|
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 nervous system. (Fun fact: Hemingway did the same thing, copying Hunter S. Thompson and F. Scott Fitzgerald to absorb their style. And that dude knew what he was doing.) And guess what? It freakin' WORKED. My strategy got razor-sharp. ✅ My persuasion skills went through the roof. ✅ I could crank out killer sales letters in my sleep. ✅ I started to develop a sort of X-ray vision for persuasive writing. But here's the mind-blowing truth I've discovered recently…. All that persuasion power - the hooks, the pain points, the emotional arcs? It's NECESSARY... but it ain't ENOUGH anymore. Not in this video-obsessed world we live in. This hit me like a ton of bricks a few months back. We had started using AI to write these killer ad scripts. They ticked EVERY box on the persuasion checklist: ✓ Positioning that crushed the competition ✓ Flow that was smooth as butter ✓ Hook that grabbed attention ✓ CTAs that demanded action ✓ Logic that was airtight Man, these scripts were BEAUTIFUL. But the ads? They BOMBED. Hard. Why? Because while we nailed the WORDS, we completely ignored the VISUAL STORYTELLING. We had scripts that would make any copywriter drool. But the execution? Just talking heads droning on. No transitions. No movement. No visual rhythm. It was like putting a Ferrari engine in a shopping cart and wondering why you weren't winning races. So we went back to the drawing board. For MONTHS, we obsessively studied the visual mechanics of high-performing video ads. We watched THOUSANDS of ads. Broke them down frame-by-frame. And we cracked the code on the visual storytelling patterns that make people stop, watch, and take action:
We turned all this into our visual storytelling playbook. And now we're sharing it - not because we're nice (though we are) - but because I KNOW how much it sucks to put out an ad that should work in theory... and watch it face-plant. If you've got the script, the hook, the offer... but your ads still flop? THIS is why. Grab our playbook for free right here. And if you're dropping $50k+ monthly on ads and want our team to fix your visual storytelling directly to drive CPAs and ROAS-es, hit reply with "VISUAL STORY" and we'll jam. Later, Shamanth PS: Some goodies from our socials over here... ☂️ made WAY more creatives for an app spending $20k vs one spending $75k on UA a few months ago ** 📕Bible Chat makes $3.6mm a year. I ran semantic analyses of ~182 of their videos ** 🏋️♂️ The algorithm knows your audience better than you do. 🚀 The lowest hanging fruit for apps targeting both men & women? ** |
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 - There's a robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called Marvin. Full name: Marvin the Paranoid Android. He's the smartest thing in the universe, and he's miserable about it. In one scene, he tells a mattress he's thirty billion times smarter than it is. To prove it, he runs a little test. "Think of a number, any number." "Er, five." "Wrong. You see?" The mattress comes away very impressed. I think about that scene a lot when we use AI to analyze ads. Because the analysis...
Hi Reader - Years ago, I was working on a word game, and we were killing it in the US. So we ran an experiment in the UK. After all, they speak English too, right? I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said: England and America are two countries divided by a common language. (Whoever it was that said it, I was about to prove it.) Anywayyy for our word game, the UK did even better than the US. CPI was strong. Cost per first puzzle played was strong. D1 ROAS was extremely strong, and D7 held...
Hi Reader - Before I scaled an app from $30K a month in ad spend to $1.5M(profitably), first I cut it to zero. I've told the zero part before. What I didn't tell you is what happened in the two months after. Because turning the spend off turned out to be the easy half. Zero spend fixes exactly one thing: it stops you paying to pour users into a leaky bucket. It does not fix the bucket. And in a five-person company, zero spend isn't a strategy. It's a countdown. Or a ticking time bomb. Pick...