Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today's episode is one I've been genuinely looking forward to. We are talking about content production in the age of artificial intelligence and how it's changing the game for brands, vendors, and more specifically, agencies. But, before we get into it, a couple of updates from my side. First, our Amazon Vendor Summit is coming up on the ninth and the tenth of December. It's a two-day virtual event with more than fifteen expert speakers and over a thousand attendees.
Plenty of practical insights to help vendors win in 2026. Early bird registration is now open completely free for vendors and MerchantSpring clients. Just scan the QR code on your screen or head to merchantspring.io to grab your tickets. And of course, we also have Amazon Unboxed right around the corner. Luke and I will be heading to Nashville in early November, and we'd love to catch up with as many of you as possible. If you are attending, drop me a quick DM on LinkedIn so we can connect in person. I would love the opportunity.
All right, let's jump into today's topic. I am joined by John Wondrasek, Managing Director of Incomar Services, a global content studio based out of Chicago. John's team works with vendors and agencies around the world to create high-performing content for Amazon and beyond. And what's fascinating is how Incomar continues to grow even if generative AI reshapes the entire industry. Today, we're going to unpack how Incomar is using AI to boost creativity and efficiency, what's changing in the content game and how agencies can adapt to build smarter, more resilient businesses. All right, let's get into it. John, so great to have you on the show today.
John Wondrasek
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Paul Sonneveld
Just before I get into my question mode, to remind it to our audience, this is a live show as usual. So if you've got some great questions for John, pop them into the LinkedIn comment section or the YouTube comment section, and I will do my best to put it in front of him. All right, John, let's get into it. Maybe just to get us started, some of our audience may not be familiar with Incomar Services and the kind of work that you specialise in. Are you able to give us maybe a quick overview?
John Wondrasek
Sure. Incomar Creative Services we're just outside Chicago. Our focus is truly on like, we feel like we're in the intersection of content strategy, content creation, and then the more important role of content integration, getting your content that you just created out to Amazon and all the other resellers in the market. We partner with manufacturers and brands primarily in the education or the office products space. Our job overall is to help them tell a better brand story, to help them sell their products, and really tell that story so that people can understand it visually and by reading whatever we have to put out there.
Our focus is on the product detail page optimisation, or like we like to call it, the perfect product detail page program. We deliver Amazon-style bullets, A plus content, 3D renders, photos, lifestyle imagery, whether it's renders or photography and video, whether it's traditional and we're doing a lot less of that or the animated, and we're doing more animated videos than we've ever done before. We also do marketing campaigns, outbound or outreach email marketing, and we do trade show collateral and, you know, trade show design. So the whole idea is for us to do our jobs best is we say that we make products easier to understand and then to buy and then also to sell. So overall, that's what Incomar is all about.
Paul Sonneveld
That is an enormous breadth of services. And I think even just those examples speak to the evolution, but I was going to ask you specifically when it, particularly when it comes to Amazon, you know, how an Amazon detailed pages and other content requirements that brands and vendors have, how have you seen the demand for content really evolve specifically in the Amazon space over the last couple of years?
John Wondrasek
Well, it's funny because I would say just the last year, there's been the major shift. So the last several years ago, we could create content. I could do fifty images. I'd shoot fifty images in a week. And then and this is actually what happened. I came over the weekend, and I would create fifty image sets so I could deliver them on Monday or Tuesday. So now, we've gone from shooting everything to shooting a few things and then generating the rest of the content with AI. I mean, we might take the content that we write because you have to have that human element, but we might take that content and then turn it into a more kind of an experience where the viewer feels like they're in kind of a mini website that gives them comparison charts, could give thema video and really tells the story. So there's no more of the check the box content saying, yep, I've got my left, centre, right, done. Tells my whole story.
Paul Sonneveld
That's fascinating. I'd love to just ask, are you able to elaborate a little bit more about how you just take a couple of pictures? Maybe it's just, I'd love to just, I want to get a little bit clearer in my mind, maybe just an example of what that looks like.
