TEA 242: A Simple AI Meta Ad Creative Strategy (If You’re Stuck On What To Build Next)

Introduction to Ecommerce Alley

0:00If you're stuck on what to build next for creative, we want to show you a really powerful yet simple AI strategy that you could plug and play in the next 15 minutes to find and build new creatives using AI. If you don't know who we are, we're the e-commerce alley. We work with e-commerce founders who are looking to scale their acquisition and then ultimately just build a business that's not very stressful and it's more built on what they love to do and profitability and allowing them to sleep a lot better at night.

Screen Share Episode

0:30And so in this episode, what we're going to do is we're going to cover, this is going to be a screen share episode, by the way. So Dylan, you're actually seeing this process live time. This is something that I do in coaching all the time, but I want to show everybody here a really fast way to start using AI for creative if you're not using it and go have fun with this. We have clients doing this now and every time I show this, clients are like blown away and then they go do it and they get great results. So if you're on audio, I would recommend jumping over to YouTube because we are going to be screen sharing and showing this live on YouTube in the video, what he's doing.

1:00I mean, you could still get, we'll try and talk it through in audio, but this will be a much better visual video podcast. Yeah. Listen to the whole thing. Then go, you could just go catch the like the tutorial, like how to, because I'm going

Example with EC Sports

1:11to talk through this. Now I'm going to go through an example that I literally just did this week with a client. Now this client is in the supplement space and they're selling an electrolyte drink and they're called EC sports. So Daniela is the founder. She's really, really awesome. We've been working with her for a year and a half or so. And, and Daniela follows the process. She launches ads every single week. We tell our clients, you have to, every week you need to launch ads. We did a study of about 69,000 ads in the shelf life of an ad, the median shelf life of an ad, the meta will prioritize spend is about eight days.

1:42So meaning you need to be launching new stuff every single week. It needs to be a non-negotiable in your business, the same way that you wouldn't stop producing and fulfilling orders, right? You wouldn't stop making stuff if you do it in house and you wouldn't stop fulfilling orders for a week. The same thing needs to happen with your ads. Every week you need to launch new stuff. Now, sometimes we're all a little in a crunch and we're like, Oh man, I don't have time to do the videos like I really want to do. I'm about to go on a trip or whatever that is. And so this is where AI can really help you. And I got to be honest. I have, I have not been the largest fan of AI creative up until recently, because up

2:15until recently, it hasn't been that good in my opinion.

Using Gemini for Analysis

2:17And so what I'm going to do, I'm going to walk through this simple three-step process that we will do to do a process called breadcrumbing, where we will follow the breadcrumbs and we will build the creative. So in this, I'm going to show you how to take ads that you're doing, how to then plug this into a Gemini. We're going to be using Gemini within this. And then Gemini is going to be able to analyze the things. It's going to be able to then prompt what we need to create next. And I'm going to use two tools to build the AI creative. Now, where you build the AI creative doesn't matter. You could go build these images inside of ChachiBT, or you could build them inside of Gemini.

2:48You could build them inside of Higgs field AI, which I have examples inside of all of these. And I even have an example that the client ended up getting. So I'm going to show you all what happened when we followed this process in this process took me, I mean, I explained it live time. So it was like 10 minutes, but you could do this process. I'm telling you guys in like less than five minutes. This is really, really fast. So here's what it kind of looks like. Step number one is you need to go into meta and I want you to take, just start with one, take your top performing creative.

3:20Now we're going to go static on this. I'm going to go statics. I'm not going to take video. We're going to just do statics. Take your time. But it does, it does work with video. This works with video too. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to use Gemini to number one, analyze our top creative. Now Gemini, the reason we're using Gemini is Gemini is the only platform right now that can analyze what's happening in the video. Not just like a transcript. If you go to quad or chat, you have to upload a transcript. Like that doesn't give context as what's happening within it. Gemini, you can upload up to two gigabytes of data. Or if it's in a Google drive folder, you could just put the link in there and it can have two

3:52terabytes. It's pretty crazy. Whoa, that's crazy. Yeah. Up to two terabytes. That's crazy. So like most files are all under two gigs. So you're not gonna have to worry, especially if it's an ad. And so all you do is just upload it. And that's the first thing we're going to do. Number one, we're going to go into meta. We are going to pool the top performing creative. Now we've done this. We do this with video. We do this with statics. In this example, their top performing creative is a static. And the one that they had performing, I'll show you right here. Anybody that's watching, I'm going to read this out. So the graphic, the top of the graphic says, get rid of cramps. And then there's a hand holding.

4:23Now this is an AI. AI creative as well. A hand holding the supplement, the container of it, of the intense hydration electrolytes. And so it's just holding it there. And then it has some, it has some call outs. It says zero sugar and zero calories, 66 cents per serving. And then five times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink. And then love it or it's free in a badge below. Okay. So that's kind of what we're working with here. So what I did is we just popped into meta ads. We took their top spending, top performing creative. We took a screenshot of the whole thing, including the primary text and the headline.

