How AdPerfect brought human control back into AI-generated ads
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
COMPANY
AdPerfect helps agencies and nonprofits create marketing assets using AI. The founders built strong capabilities around messaging, ad copy, and campaign generation, but ran into a fundamental limitation: AI could produce creative concepts quickly, yet the last 20 percent always needed human adjustment. Without a real editor inside the product, the entire workflow was incomplete. Teams could generate ideas but not refine them. The company needed an editor that behaved like a familiar design environment, integrated cleanly with React, and didn’t force them into a multi-month engineering project.
THE CHALLENGE
A stalled product vision: AI output without human control
AdPerfect’s AI engine could generate ad copy and layout concepts quickly, but the workflow broke at the refinement stage. Users needed to reposition elements, adjust typography, tweak messaging, and finalize creatives before publishing. Without a stable editing layer inside the product, AI output was not usable in production.
The team attempted to build their own editor and invested over 120 hours into the effort. Despite weeks of work, the result remained fragile, limited, and unsuitable for launch. Expanding that prototype into a production-grade system would require hundreds more development hours, plus ongoing maintenance. For a small team, that level of diversion risked slowing the AI roadmap that defined their competitive advantage.
"We scrapped the idea of going with our own prebuilt solution pretty fast. It took our design team maybe 120 hours just to get it to where it was broken and didn’t work."
Alving Garcia
Founder @ AdPerfect
THE SOLUTION
A complete design editor they could integrate themselves, even without engineering resources
Integrating Polotno SDK allowed AdPerfect to drop in a complete editor — similar in usability to modern design tools — without building and maintaining it themselves.
Once the team encountered Polotno, the criteria aligned instantly: full template support, clean React integration, dependable rendering, and a flexible UI they could tailor. With the minimal engineering effort AdPerfect integrated Polotno in less than a month relying solely on AI guidance and the SDK’s documentation. The initial integration took about two weeks and covered everything their internal build couldn’t accomplish.
They stripped the UI to the essential components their workflow required, removed sections unrelated to ad creation, and embedded Polotno’s lightweight SVG preview to power their template gallery. This allowed users to browse AI-generated options before opening a template in the full editor. JSON exports gave them a simple path to store and reuse designs. Instead of a fragile homegrown system, they now had a stable editor with all core controls in place.
Polotno’s long development trial and clear pricing also made the decision straightforward. They were able to validate technical fit, adapt the UI, and test the editor with beta users before committing to a paid plan. For a small team, removing architectural risk was a major win.
“It fit perfectly into what we were doing, and it had all the features that we would’ve built from scratch.”
Alving Garcia
Founder @ AdPerfect
THE OUTCOME
From stalled prototype to production-ready workflows
With Polotno in place, AdPerfect closed the gap between AI generation and final creative execution. Beta users can refine layouts, adjust copy, and finalize assets inside a stable canvas environment that behaves predictably in production.
The team avoided hundreds of additional development hours and eliminated the burden of maintaining a custom editor stack. Engineering focus returned to AI innovation instead of canvas debugging. The editor is no longer an experiment — it is a reliable, embedded component of the platform’s core experience.
“It fit perfectly into what we were doing, and it had all the features that we would’ve built from scratch.”
Alving Garcia
Founder @ AdPerfect