John Wondrasek
Sure. So we're currently in the middle of a project. And I'll explain it a little bit later. But we're in the middle of a project where we shot a few items. So if I have a picture of product X, but my product detail page says, hey, it's a set of twelve. Well, I can take product X and I can make it look like it's twelve without just placing twelve pictures on a screen. And then I can say I want to have this product in an environment. So I laid into an environment. I want to have it in an office. I want to have it on a desk. And I want to say I want to have it on an oak desk or a maple desk. Through AI, we can do these things a lot more smoothly. So that's kind of like an example of it. And then I would love to say that it happens more quickly, but it really doesn't. It takes a little more time, but we keep getting better. We keep evolving with AI.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Okay. I completely understand that. Many years ago, this is about ten years ago now, I was in the e-commerce space, and we used to do a similar thing. Taking the product shot and trying to put it on the backgroun,d but also we didn't have the benefits of AI, and the quality was poor at the time, or you know, certainly for certain purposes
John Wondrasek
Yeah, it was as good as you could shoot
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
John Wondrasek
Right. If your photography was decent, it was a decent image set. If your photography was Hey, I'm going to take out my iPhone and shoot it then you know garbage in, garbage out.
Paul Sonneveld
Well, it was found even just the I don't know getting like a I don't know, a home appliance, right? You know, shooting it in sort of a big light box, whatever, will be fine. But then, trying to like shoot it in a real kitchen or that. The idea in your head is good, but it takes so much work to actually make it look good. It's, it's very easy when you still have to do everything, get some props and all of that and get the sort of put it together, but can it still look very average? Actually, the amount of time we put in there was phenomenal.
John Wondrasek
Yeah, you would you would have to style it, and then you have to turn off your overhead lights because they're terrible for photography, then you'd have to bring all these lights. And if you have a specific kitchen, these lights may not fit, and you're really trying to force I feel like we were trying to force everything to happen instead of just kind of prompting it and pushing it to happen.
Paul Sonneveld
That's really interesting, because I think rather than a threat, that sounds like AI has been a real kind of enabler, actually, in your space.
John Wondrasek
Yeah, as long as you don't rely on it to do everything. So AI has its place. Yeah, for sure.
Paul Sonneveld
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions that people have when it comes to generative AI and content production in general?
John Wondrasek
I don't know if you're old enough, but in the beginning of the internet, if you build it, they will come was sort of true. You know, if you built a website, people would come to it because there are only a few hundred or a few thousand at the time to go to. Well, I think with AI, the misconception is if you just dump it into AI, then it's going to generate this perfect thing for you, because that's just not the case. You still need to come up with a strategy. You have to have oversight, and you have to have brand knowledge so that when you're creating these assets, you actually know what you're talking about and you're knowing who your audience is.
So I might create a great image, but it's not speaking to who I really need to be speaking to. So, you know, leave AI to its own devices, and you're going to have generic content. Often it's going to be inaccurate or just dead wrong. And it may not tell the story you're really trying to tell. So AI is definitely not going to replace your creative team. It's just going to change how we work. So creative teams need to not be afraid of it. Just embrace it.
Paul Sonneveld
It's so interesting because I would say I'm highly proficient in terms of writing, like marketing copy with AI. I think I've been good at that. Good at prompting. I am terrible at like, I might, might've created a marketing newsletter and trying to create a graphic to go with it. And I just can't, I just really struggled trying to get like an image that conveys the right kind of intent and message. And i think part of that it's not the AI's fault or the model's fault, it's like I'm just struggling to articulate what I really want right? That's sort of um yeah
John Wondrasek
But it's the AI is just AI is grabbing what it what it's learned, that's it. So, you might have one AI engine that learned one thing and another that learned something else, and you can put the same prompt in both and you're going to get two different results
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Which brings me onto the question, how have you integrated AI tools into your content workflows? You know, I'd love to just understand what are your, and this is a rapidly changing space by the way, you might be using one thing this month and next month you're trying something else. But yeah, what are the tools that you really like right now and how have you integrated those into your workflows?
John Wondrasek
Well, on the copy side, AI is writing the first draft. So we just wrote a script. AI wrote the first draft. I prompted it with things that I wanted to say, and then it wrote the first draft. And then we beat it up internally because we understand who the audience is. So we keep rewriting things to make it better. So that's best back to the misconceptions that it's just going to happen to be really fast. And it's not, it's just, it still takes some nuance.
