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 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 - 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...
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....