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.
ceiling, meet sledgehammer.
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Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], I hear it ALL. THE. TIME. “We’ve hit our ceiling.” “Our product is too mature.” “We’ve tapped out our audience.” They’ve got six figures in spend, maybe 5-6 figures in DAU. They’re running a handful of ads a month. Performance has plateaued. And they’re wondering if that’s just the ceiling. And every time, I want to reach through my screen and shake these people. Let me tell you why…. I worked on Words With Friends. Not when it was shiny and new. When it was 8 YEARS OLD. A dinosaur in app years. Hundreds of millions of installs. Brand recognition through the roof. The kind of product your grandma had heard of(and played). By all conventional wisdom, this thing should have been DEAD. But guess what? We were still growing. AGGRESSIVELY. And spending 7-figures monthly. PROFITABLY. So what was the difference between Words With Friends and all these “mature” products that are supposedly “maxed out”? One simple mindset shift: We didn’t see maturity as a ceiling. We saw it as a CHALLENGE. Here’s what most teams do when growth plateaus:
Here’s what we did at Words With Friends:
It wasn’t random. It wasn’t desperate. It was METHODICAL. High-velocity. Structured. Relentless. The experimental mindset infected EVERYONE. Product team. UA team. Design team. Everyone was obsessed with breaking through plateaus. No one EVER said, “Welp, we’re mature now. Time to pack it up!” Instead, they asked: “How do we get to the next level?” ** This was the biggest thing I took away from working on that team…. …and this is EXACTLY the mindset we’ve built into our team. We don’t have “creatives” on our team today. We have RELENTLESS EXPERIMENTERS. People who aren’t satisfied making 4 pretty ads and crossing their fingers. They’re running tens(sometimes hundreds) of ads a month: intentionally.
And here’s the part most people completely miss: In a world of generative AI, your creative team isn’t just a design function. It’s your GROWTH ENGINE. And experimentation is the fuel. The faster you test, the faster you learn, the faster you scale. So if you’re sitting there worried that your product has “matured” or “peaked”… Ask yourself this instead: Are you testing like the teams that are obsessed with breaking past plateaus? Because if not, you’re nowhere NEAR your ceiling. You haven’t even installed the damn ladder. Want help turning your creative workflow into a high-velocity testing lab? If you’re spending ~$50k/month or more on ads, hit reply with “LAB” and I’ll show you exactly how we can help you build testing systems for you that ship fast, learn fast, and scale smart. Later, Shamanth PS: ICYMI here is a case study of how we broke through the plateau of an 'untouchable' legacy ad in a few weeks for a 'mature' kids app.. P.P.S. From the lab: 💎 Incrementality tests aren't always a holy grail (after $100MM+ in ad spend) 🤔 $5,500 for your first influencer collab - should you pay it? 🤯 We slashed CPIs by 70.5% without touching a SINGLE creative 😅 Our TikTok ads for Bumble ran for 267 days (and everyone keeps asking how tf we did it) 💡AI changed how we make ads - but the biggest shift happened when we started doing this. 🤦♂️ My entire life collapsed in seconds when the US consulate handed me that blue slip. 🧠 You stopped Meta from ‘stealing’ credit — and now your ROAS is tanking. Here’s what to do instead. 💵 We scaled ad spend from $30K to $1.5M/month. Here were 5 big inflection points in our journey. |
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 [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], ZERO. That was the number I wrote on the whiteboard. A month into my new role as Director of Growth, I stood in front of our five-person company, grabbed a marker… and said: “We need to shut off all ad spend.” Not cut. Not reduce. Zero. Cold turkey. It was one of the most emotionally difficult decisions I’ve ever made. Because let’s be real: I wasn’t just pausing ad spend. I was shutting down my own function. I was saying: “The thing I was hired to do? The thing I’ve...
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...
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], I just watched a team light $100,000 on fire. Not literally. But close enough. Soooo I was auditing this account that was spending in the six figures. They had this BEAUTIFUL creative briefing deck. I mean, this thing was a masterpiece: ✅ Hypotheses laid out like a scientific paper ✅ Cutesy little gifs to showcase every concept ✅ Brand values articulated with surgical precision ✅ Shot sequences scripted better than most Netflix shows It was the kind of document that...