Now, on the visual side, it's great for giving us mock-ups. It's great for giving us composites. It's great for, you know, I've got a great concept, so I want to dump in the AI and see what it does for me. The limits are truly the accuracy and the brand knowledge. AI just does not know the brand. And if you have copy on your product, I would say that 90% of the time, at least in my experience, I've had to fix that copy to make it work because AI seems to put whatever copy it thinks it should put in there. And it doesn't really work. AI doesn't have an emotional side or a storytelling side, or an understanding of a SKU. It just doesn't. So the whole rule of thumb is AI creates the draft, and the humans refine and define what it's going to be at the end.
Paul Sonneveld
And on that point of iteration, Like, I mean, this is a very sort of detailed question, but how, I mean, there's sort of iteration with the AI model, you know, revising the prompts and asking it to make changes and all that versus drawing the line and sort of taking the output that you have at that point and sort of take, putting it back into human hands and, and crafting it and finishing it and polishing it sort of more manually. How do you evaluate that, or what's your practice when it comes to kind of iterations and the reliance on AI to do the iterations versus saying, hey, thank you very much. We got to the 80%. That's great. We're now, we'll take it from here.
John Wondrasek
Well, I would say if you try a handful of prompts and they're still not working, it's time to go back to the reason you were hired in the first place. You have that creative skill to make it happen. So just take it over and make it happen. You're going to spend less time doing it than you would keep trying new prompts. So you have to draw the line in the sand. There's got to be that point where you just say, okay, I've done this six times. I've done this twelve times. Uncle, call uncle. I'm just going to fix it.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. That's great. I'm going to keep that quote. I think three times is a good number. AI has got this amazing ability to sort of get stuck onto something, right? And you sort of just seem to be going into a deeper, deeper hole. There needs to be some sort of red reset button where you can say, okay, I guess you can always do that. But, um, you know,
John Wondrasek
I wish you could just tell it to stop. Like I want you, here's an image. I just want you to change this thing in quadrant X, and only change it instead of changing the whole thing and starting over. Cause that's one issue with AI as well, it will, it's a limitation for sure. It'll keep changing the whole image instead of just one little chunk of it.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
John Wondrasek
And I'm sure there's a way to do it. Right.
Paul Sonneveld
Right. Turn off the people pleasing feature and the on the promise of just do what I asked.
John Wondrasek
There's no easy button for this one.
Paul Sonneveld
No, unfortunately. All right. I'd love to maybe hear from you. I guess you started to allude to it a little bit. But I'd love to hear it if you could walk us through, maybe a recent project that you've done where AI really played a pivotal role in the content creation process.
John Wondrasek
Well, it is the one I'm in the middle of right now. So we have a customer who makes paper products. And so we took a handful of images, and we're using AI to help us craft, you know, the final story. So we know that if we have six images to work with, which is kind of our benchmark, we have six images to work with on Amazon. Our plan is to have as many lifestyles that tell a different story in each lifestyle that speak to the content that's on the page. So if I can write the content and say, Hey, I need you to have a person writing or drawing a picture of a whatever the image is, say it's a recycled symbol because it's recycled paper. I want to have a picture of someone drawing a recycled symbol onto this booklet that's sitting on a desk in a classroom. Then we use AI for that, and then we refine it because we know it's not going to be perfect.
And AI has really helped us with that. It's not saving us time. But it's definitely saving us on what we've done in the past, where we have set up all these photo shoots. Our timeline is really long because we have all this prep for photo shoots and bringing in photographers, and having the customer ship product. We don't have to do all that anymore. So AI is really helping us if, you know, go past that. Like I would have them ship me, you know, two or three of each thing instead of cases. So they spend less shipping, and then I can create different images based on the few things that I've shot. And then we're using AI, we're using photography, we're using Photoshop. I mean, we're using all the tools that are in our arsenal to get it done.
Paul Sonneveld
It still starts with photography, right? Like you still take, it's going back to your earlier point. You still take a couple of, I mean, these are just taking some shots in a light box of the product or, yeah, kind of the typica, l yeah.
John Wondrasek
Yeah, well it's shots of that also we shot people like i wanted to have a person actually writing in each book and then i had one of my designers do a bunch of illustrations for the sketchbooks so then we had the model sit there and just pretend they were drawing a picture like that's kind of how we were doing it and then we use ai for other things. If I just want someone holding a book, and they've got a backpack on because it's for a student. I don't need to have that person do that, I can just have AI do it, and then I can do it all the different colours.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
John Wondrasek
So it's helped us there.
