Building StudioFlow - helping ecom brands scale their paid ads with AI creatives.
Work with us →
Joined September 2022
- Tweets4.8K
- Following32
- Followers3.5K
- Likes2.5K
Overstated at this point but how do people even operate Meta Ads considering how dogshit their UI/entire system is?
Taken me the best part of 2 hours to upload 6 media files that are ~1 min each
It is borderline unusable
Hot take is that "leaving your hometown" isn't necessarily the flex you think it is or some crazy anchor for character development.
Character development is intrinsic and shouldn't be affected by an external environment.
Loving your hometown/maintaining traditions/keeping things in the family might be the new meta
Super Pumped by Mike Isaac about Travis Kalanick is one of the best books I've read to date.
Guy just absolutely steamrolled his way through Silicon Valley and took the most aggressive route possible to growing Uber with a literal total refusal to compromise.
They made half a BILLION dollars from just adding a $1 "safe ride fee" that was supposed to fund extra safety checks for drivers but just went straight into their profit.
So many lessons in there
These ads can work well for companies like @opalapp because:
- the viewer is experiencing the problem while watching the ad
- the storytelling makes it feel more personal and holds their attention
- it's genuinely a good creative and enjoyable to watch
From what I've seen though, don't convert super well for 99% of other brands
Not sure what the obsession is with Canary Wharf and these high-rise flats tbh
Most soulless, clinical, uninspiring place on earth.
You live in London yet have somehow managed to find the one specific area devoid of any sort of character.
What happened to having taste
This is absolute facts lol
As a founder you do not need to be obsessing over Grok bot and Claude code.
Setting up custom this and custom that is not going to make you more money
I'm always curious about these corporate ads.
like do they actually work?
They obviously must do otherwise these companies wouldn't put so much $ behind them but they're so bad
Copy is so bad too
I know it's LinkedIn ads + messaging prob more aligned with brands likely to advertise on Linkedin but what am I missing here?
Watched this video of Iman back in 2020 which is directly what led me to start a business.
Was part of his early GYA courses/community and I recall him directly telling me on a call my idea to start SMMA for lawyers was a terrible one lol
Have spoken to him and his team directly quite a few times over the last 5-6 years and had a profound impact on my business growth.
Can attribute over 7-figures personally made as a direct result from Iman and his advice/inspiration and most likely wouldn't have actually even started a business in the first place if I hadn't stumbled across his content during lockdown
Genuinely can't decide whether I'm a fan of what Resilia are doing or not.
Clearly doing well and growing quickly but so many of their ads are just these crazy stories that I'm not sure if a great look for the brand.
Mimetic desire was one of the largest inhibiting factors to my personal character development.
Ironically used to wear this brand 5+ years ago before it came into the UK and largely before anyone I knew had heard of it and it largely shaped my taste.
Since then and up until fairly recently I found myself losing interest in what I'd consider my own taste as algorithms slowly move you towards accepting Dubai, Miami, Rolexes etc as what you "want"
Kith CEO @RonnieFieg says social media algorithms have flattened taste:
“Everyone now wants the same thing. You used to be forced to have your own opinion.”
His influence came from riding across Queens, watching completely different cultures get on the train, and walking into stores before the internet had already told everyone what to like.
“Every other stop would be a different culture hopping on the train.”
“What I got to see became my world. That was my influence. I got to see so many different styles, people dressed in so many different ways, and that’s when the sense of individuality was at an all-time high.”
“Before you were influenced by your algorithm, which now, a lot of people want the same things because it’s based off what they see.”
“Back then, when you went shopping, you were forced to have an opinion because you wouldn’t have seen everything.”
“Today, people will walk into a store and know about all the products before they walk in. They’ve already seen someone wearing it, a photo of it, a lookbook of it, a campaign of it.”
“Back then you were just forced to have your own opinion.”
We have multiple clients spending between $1m-$10m each month on ads.
All of that data has given us a pretty good insight into what a winning ad script looks like.
This is the recurring spine in every winning script:
Sometimes the next level of growth just comes from giving more people a product they can buy.
Ridge is a great case study.
Instead of agonising over new angles/reasons to buy, just create more products.
More products = more angles/ads
(This is even more so true with commodities - only so many features/reasons to buy a wallet etc.)
Incredibly fine line between "trending" and "fatigued".
A format can be trending and worth testing as "new" from the perspective of the brand, yet from the perspective of the customer it's "another AI song ad".
Important to bear in mind
We are building the first actually good fully automated AI ad system that produces creative.
Not mass-market like Higgs etc - uses real ad account data, VoC research and creative strategy.
This ad required zero human intervention and took minutes to produce:
If you have an older/more mature audience, you should be leaning into long copy as much as possible.
Our clients that do always tell us that plain-text emails significantly outperform design, and long-form statics leading to a editorial/listicle perform best too.
Not every ad needs to be shorter/faster or more visually elaborate.
My interpretation of the bell curve meme is you start off thinking best option is to just lock in, spend 12+ hours/day in front of a screen.
Middle you think it's better to get outside more/start writing, reading etc and clearing your head.
And then you just end up back with the realisation you need to get back behind the screen and lock in
(I haven't got it figured out yet tho so could be completely wrong here!)
Interesting consideration for ads/angles is that there are usually distinctly different reasons one-time customers buy vs recurring.
Wilder angles/novel claims etc can inflate metrics due to attracting more one-time customers, but higher-lifetime-value customers tend to buy for more boring recurring reasons.
Angles less exciting but that shows an everyday use case will typically outperform on a longer-term