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Introduction
Plai, the AI-powered advertising platform founded by growth marketer Logan Welbaum, helps businesses of all sizes launch ads across 11 platforms with ease. From global acts like Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers to local service providers, Plai’s promise is simple: fast, automated, high-performing campaigns.
When Plai sought to speed up creative production without outsourcing design, IMG.LY’s Creative Editor SDK became the solution. Since adopting it, Plai has grown to 30,000+ creative exports per month, cut time-to-launch dramatically, and helped clients save $1,000–$10,000 per month in design costs.
The Story of Plai
Logan Welbaum built his career at Meta and Google before turning his expertise to founding Plai. Known for early growth-hacking experiments on TikTok-where he built a following of 450k-Logan recognized a recurring challenge for marketers: ad creative was slow, expensive, and inconsistent.
Plai’s mission: make ad creation as simple as typing in a prompt. Businesses paste in their website, and Plai automatically generates brand-aligned creative across multiple platforms. But to deliver on this promise, Plai needed an embedded design editor that was powerful, customizable, and seamless.
The Challenge: Edit AI Generated Assets
While Plai already excelled at generating highly on-brand images and videos with AI, the product quickly ran into a common limitation: AI can create assets, but it can’t finish them.
Even with strong generation quality, users still needed to tweak layouts, adjust text, fix proportions, refine colors, or make brand-specific edits the model couldn’t reliably control. Without an integrated editing layer, they had no way to do that inside Plai.
This introduced new friction:
- AI outputs weren’t fully controllable: users couldn’t refine or correct what the model produced.
- Human-in-the-loop workflows broke down: customers had to export AI outputs, edit in external tools, then re-upload.
- Campaign readiness suffered: assets looked good, but not polished or precise enough for real ad production.
Logan explains it simply:
“The most important part of an ad is what people see. Before IMG.LY, we couldn’t give customers the flexibility to edit and optimize AI-generated assets quickly. That slowed them down and hurt results.”
By integrating IMG.LY, Plai bridged that gap. Now, users can directly adjust, personalize, and finalize AI-generated creative within the same flow without the need for tool switching or sacrificing brand accuracy.
Why Plai Chose IMG.LY
Logan’s team evaluated alternatives like Canva, but friction was a dealbreaker. Requiring users to create separate accounts or leave the Plai platform wasn’t an option.
Instead, IMG.LY offered:
- Full customization - Plai could white-label the editor to match its product experience.
- Form-based editing UX - simple enough for non-designers to generate “smart creative.”
- Speed to market - integration launched in just one month, compared to “months and months” if built in-house.
As Logan puts it:
“If you’re not a design-first company, you’ll pull your hair out trying to build an editor yourself. IMG.LY already has nearly every editing function you’d need, and it feels native inside our product.”
How Plai Uses IMG.LY
Within Plai, the editor powers several workflows:
- Smart Creative Generation - ads aligned to brand voice, colors, and context, with quick resize options for platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Spotify.
- AI-Driven Enhancements - automated ad copy, image variations, and voiceover layers.
- Customizable Templates - clients can make quick tweaks without hiring designers.
Importantly, Plai leads demos with the editor. Logan noted, “Customers’ eyes light up when they see it-they know they’d otherwise have to hire a designer or buy Canva.”
The Results
Since adopting IMG.LY’s editor, Plai has seen measurable improvements:
- 30,000–37,000 creative exports per month - a major jump in customer adoption.
- Cheaper ad costs for clients - better creative earns platform rewards with lower CPMs.
- Faster time to launch - cutting campaign prep from weeks to minutes.
- Cost savings - customers avoid $1,000–$10,000/month in freelance or design tool spend.
- Revenue growth - Plai continues to double annually, with creative automation as a core driver.
As Logan summarizes:
“Fast to launch, that’s the biggest thing. Building this ourselves would’ve taken months. With IMG.LY, it was live in a month and now drives thousands of ad campaigns.”
Outlook
Looking ahead, Plai plans to deepen its creative automation, especially in video editing and AI audio. With IMG.LY’s evolving feature set, like AI sound generation and video prompting, the partnership is set to expand.
“Our goal is simple: get clients' results. IMG.LY helps by making sure the creative-the most important part of an ad-performs at scale.”
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