One of my favorite underrated features at Waymark is Prompt Topics.  It's gone through multiple iterations since launch, and it's now a powerful part of how we help users generate high-quality, relevant, and unique AI videos.

The Early Days: Themes

When we first started implementing AI models, we built on our existing “Auto-personalize” feature with a simple approach: search your brand and then tell us what you want your video to focus on. We started with broad prompt “themes”:  Think: the buckets or categories that ads typically fall into, like ‘Business Overview’, ‘Recruiting’ (especially hot in 2022), or ‘Events.’

The problem? We noticed that our users (mostly salespeople making spec videos) didn’t always know what their prospective clients were looking for. They’d leave the text box empty and the theme unselected. While this still created a decent ad, it felt pretty generic. Worse, multiple generations would produce similar results, reducing our AI's ability to create the kind of unique ads that could actually be tested with clients.

Enter: Suggestions

We needed a better solution. Using existing data, we built "prompt suggestions.” We could guarantee that these suggestions were meaningfully relevant and could make an ad that highlighted specific aspects of the brand, rather than a simple overview. 

When suggestions first went live, it was still pretty buried; the topics were not front and center. And because AI in general can be pretty wordy, our multi-sentence prompts could feel overwhelming to read. That said, continued testing revealed something important: having any prompt was critical to getting good results.

Today: Prompt Topics

That insight led us to our current iteration: prompt "topics!” As AI models have become more powerful, we've learned that shorter, tightly focused prompts can still create punchy, effective ads. We refined our suggestion tool to write concise topics and surfaced them prominently in the Waymark AI flow.

Now, in the Direction step, users see four distinct topics that can generate four distinct, well-focused videos. It's streamlined, user-friendly, and effective.

From themes to suggestions to topics, we've continuously leveraged our business data to create an experience that lets users get creative while staying focused on ads that drive real value for their clients. 

Better prompting is all part of helping our users leverage AI without feeling overwhelmed: and helping them understand exactly what levers they can pull to get the results they're looking for. (More on that another time. (;)

Try our prompt topics today with Waymark AI.