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 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 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....
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...