AI Ad Creative Testing Works; Everything Else Is Noise

“How do I do this without being a shameless plug? Hmmmm 🤔 Okay, been writing on the topics of AI strategy and tactics from a PM POV relatively regularly here: https://deanpeters.substack.com/ Downside: I'm not a PM influencer A-lister like Lenny or Cutler, so my ramblings are based on the shit I hear and see as I teach & coach on the topic. Upside: I'm not a PM influencer A-lister like Lenny or Cutler. So you can always come back here and ask questions or tell me I'm full of shit”

“A moat is anything a competitor can’t recreate inexpensively. If your competitors need a talented team to recreate what you’ve done. You have a moat. If a non-technical entrepreneur can create a product with a AI prompt, a competitor can too. If you can create it with a cheap outsourced team, a competitor can too. If the only way a competitor can recreate what you’ve done is with similar investment in expert talent, your code is a moat.”

“I agree with u/Humble-Pay-8650 . Product strategy doesn’t change due to AI. The new superpower is having a clear, defendable position about how fast your target market users can adopt features. As Dev teams can push features 3x or 10x faster, someone has to protect the users from being buried in feature slop. The best AI PMs will be the ones who can convince execs to reassign Dev teams as each Dev becomes more productive. (Don’t fire Devs. Just use the bandwidth to build additional products inst”

“We will see what happens in the Ai world sooner or later. But it would be cool I agree. Btw, what would you want as a feature for marketing specifically?”

“Most of what people call AI in ecommerce right now is just faster copywriting. What actually interests me is the layer below that, where AI stops being a writing assistant and starts being able to reach directly into your tools. I've been testing the MCP integration Omnisend has with Claude, and the difference is real. Instead of generating copy and then manually setting up flows around it, you can describe what you want in plain language and have Claude actually do the work inside the platf”

“What's one workflow where AI made you think: "I'm never doing this manually again." Not looking for "writing ad copy." I'm curious about the workflows that genuinely save hours or improve performance - account audits, search term mining, scripts, reporting, creative analysis, MCPs, agents... anything. What's yours, and how does it work? submitted by /u/Recent_Prune_885 [link] [comments]”

“I would say, that based on the customer visiting the shop AI will create a custom storefront on the fly, individual to each user. So structure stays, content and products change based on the user.”

“I was in the same boat but it was for logos and brand guidelines for a service not products. Have you considered hiring a freelancer to create brand guidelines? You can start with that and then feed that into an AI tool so it has something to work off of. Plenty of freelancers can do this for you. It saved me a lot of time and kinda wish I went that route sooner”

“I’ve been messing about connecting AI to my Amazon Ads data over the last while, and it’s genuinely saved me a load of time. The setup’s nothing fancy: I’ve hooked my Amazon Ads account up via the API, running it through a local terminal on a Mac Mini I’ve got sat at home, with Claude doing the actual analysis. Sharing in case it’s useful, and mostly because I’m curious what everyone else has rigged up. What it does for me right now: Negative terms. It chews through my search term reports and fl”

Yeah man, another thing I was missing is also include legal decisions to make this even more accurate. You are 100% correct, Ill change my marketing approach to it! Thank you

“I've tried a lot of AI ad video tools, but none of them create ads that actually run. I'm thinking of building one where you just paste a product URL, and it generates platform-specific ad videos (TikTok, Instagram, Meta, YouTube Shorts) with optimized hooks, scripts, and CTAs. Would you use something like this? What's the biggest thing current tools are missing? submitted by /u/Electronic-Drive7419 [link] [comments]”

“Went through the site. The strongest thing you've got is the framing of "the machine around the model" vs ChatGPT/Claude, that's a real distinction and it's the one that would convince someone paying $45/mo instead of using an AI subscription they already have. But that framing is doing all the work in the FAQ, not on the marketing site itself. Nothing above the fold or in the "Feral at work" section actually shows the critique-and-rewrite loop happening. You'”

“Appreciate the suggestion. building sth with custom AI Is interesting, though we are still a small team and do not have much tech experience. We are probably looking for a ready to use tool rather than developing our own right now”

“Was watching a YouTube video yesterday and the person was talking about a new campaign type that will be available in Google soon called Standard Shopping with AI Max. It's in beta right now. The campaign serves to shopping ads and search. Sounds interesting Just wondering if anyone is testing this out now and what you're seeing. submitted by /u/waves731 [link] [comments]”

