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 Last time I told you how our “lazy” variations crushed the bold new ads in the account. What I didn’t say? If we hadn’t figured that out, the whole account would’ve gone off a cliff. I didnt realize how close to a crazy drop we were. It’s easy to think ‘haha lazy’ - and move on. and hard to appreciate how hard it is to build a rock-solid testing system. This is why I see most teams(even well intentioned) bleed out. Because this is what their tests can look like: No structure 20 new...
Hi Reader In 2013, I was running user acquisition for a mobile app called Bingo Bash. Our monthly ad budget? $1.75 million. When I’d just joined, I honestly couldn’t believe it was humanly possible for a single product to spend that much. I thought Bingo was for a tiny niche of middle-aged women. But this was the wild west of mobile growth: when platforms were exploding ...and anything was possible. So we spent. Scaled up. And one ad quietly started hogging a huge chunk of that budget. This...
Hi Reader After I sent that last email about building on winning ads… I got hit with some replies that all sounded kinda like this: “Okay… but what about new ideas?” “What about new formats? New audiences?” And look: I get it. Most marketers hear “optimize what’s working” ….and just assume you’ve stopped trying to grow. But here’s the truth: that is a false dichotomy.... The smartest marketers dont pick... between optimizing what's working and what's new. They build off what works AND go...