Welcome to Intelligent Artifice, your weekly dose of insights to help you win with performance marketing in a Generative AI world.
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Cabbage at a job interview
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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 the break room.” I thought it was funny. The audience didn’t laugh. My teammates looked confused. And my teacher said: “What the __ are you doing?” She wasn’t wrong. Then she said something that changed how I saw the whole thing: “The goal isn’t to invent new things. It’s to build on what you already have. …and… When in doubt, ask yourself: ‘If this is true… what else is true?’ Next time, I played it differently. Same word: cabbage. This time, it’s a kitchen. A stubborn grandmother. A distracted grandson playing. A family recipe passed down—or lost. We went one line at a time. Listening to my partners. Building. Adding gradually to what came before. Not going crazy with improbable, impossible, unfunny premises. And somehow… it all made sense. And it felt… MAGICAL… to see a 10 minute play emerge from ONE word. Not because it was wild. But because it was grounded. We built something that made sense within the truth of the world. Sooo what does this all have to do with creative strategy?I saw a post recently: “20 formats you MUST test in your ad account.” And look, I get the temptation. But if you’ve ever run real spend through Meta, you know the reality: 19(heck, 20) of those formats will bomb. You’ll burn time, money, and energy. That’s cabbage-at-a-job-interview energy. Most marketers try to reinvent the wheel. New concept. New format. New world. Every time. But the top 1%? They don’t invent from scratch. They build off what’s already working. They start with one proven ad. And they ask: “If this is true… what else is true?” New hook. New angle. Different structure. Same core concept. And yes: they do chase net new concepts, the blue ocean stuff… to pursue ideas that havent tested before, to try new things. BUT not without nailing what is already working. That’s why we built Brute Force AI. It’s our internal tool to deconstruct what’s actually performing… either in your own top ads, or in the most common patterns we see in the Meta Ads Library. No theories. No wild guesses. Just clear signals. Real performance, reversed and rebuilt. It’s improv for ads: we’ve trained the machine to ask: “If this is true… what else is true?” And then keep building. …which is how we get results like this… If you are spending $50k a month, and want to start scaling effectively and profitably…. Hit reply with “IMPROV.” We’ll show you how to unleash creative wins in a way that ‘bottles the magic’ of your current performers AND surfaces net new ideas. Later, Shamanth |
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, I was reading the AppsFlyer 2026 State of Subscriptions report last week(it’s free, there’s no email gate, you can click and read directly). For fun. On a Sunday. I’m a lot of fun at parties. One set of numbers has been living in my head rent-free ever since. In Photo & Video, the top 5 apps’ share of UA spend dropped from 64% to 45% in a single year. Every other category got more consolidated. This one went the other way. New entrants took spend share away from incumbents, which...
Hi Reader - I was doomscrolling the other day on LinkedIn. Everyone was going on about RIP media buyers, RIP designers. …and how to write better prompts. how to get better outputs. Utterly fascinating stuff. All that stuff LinkedIn thought leaders love to post about between their humble brags about revenue milestones. And I noticed something that made me laugh. All of the AI prompting advice was also just… management advice. The exact same stuff people have been saying for 100+ years. So I...
Hi Reader - Del Close taught basically everyone who's been funny in the last 40 years. Tina Fey. Bill Murray. Amy Poehler. Mike Myers. The godfather of modern improv. He wrote a book called Truth in Comedy. The title is the lesson. His whole thing: nothing is funnier than the truth. The audience laughs when they recognize something real. The moment you abandon truth for something clever, you lose them. I keep coming back to this because ads work exactly the same way. We've all been in that...