hi Reader - Many moons ago, I studied improv theater in New York City. If you arent familiar with it, here’s how it works: You walk onstage with four or five people. The audience gives you one word. And from that, your job is to build a full 10-minute theatrical production. No script. No props. No plan. In one of my first classes, I took the word “cabbage”… “Hey, I’m a talking cabbage at a job interview. “Hi hiring manager, you are a carrot talking to me.” “Oh hey, there is ranch dressing in...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader I thought it was the best thing after sliced bread. When I first wrote the code for Brute Force AI, I was fired up. The plan was simple: ✅ Take your top-performing ads. ✅ Take your worst performers. ✅ Use AI to analyze 'em. ✅ Extract exactly what separates the high-performers vs. the rest. 🤑 Profit I thought it was genius. I obsessed over the code to fine-tune it. And then I ran the analysis on actual ads. ...and waited with bated breath to see the results.... And it just… sucked....
18 days ago • 2 min read
Hi {FirstName}, I see the same loop on LinkedIn all the time. One guru yells: “Run more Reels. Get the younger users. Waittt. Go after feeds. Older users.” Another whispers: “Talk to your users. Tap into their psyche. Message is everything.” They both sound smart. But here’s what actually happens: You chase the hot format… and performance tanks. You do deep research… and your ads still crash like a ton of bricks. If I had a dollar for every deeply researched ad that completely bombed in an ad...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], ZERO. That was the number I wrote on the whiteboard. A month into my new role as Director of Growth, I stood in front of our five-person company, grabbed a marker… and said: “We need to shut off all ad spend.” Not cut. Not reduce. Zero. Cold turkey. It was one of the most emotionally difficult decisions I’ve ever made. Because let’s be real: I wasn’t just pausing ad spend. I was shutting down my own function. I was saying: “The thing I was hired to do? The thing I’ve...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], I hear it ALL. THE. TIME. “We’ve hit our ceiling.” “Our product is too mature.” “We’ve tapped out our audience.” They’ve got six figures in spend, maybe 5-6 figures in DAU. They’re running a handful of ads a month. Performance has plateaued. And they’re wondering if that’s just the ceiling. And every time, I want to reach through my screen and shake these people. Let me tell you why…. I worked on Words With Friends. Not when it was shiny and new. When it was 8 YEARS...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], In 2013, I started my career in B2C mobile marketing. My first big project? A Bingo game. And I remember thinking: “How many middle-aged people could there really be in America playing bingo on their phones?” That was my actual thought. Two weeks in, I saw the monthly budget that I needed to manage for this Bingo game. $1.75 million Just me. No roadmap. No junior marketers to do grunt work. And I was not ready. I couldn’t wrap my head around how one person could be...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], I just watched a team light $100,000 on fire. Not literally. But close enough. Soooo I was auditing this account that was spending in the six figures. They had this BEAUTIFUL creative briefing deck. I mean, this thing was a masterpiece: ✅ Hypotheses laid out like a scientific paper ✅ Cutesy little gifs to showcase every concept ✅ Brand values articulated with surgical precision ✅ Shot sequences scripted better than most Netflix shows It was the kind of document that...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], Many moons ago, I had this weird morning ritual. For the first 60 minutes of my day, I'd grab a pen and a stack of papers... and I'd literally handwrite famous sales letters. Word. For. Word. Halbert. Schwartz. Ogilvy. The legends. Why the hell would I waste my time doing that? Because I wanted that stuff BURNED into my brain... All those psychological triggers: scarcity, pain, desire, FOMO, urgency... I wanted to not just study these - I wanted to reprogram my...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE] "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker "I just made 200 ads in 20 seconds!" - LinkedInBro Let me tell you why that second quote makes me want to throw my laptop out the window. I've been watching this bizarre trend unfold where everyone's bragging about how FAST they can churn out ads with AI. Like it's some kind of digital duck-measuring contest. ** Let's be brutally honest here. I've been guilty of...
5 months ago • 3 min read