Hi Reader - A lot of people tell me they won’t touch AI creatives with a 10 foot pole. Honestly, fair. I make these things for a living and I still flinch at half the ones I scroll past. You know the look. That cringe-inducing, uncanny weird aesthetic is real. I get it. BUT here’s what everyone misses the second they say they hate AI creatives. Most people think AI creative means you push a button, you walk away, you come back to a folder of forty ads nobody chose, and somewhere a LinkedIn...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader - Last week I wrote about the AI creative strategy agent we open-sourced and why it doesn't replace humans. One of the questions we got on the post was: How do you feed back performance? Short answer: same shape as the agent. The longer answer is more interesting, because performance analysis isn't actually one job. It's two completely different jobs at two completely different altitudes, and most teams treat it as one and end up doing neither well. Both altitudes can run...
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader - We open-sourced our AI creative strategy agent last week, and I was actually a little nervous about it. Because a lot of people would be thinking - if not saying this. "Great. Now you can fire half your creative team, right?" That's the assumption baked into every "AI agent" launch on LinkedIn right now. You plug it in, watch the headcount line on the org chart get a little shorter, and spend an extra five minutes on the beach. The honest answer is no. The opposite, actually. And...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader - The booster rockets on the entire United States Space Shuttle fleet, were designed based on the dimensions of the rear ends of two Roman horses. I’m not joking. Stay with me. The boosters had to ship by rail to the launch site. The rail route went through tunnels. The tunnels were sized for the trains. The trains were the gauge of the railway, which is 4 feet 8.5 inches. That weird number didn’t come from anywhere obvious. The British set it because the people who built the first...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, A few weeks ago I went on Sub Club Live with David Barnard to spend 60 minutes roasting about ten subscription app advertisers. Granola. Cal AI. Headway. Grammarly. Ladder. The whole subscription app pantheon, lined up like ducks. That exact same morning, Ladder rolled out a giant Hilary Duff billboard in Times Square. I can only describe this as the universe doing me a personal favor. Here's the question David and I got into. Do celebrity endorsements actually work for apps(that...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader - I've scaled tens of products well past a million a month in ad spend: both in-house and agency-side, and here's what's funny about operating at that level. Every measurement argument you see online stops mattering. The guy with 2k followers and a ring light who cracked the code with a new lookalike stack. The "I scaled a brand to six figures, here are my 9 CBO learnings" guy. The targeting hack that changes everything until Meta deprecates it in March. Nobody at a million a month...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader - While LinkedIn bros the world over have been going 'RIP designers,' I've been having more and more conversations like the below lately. Here is what they were expecting me to say Some clever stack of AI tools wired together with prompts. Maybe a word-salad about 'skills' and 'agents' or 'n8n workflows'. While what we actually do is boring. We use the standard AI models(same as your favorite LinkedIn bro). Then we hand all of it to human designers & strategists. The designers &...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader - I was not a programmer. My entire technical background was: ‘hire a developer and hope for the best’. As of a year and a half ago, my big AI move was exporting a CSV from my MMP, uploading it to ChatGPT, and asking it questions about my performance data. I thought I was ahead of the curve. I was very proud of myself. Turns out I was doing pivot tables with a chat interface on top. Something changed though. I started writing code with AI. I now spend 35 to 40 hours a week on my...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, Every week I pick apart subscription app ads on LinkedIn. What's working. What's broken. What could be fixed in thirty seconds. Hooks that tap into the lived experience of users(and those that are written by brand managers that have never spoken to a user). I've done this long enough: 50,000+ ads produced, hundreds monthly, $100M+ in spend managed: that the pattern recognition is basically automatic at this point. I've built AI agents to help with parts of the workflow(based on...
3 months ago • 1 min read