“Over the last few months I’ve noticed something interesting. People talk about AI search as though it’s replacing Google but I’m not convinced that’s what’s actually happening. For years, most of us could assume the customer journey looked something like this: Google → Website → Sign up It wasn’t perfect, but it was simple. Today, I’m not convinced there is a single default journey anymore. Instead, buyers are discovering products in lots of different ways. Some still start on Google. Some ask C”

“This drives me crazy. We’re all being told to ask “how could we leverage AI?” But that’s not a customer problem! Sure, there may be customer problems that are solved by AI, but in a lot of cases we end up making a worse, more expensive feature because we had to incorporate AI rather than just hard coding an algorithmic one.”

“Personally speaking - this is a data and input issue. I run a popup and data collection and analytics company. We collect data points from 70%+ of first time buyers about their customer journey complete with what converts by orders revenue etc. We then take that data and combine it with reviews to find themes that match then we create statics to test with templates. Then when we find something with traction we go to video in canva. Then founder video. Staying on brand doesn’t matter until you ar”

“I've been working on AI features and we keep building features to drive adoption but then don't use them ourselves even though we use our own tools all the time. It seems wild because we keep writing strategy pages about how we will win with AI that delights our customers but they don't love our AI features and neither do we. It seems really weird. I'd understand if you're working on a feature for lawyers or some other group that are very different from you. But our AI use ca”

“I handed a script to the production team last month. "Busy office, people working, energetic atmosphere." That's what I wrote. That's what came back. It looked like every stock footage clip ever made. And I realized: that's not the production team's fault. That's my writing. That got me thinking. What if I could visualize my own scripts before handing them off? Not produce the final thing. Just get a rough version of what's in my head. So I tried it. Took 5 of m”

“Only way I was able to get a good one was to make my own highly curated to my brand”

“I partially agree. It has never been as easy as it is now to build a vibe coded AI app, but I think marketing and distribution is harder compared to 1-2 years ago.”

Just hire an agency

“the AI presenter thing is a genuinely smart move for the phase you're in, not a cop out. testing hooks and angles is expensive when every variant needs a real human on camera, so getting cheap volume out first makes sense. where it tends to hit a ceiling is once you've found a winning angle and want to actually scale spend. if you look at the ad libraries of DTC and SaaS brands that are spending real money, the stuff running at volume skews heavily UGC, real faces, real rooms, imperfect”

“Agently is an AI chief of staff for your company. The idea: instead of one more stateless tool you have to babysit, an AI that actually holds your company's context — a persistent knowledge graph across every app you use — and acts on it. At the center is Jarvis, an orchestrator that reads your company brain and dispatches agents to do end-to-end work. A Stripe event kicks off a Slack thread, spins up a Linear ticket, routes the work through an agent — triggered, running, shipped — without y”

“the two things you flagged as separate (thin days plus overstated importance) are really one problem underneath: the model's importance ranking. when the ranking's off it both talks through dead days and inflates a dependency bump into a headline. a repo is actually a cleaner source than a changelog for this, since commits and PRs come pre-structured, so the model is ranking real events instead of guessing from prose someone hand-wrote. written with ai”

“The question in the title seems a little obvious. I think, in general, honesty is the best policy. But I’ll try to add some nuance. For the record, I will preface that I don’t have any issue with AI-coded apps/tools. If it works, it works, and I’ve made plenty myself. However, the general premise of this question is based on how I see people routinely frame their project when they are promoting it online. Generally, I tend to identify two types of framing: ”I made _____” *or* ”I had Claude/ChatG”

“Saw a couple posts from one of the founders on LinkedIn, but I’ve never actually heard anyone mention the company. Has anyone used it or know anything about it? Curious if anyone here has come across it. submitted by /u/Evening_Hawk_7470 [link] [comments]”

“I keep seeing the same pattern: someone builds a genuinely useful AI tool or agent, posts it once on Reddit or Product Hunt, gets a small spike, then crickets. The product isn't the problem. Distribution is. I'm working on building a network of AI builders and connectors — people who can actually introduce products to the right audiences. As part of that, I'm running an interview series where I feature indie builders, their projects, and their stories across X, LinkedIn, and a growin”

“Even if you ignore the moral implications of generative Ai, studies are being done and most of them show that Ai generated advertising is just not effective. People are more likely to ignore it or find it annoying than a normal ad. Engagement rates for Ai ads are also generally much lower than with non Ai generated images. With how terribly hard it already is to market a podcast right now, using any Ai generated stuff is not the way to go if you want people to listen to your podcast.”