Paul Sonneveld
So that sort of alludes to skills, right? And, you know, hiring practices, you know, now versus, say, five years ago. I mean, what kind of skill sets are you hiring for now compared to, you know, three, five years ago? You know, has your philosophy and even just the skills that you're hiring for changed in any way?
John Wondrasek
Well, yeah. So I would say a few years ago, and if I was looking for a graphic designer, for example, I would be looking for a generic, not generic, but a general designer, someone who is good at print, someone who is good at web, someone who could do digital, someone who could create sell sheets and things like that. Now, I still need that person. Don't get me wrong. But I also want the person who really understands how to embrace AI to use it in all those areas. Use AI to create their print piece, use it to do their image sets, use it to do you know if I want to incorporate it into my say I want to take a picture and create a video out of it, I want to have someone who understands how to do that prompting.
Learning the prompting is really important, it's a question I will ask for any time I hire a designer from now on is, Do you understand AI prompting? How engaged are you? I'm not going to ask you how long you've been doing it, because nobody's been doing it for that long. But I really want people to understand that I still want to have a problem solver, but they have to understand how to integrate the human creativity with AI efficiency and how to meld those two things together to come up with a great piece. And again, I'm going to say these designers should not be afraid of losing their jobs because of AI. They just need to embrace it. And it's going to create all these new jobs for you. Just understand that.
Paul Sonneveld
Is there, I'd love to, maybe this is way too specific for this conversation, but, um, is there a specific case study or question or like, how do you evaluate yet during the interview process? It's probably slightly off piece in terms of what we're talking about today, but I'd love to, because everyone talks like they know everything. Right. But. But how do you probe that when you're recruiting for a design person?
John Wondrasek
Well, the last two designers we actually hired. We hired them for two different things. And luckily, they both understood how to use AI. And AI came up in the interview process. I didn't test them on how good they were. I didn't test them on their prompting because, you know, like I said, you could put prompting in three different engines and you get three different results. But I just tested them, you know, the question was, do you have knowledge of AI? Have you used it? Do you understand how to use it? I think now, because it's been a while, I think now I'm to the point where I would say, if you want to create x, show me what you would do. Here's a product like write the prompt, and let's do this together. Not as a test, but just to understand, like where is your head when you're creating these assets, you know that's really what I'm looking for, how are you solving the problem in front of you?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, how they think because it's sort of a bit of an analytical mindset, right to break down the task and how to then put into subcomponents and structured in the form of a prompt.
John Wondrasek
And a lot of designers are not analytical. They don't think one, two, three, four, five like an accountant. They think one, three, seven. What did I have for lunch today? And then they'll just kind of go down. They're all over the place, which is what's great about them being creatives. That's what you want. You want them to totally get outside themselves and come up with some beautiful work.
Paul Sonneveld
I want to pivot a little bit towards the Amazon agency perspective because a lot of our audience are Amazon agencies, many obviously running or managing brands on Amazon seller, vendor, you know, other marketplaces too, but a fair few of them have sizable content businesses. And even MerchantSpring, before we were a software business, we were we're a marketplace agency as well as a content business, and content was great. I mean, this is about eight, nine years ago now, but the content part of our business was great. It was a high margin. It really helped the rest of our business, but clearly things are changing. For Amazon agencies specifically, John, what advice do you have about repositioning their content services in the era of AI? You've worked it out, but I'm sure a lot of them are still going right. I've got this big revenue stream. I can see it's falling off a cliff. What advice would you have for them?
John Wondrasek
Don't try to compete with AI. Integrate it into your workflow. Embrace it. Use it to your best ability. And be like... a strategic filter between the AI output and the truth of the brand, and truly understanding what the brand is all about. So if you have all that brand knowledge, you're going to be valuable to your customer. So that when you're using AI, you can actually put out the best product. Remember, your clients are paying for relevance and they're paying for conversion, but they also want authenticity, not just content. It's just not about your basic content anymore. So in the grand scheme of things, the success of your agency is going to have a lot to do with the speed of AI and all of your human insight and knowledge. So meld those two together and you're going to be just fine.
