-first focus feels out of step with the direction of the market. It solves for design, but it does not solve for growth. Marpipe takes the opposite approach. By treating the product feed as creative infrastructure, it unites design, performance, and optimization in one workflow. Brands can launch catalog ads across Meta, TikTok, and Google in a fraction of the time, keep campaigns accurate as inventory changes, and scale efficiently by letting data guide creative decisions.
The industry’s trajectory is clear. AI shopping, social commerce, and performance automation are all powered by product feeds. The brands that win will be those that see catalog ads not just as another format but as the infrastructure behind their entire growth strategy.
And, the first step toward a catalog-first strategy is ensuring your product data is clean and accurate. That is why we built our Product Feed Management Tool. It gives marketers the foundation they need to scale smarter campaigns.
If you are ready to move beyond static templates and build a catalog-first growth engine, get started with Marpipe.
