Welcome to Intelligent Artifice, your weekly dose of insights to help you win with performance marketing in a Generative AI world.
Intelligent Artifice features hard won insights from the front-lines of performance marketing in a Generative AI world - delivered straight into your inbox. For free.
new wave. same playbook.
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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 trusted with that kind of budget. It felt reckless. I felt unqualified(and I'd had a couple years of marketing experience). What if I made a small mistake and blew $500k of the company's money? I mean - surely you'd need 4-5 marketers to handle that kind of budget? As it turned out in the just-exploding world of mobile marketing, you could stay lean and move fast. And here’s the crazy part... We made it work. We tested 15+ mobile ad channels. Found signal. Scaled. And the company? Exited for $170 million(look up Bingo Bash, still around today). All from a game I thought nobody played. That experience taught me something I’ll never forget: When the market’s new, everything feels impossible… until it isn’t. And the people who learn fast, test fast, and move fast? They win. Now here we are. 2025. And it’s happening again. Except this time, it’s generative AI. Same feelings. Same skepticism. Same upside. I see founders and marketers today treating DALL·E and ChatGPT like toys. But they’re not toys. They’re the tools that let us test 10x more creative, angles, and hooks: without a huge team. And the performance gains? They’re just as wild as those early mobile days. I missed the internet boom. I caught the mobile wave. And now: this is the next one. If you’re spending $50k+/month and you’re still moving slow on AI… you’re sitting on the sidelines. Reply with “WAVE” and I’ll show you how we’re helping brands scale creative testing the smart (and weird) way. Later, Shamanth P.S. I know the feeling of not being ready. You don’t need to be. You just need to move. PPS. Some ideas from our world: 🔥 DALL·E 3 still aint' available via API - boo. 💰 Early stage subscription apps: stop wasting money on fancy analytics 🤦♂️ That "winning ad" is killing your scaling potential |
Welcome to Intelligent Artifice, your weekly dose of insights to help you win with performance marketing in a Generative AI world.
Intelligent Artifice features hard won insights from the front-lines of performance marketing in a Generative AI world - delivered straight into your inbox. For free.
Hi Reader After 16 years in performance marketing, I’ve learned something most people don’t want to admit: Nobody actually knows what the algorithm wants. Not Meta. Not the gurus. Not the guy posting “7 hacks to scale your ROAS.” (Not even the guy who is writing this email to you all.) We all have pieces of the truth. Which reminds me of that old parable: A group of blind men each touches one part of an elephant. One says it’s a rope. Another says a tree. Another says a wall. All of them are...
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...
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....