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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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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], 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...

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...

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...

Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE] "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker "I just made 200 ads in 20 seconds!" - LinkedInBro Let me tell you why that second quote makes me want to throw my laptop out the window. I've been watching this bizarre trend unfold where everyone's bragging about how FAST they can churn out ads with AI. Like it's some kind of digital duck-measuring contest. ** Let's be brutally honest here. I've been guilty of...

Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], Let me tell you how spectacularly stupid I was about AI. No, seriously. I was THE poster child for AI delusion. When we first started using AI for analyzing videos and ads(with the early version of BruteForce AI), I was convinced I'd just unlocked god mode for marketing. This tool would review EVERY. SINGLE. FRAME. of any video ad and spit out pure marketing gold(or so I thought). I literally did a little dance at my desk. (Don't judge me.) "THIS IS IT!" I muttered....

Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], Soooo there's this massive hype storm around AI agents right now. "They'll write your emails! They'll create your ads! They'll walk your dog and do your taxes!" Look, I'm as excited about this tech as anyone. We use AI every day in every part of our business. But here's the awkward truth nobody's talking about... When it comes to making ads that actually CONVERT, AI agents still don't cut it. ** Not even close. Here's why: Last week, I ran an experiment. I generated...

Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], Something weird happened the other day. We built this tool BruteForce AI that basically 'watches' every ad, reads every script, correlates these with performance metrics and analyzes what works and what bombs. And here's what happened... It started spitting out all these patterns about which hooks get people to stop scrolling and pay attention. Opinion hooks, curiosity stuff, all that jazz. And honestly? We throw away about 70% of what the AI produces. Because...

Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], “Goodness, is AI coming for our jobs?” - he asked. See, I was showing them our software BruteForce.AI - and he was astonished by the raw horsepower that let BruteForce.AI dive deep under the hood of ads, scripts and themes. I had to say: no. AI isnt coming for our jobs. Not true for the 10x marketers who embrace AI. Here is why. AI is only as good as its inputs. It’s not a magic bullet for everything. AI doesn’t work without the right inputs. Heck, even with the...