Exactly

“I've been doing digital marketing since it came out 20+ years ago and I've never seen anything like this AI shift. I mean look, it's cool and all in some ways, but have you noticed now most of your favorite Youtube creators are using it to write their scirpts and it all sounds the same! Grrrr.... AI has a way of phrasing things like: It's not the ___ that counts, it's the ____ that you put into it. ETC... The point is this, I feel like with content marketing these days it fee”

“I feel in this time of similar AI apps, I think that marketing and distribution is more important than ever. I am working on several products, and I definitely know if I start making MRR from it, a competitor can potentially copy my ideas. However, I feel a strong customer base and strong marketing/sales is important as a solo founder. Let me know what you think?”

100%

“I have seen a lot of websites are having an ai chatbot to their landing pages, these days . I also want to build an ai chatbot for my website, Where visitors can ask questions about the product , And I can monitor what people are asking and improve my product , according to it. I have searched a lot , turns out there are plenty in the market . Which one is the best software for building AI chatbots for website ? submitted by /u/Mr_Gyan491 [link] [comments]”

“Exactly 😄 My point is that APIs might become the primary interface, while websites become more of a human-facing layer than the main product.”

“We looked at a few existing tools, but most only handled one piece of the process. We still would’ve been moving information between systems and manually checking the edge cases. A VA could do that, but we wanted to remove the repetitive monitoring rather than hire someone to keep doing it. The custom route made sense because it was built around how we already work and only flags us when something actually needs attention. Since we were doing this for multiple clients it just made sense.”

“Yep also very true, marketing can be hard and its something a lot of people struggle with. AI has only increased the noise and competition so it may be even harder now.”

“If you're bootstrapped, skip the fancy AI suites and look at three things: open-source LLMs (like Llama via Hugging Face) for trend scraping from food subreddits and review sites, affordable consumer panels through Prolific or Attest for quick concept testing, and free tools like Google Trends paired with a simple prompt to spot emerging flavor combos. The key is combining cheap data with a cheap model - not buying an overpriced "food innovation" platform that just wraps the same A”

“i found that scraping public reviews on amazon for similar products is way cheaper n honestly more insightful”

“What are you actually trying to get out of this? What's AI supposed to do? Automatically search the web and tell you what food products are a sure way to make you rich? Right now you're just looking to buy something that will do something, but you haven't said anything about what that something actually is, what the results supposed to be. What you want to input into this AI tool to get what type of output, and what that output is supposed to help make possible. What do you have righ”

“I've been trying to figure out how small food startups do market research without spending a fortune. We're still pretty small so paying for an expensive research isn't realistic in my opinion. I keep seeing these AI tools that promise food innovation and consumer insights but it's hard to tell which ones are useful. Has anyone found an affordable Ai tool that helped with product ideas or understanding what customers might want next? I'm looking for real experiences and not m”

“The part that resonated with me was the "AI got me to 80%" bit. I think that's where a lot of people get the wrong idea. Getting something that works is easy now. Getting something people actually enjoy using is where all the time goes. Also, launching for under $50 is impressive. The real investment was obviously your time, not the tools. Curious—if you started over today, is there anything you'd do differently in those last 3 months?”

“Care of "research" these days, everyone has the same AI. It's not the tactics that will win the game. Its the strategy. Who is buying? What are they buying? And most important, why would they buy it?”

“yeah I think the value of doing it manually at first is you learn which message resonates before you scale it, once you know that automating becomes way more effective”

“I’ve been working on a small AI-related product recently, and I’m realizing that building the actual product might be the easier part. The hard part is everything after that. I can explain the features, but turning that into a clear landing page is harder than I expected. I also keep going back and forth on where the first users should come from. Product Hunt feels too early. Reddit is tricky because nobody likes self-promo. Cold outreach feels spammy if the positioning isn’t clear. SEO feels to”

“Many AI tools are now making claims that they can review previously created advertisements within a specific timeframe and then provide the user with recommendations on how to create new advertisements based on the results of the analysis that was performed. While Isee why this would be appealing, because if a program can look at thousands of previously created advertisements and they can find patterns across all those ads, that could help you identify which types of ads are likely to perform be”

