PromoPulse automates 1,000 videos a month with Shotstack

A small team added a fully automated video channel to their marketing platform. Unique videos for every distributor, rendered through the Shotstack API, with no editors and no manual work.

At a glance

With Shotstack, PromoPulse:

• Puts video in every automated marketing campaign without hiring editors or developers
• Renders 1,000 unique videos a month from a handful of reusable templates
• Generates a different video for every distributor that includes randomized products, music, text, and imagery
• Rebuilds the entire template rounds conversationally, using AI connected to the Shotstack MCP server
• Ships AI-generated imagery, motion clips, and music into finished videos with no manual editing at all

The challenge: marketing platform needed unique videos, fast and at scale

PromoPulse automates marketing for the promotional products industry. From customized merchandise and promotional gear to any product bearing a company logo.

Their platform sits between the suppliers who make those products and the distributors who sell them, turning supplier content into automated email and social campaigns. Their own tagline says it best — marketing campaigns that run themselves.

But when customers wanted to reach Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, that meant video, and PromoPulse had no way to produce it.

“We had no process. We did not have the ability to do what we are doing now until we found Shotstack.”

Jason Nokes, founder, PromoPulse

The requirements ruled out every conventional tool. The videos had to be generated programmatically because nobody at PromoPulse was going to open a video editor. And every video had to be unique. Campaigns ran for many distributors at once, and identical posts across accounts were not an option.

The solution: a handful of templates, infinite video variations

Jason, the technical founder of PromoPulse, prototyped the first videos himself in raw JSON. The team then turned the prototypes into templates with merge fields and wired them into the platform through the Shotstack API.

The requirement, in their own words, was “something 100% programmable”. Drop a JSON blob into Shotstack, get a finished video back.

The uniqueness data comes from PromoPulse’s side of the integration. Campaigns can contain any number of products, so the platform varies the products, imagery, music, and text that fill the template on each edit.

The pipeline then runs without anyone touching it:

1. A distributor’s campaign is scheduled to post.
2. Ahead of the scheduled time, the platform assembles the edit and calls the Shotstack API.
3. The finished video is published to social media on schedule.

Layering in AI

The same pipeline kept absorbing new capabilities. Static product shots are transformed into AI-generated lifestyle imagery and short motion clips, and each video features its own music. Shotstack, as the assembly layer, happily turned it all into finished, branded videos.

Templates edited by an agent

For their latest template round, Jason skipped hand-editing JSON entirely and worked through AI connected to the Shotstack MCP server. Their templates handle a variable number of products, and adjusting timing across every variation by hand “was a nightmare”. Now it is just a conversation.

“I did all our latest videos through the MCP server, and that was fabulous. I just tell AI what I want to do, and it makes the changes. That has been a true unlock.”

The results:

• 1,000 unique videos a month, zero manual work: Every campaign now carries video, every video is different, and the team never thinks about rendering.
• A video channel with no video team: PromoPulse added an entire video product to its platform, complete with a handful of templates and an API integration, without hiring an editor or a specialist.
• Reliability that works in the background: Renders fire ahead of every scheduled post, automatically, at whatever volume the campaigns demand.
• A foundation with room to grow: The same templates and pipeline are ready for whatever PromoPulse builds next, without new video infrastructure.

Why PromoPulse chose Shotstack

Their summary of the evaluation is short — there wasn’t one. Shotstack matched the requirement of a fully programmable, JSON-driven video editing API so perfectly that they integrated it and stopped searching.

“We never found anything else. I haven’t looked since. It just fits perfectly for what our needs are.”

Years later, the account is still growing, and the pipeline still runs on the same principle: PromoPulse generates the ideas and the data, and Shotstack renders the video right on queue.

Turn product data into video, automatically

If your platform has images, data, and users that expect video, you can easily build what PromoPulse has built. Design templates once, generate unique videos forever, rendered through an API your code (or your AI agent) drives.

Get a free Shotstack API key and render your first video in minutes, or explore the template library to see what you can automate.