Paul Sonneveld
You raise a really good point there. I actually had a separate question on this, so I might as well go there now, which is this balance between using AI to speed things up and get to output for a client quickly, whilst maintaining that brand knowledge, authenticity, and the creative quality. Maybe there's no perfect answer to this, but how do you balance that appropriately? particularly in the context of, you know, client expectations. I mean, I've had some other conversations with other agency owners and, you know, certainly client expectations around the speed around which things can be turned around is accelerating, right? So keeping that in the background, like how do you balance that speed and automation with maintaining that brand authenticity that you spoke about earlier?
John Wondrasek
Well, in my opinion, it all starts with your knowledge of the brand and your relationship with the client. So don't be afraid to ask your client questions about the brand to understand it better. You know, like I said, we're working on paper products and there are certain things that AI will create where the customer will say, okay, this product is its glued. It's not stapled on the end, and your AI put it stapled. So you have to understand all those product nuances. And AI does have some speed to it, but it still isn't the end-all be-all. It's just a tool. So embrace the AI, like a tool that it's meant to be, just like you would embrace Photoshop or you would embrace Microsoft products. They're tools. AI is just a tool. It can do nothing without human learning. So I hope that answers your question.
Paul Sonneveld
It does. Thank you. I think it's a specific area where agencies can actually add a lot of value in this entire process, right?
John Wondrasek
And you don't have to talk AI with your customer all the time. Just use it. You don't have to talk about it. Continue talking the way you normally do. Speak to the brand. Speak to what you want to be when it grows up. Don't worry about talking about AI solving your problems because your customer might think, Oh, great, it'll be really fast. Now I can get it cheaper.
Paul Sonneveld
Have you experienced much cost pressure from clients because they're sort of expecting things to be faster, quicker, done by models?
John Wondrasek
No, the cost pressure has nothing to do with that. It's just the market. So I would say right now, any cost pressure, you know, I wrote a quote and it ended up being, you know, it was all this work is going to be great. And then they cut it in half, and we did half the work because it just didn't have the budget or it might be not that right time of the year. So that has a lot to do with it also. But I don't think AI is the biggest factor, especially if we educate people and tell them AI is going to help us. It's not going to solve any of our problems.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's encouraging to hear. I want to just ask, probably the last question, because we're virtually out of time here. But, you know, the rate of change has been phenomenal in the last even last 12 months, 24 months, which gets us, you know, looking towards the future. Right. Looking ahead, John, like how do you see things changing? Where do you see? Maybe the biggest opportunities and risks for content-focused agencies? Where do you see some of the next evolutions or risks? What's the landscape that you've got in your mind?
John Wondrasek
Well, I think I might have said this earlier. There are tons of AI tools right now. And I think over the next couple of years, they're gonna gobble each other up until you have a handful of tools that really work for everybody. And I think it's gonna help you with scalable personalisation so that we can really personalise every image set or every product image that we put out there.
I think the other opportunities for the agency is to help brands stay out of the AI noise. Don't talk about AI all the time as being like this great thing. Just talk about you being the best agency you can for that brand. The risks, over-reliance on AI, and then you're going to lose trust. You're just going to dump AI because you want it to be fast and dirty and get it out, and then you're going to lose that trust of the customer. So any of that content is going to not feel authentic, and oftentimes it's not going to be correct. So the whole winning formula to me is to use AI wisely, but keep all your storytelling at the human level. So you can't have storytelling without the person.
Paul Sonneveld
That's a great way to finish up today, John. Some good words of wisdom. Thank you so much for today. Really appreciate that. That is a wrap of today's episode. John, I always ask at this point, if there's anyone that's listening to us that would love to get in touch with you, maybe continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?
John Wondrasek
The best way is to go to Incomar, I-N-C-O-M-A-R, services.com and just fill out the contact form. It comes right to me.
Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. That's awesome. All right. Thank you so much for your time, John. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you.
John Wondrasek
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone. That is a wrap for today's show. Now, before I sign off, please, just a reminder that Luke and I will be at Amazon Unboxed in Nashville early November. So if you are attending, come say hello. Love to meet up in person. And don't forget, our Amazon Vendor Summit is coming up on December 9th and 10th. So make sure you grab your early bird tickets for that event. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to explore ideas, tools and strategies that help brands and agencies really succeed on Amazon and beyond. Until next time, I'm Paul Sonneveld, and this has been Marketplace Masters. Take care. Talk to you soon.