“your hesitation is valid. “generate thousands of AI UGC ads” is usually the wrong promise for products with real details. for anything technical or demo-heavy, i wouldn’t let AI invent the product. that’s where you get weird proportions, wrong buttons, fake use cases, and comments calling it out. the better workflow is: use real product footage/photos as the truth layer, then use AI around it for hooks, scripts, backgrounds, first-frame concepts, captions, and fast variations. basically, AI is g”

“Oof, the 8 months on AI tagging line hit home. I think every founder has a version of that story where we build in a vacuum because we're sure we know what users need. The 3-week feature miss is honestly a cheap tuition compared to a lot of us. Curious, what pulled you back to reality this time - did a user finally tell you, or did you catch it yourself? I've been talking with a bunch of founders about how to validate before writing code, and your take would be useful. If it's helpfu”

“That's a really useful distinction — hierarchy and emphasis are much harder to fix than length. The current AI just takes your app description and generates generic marketing copy, which is exactly the "sounds close but not like us" problem you're describing. What I'm thinking: let users input a few of their own phrases or brand voice notes before generation — things like "we say X not Y" or "our users care about Z." Essentially a lightweight brand brief”

“That's the roadmap exactly - a belief map, not just a poll result. What people think, what would change their mind, and what evidence is still missing. The three modes just went live (Debate the machine / Measure the crowd / Compare instincts) as a first step. 'What would change your mind?' is next. https://preview.redd.it/rzpwzom101ch1.png?width=1526&format=png&auto=webp&s=972ac137410b6ad1967f7c7a6f7d82c15d51bd1a”

“We had the exact same frustration with product accuracy. Our stuff is small electronics with buttons and screens, and every AI tool we tried would just mangle the details or hallucinate features that dont exist. Spent like 3 weeks last fall going back and forth with one platform's support team trying to get the proportions right before giving up. What actually ended up working for us was splitting the problem. We use AdMake AI for the competitor research and ad copy side of things, which hon”

“The thing you stumbled on is real, AI answers lean on third-party posts like Medium way harder than brand sites. One trap as you build it out: citations are volatile, same prompt returns different sources run to run, so any single fixed 'score' will mislead people. Sampling the same query a bunch and showing the hit rate is the only honest way to report it. I'm such a numbers guy, I hate not being able rate it.”

“In a word… “Distribution”; and can come in many flavors, but the question being asked is “how do you get eyes on your product & conversion of sales”, the ‘if you build it… they will come’ is a lot harder than it seems.”

“I think people bounce less because they consciously spot “AI copy” and more because generic copy fails the instant relevance test. If the first screen could describe 20 other tools, the visitor has no reason to keep reading. For a stock analysis tool, I’d keep the language concrete: what question does it answer, what inputs does it use, what does the output look like, and what kind of trader is it not for. “Institutional-grade” is vague, but so is hiding all the usage limits if the buyer needs t”

“Exactly. “What would change your mind?” also gives the publisher a better follow-up path. Instead of just seeing audience sentiment, they learn what evidence or framing would move the conversation. That could become a really useful output: not just poll results, but a map of objections, uncertainty, and required proof.”

“sounds like a solid tool, got a friend using hypeworks and they mentioned it's been really efficient for them too. it’s crazy how much manual work you can save when these systems start automating things right, definitely helps sellers focus on growth.”

“I have very little social media presence and I think more marketing automation for social could be good. submitted by /u/Complex-Excuse-3236 [link] [comments]”

“went live on the App Store this morning and it still doesn't feel real. it's War Table, five AI models (chatgpt, claude, gemini, grok, qwen) each take a locked role and debate one decision across three rounds, then a synthesis pass produces one verdict. the orchestration around the model calls turned out to be 90% of the actual work, not the prompts. built the whole thing in swiftui with claude code as the pair programmer. free to start: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/war-table-ai-council”

“AI creative testing sounds like a dream: more hooks, more formats, more variants, faster production. But for Meta ads, I think the bigger risk is false positives. When you can generate 100 versions cheaply, one of them will always look like it is working for a few days. The hard part becomes knowing whether a winner is real. Questions that matter more now: did it bring new customers or cheap retargeting conversions? did MER improve or only platform ROAS? did it survive a budget increase? did per”