4:54The headline, by the way, it says hydration made clean and affordable. So we just took the entire graphic of this. And that's step one. Grab your top performing creative. Take a screenshot of it. Step number two, hop into Gemini and upload that creative. It could be video. Again, we do this with video. So, but in this case, it was an image. And here's what I said. I said, this is an ad for EC sports. And we were pushing people to this electrolyte supplement. One of the messages we're starting to see gain some degree of traction is cramps. However, it's pretty generic with this because it just says, get rid of cramps.

5:26And I'm like, who are we talking to? And what are cramps, right? I said, it seems pretty generic to me. I want to do two things. Can you please give me a ton of different ICPs, ideal customer profiles, that you believe we could create very specific messaging to give me maybe three different one line or this is me talking to text. It's a little funky here. Give me three different headline example messages to each of those ICPs. And then tell me why you think it would be a good ICP to run ads to. I want you to look, I want you to look at our electrolytes.

5:57So I'm going to include a link to the website below for you to scan. Please look at these and give me an, and even other additional ideal customer profiles with very tangible or hyper tangible specific situational messages that I could potentially build creatives for. And then I link the product page. Now, why did I do that? The product page is going to give a lot more context than the creative. So we have top performing creative. We have website page. That's what we need to get what we need for it to do the analysis. So what I'm asking is I'm asking it to analyze what this is, what's in this creative, what's

6:30happening here, what are the ICPs, what are the messages that you're seeing? And the reason I say this is because most of the time we say what the message is. We say, here's the message within this, but AI might analyze and be like, oh, the message is completely different than you think. Yeah. Which is, which is really interesting to think about. We are biased to believe that this is the message. And I'm saying, no, no, no, just tell me what messages and what ICPs you believe we're talking to. And the reason that we're biased, I see this all the time. People will put in their ad set, like the naming of their ad set, they will put a better

7:02message descriptor than what's in the actual ad. Like they'll, they'll put like, this is for gifting, for women, for blah, blah, blah. And then I look at the ad and it doesn't even look like it's any of that. So the creative is often or sometimes very different than what you actually think you're targeting. Maybe sometimes you're only targeting it in the primary text or like something else, but the creative itself has a different message. So it is good to like step back, have the AI determine it because that's what I do in

7:34coaching is I say, without knowing what your thought process was for this creative, this is what I think your, your message is, whether you think that or not, this is what I think your message is because I'm looking at it cold, just like your customers will. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a good way to say like, what is not, what do I think is so I get rid of cramps when she created this, she could have thought a particular type of person, maybe a certain type of athlete, maybe whatever. I'm like, but when I see get rid of cramps, I might think something differently. And so because of that, I'm just saying, Hey, tell me what is, but then also expand and

8:08tell me what other ideal customer profiles I can go after because going after different ICPs in your messaging and in your creative and targeting, setting it so that the context is relevant to many different types of people is going to open up all of this audience potential for different CPMs because there's different competition for different types of ICPs. If what do you think, let me ask you this, what ICP generically do you think all supplements go after people that want to be healthy or athletes, athletes, gym people.

8:38But I think if you, if you go specific people that want to be healthy, that's even worse. Then going athlete or gym because athlete or gym, or at least somewhat specific. But if you just say people that are healthy, people that want electrolytes or just like super broad, but yeah, you could go, you could go a little niche down and say gym. Most supplement companies are going to go after athletes. They're going to go after people that like to work out and are already more bottom and middle of the funnel awareness that they need supplements or they're already using them. Right. So like that's a bloodbath, right? Your CPMs are going to be way higher there.

9:09So I'm going to say, what are the abstract different rabbit trails I could go down of ICPs that nobody is thinking about in my space? Because CPMs are, are literally supply and demand. And so if there's less supply or if there's less demand and there's more supply, I'm going to pay a lot less. And not even, not even ICPs in your industry, just, just other ICPs that your product could relate to. That's the other thing. Like some people might get too hung up thinking, well, it has to be in my industry. What are other people talking to, but there might be an ICP out there that would love

9:40your product that no one is talking to. Like you're saying, that's going to give you really cheap CPMs and CPAs. And that's exactly what we found. And she was blown away. She's like, I did not even think of that. And I'm going to show you all this in a second. So I'm going to read through this. So here's what happens. It broke it down. And I'm just going to give you the, the, the quick, the quick, like obvious ones. I asked her, I said, what ICPs have you run through? And she, for electrolytes, right? Electrolytes, a lot of times you're talking to runners that are running marathons. They need electrolyte replenishment because of the long endurance based stuff.

10:10So the first thing it said is part, the endurance mile 20 runner. And it said, why? Runners lose lots of amounts of salt. Sugar heavy drinks often cause gut rot along with long runs. Your zero sugar, high sodium is perfect for this. And then it gave me three headlines. I mean, even that's really specific. Talking about you lose salt, super sugar heavy drinks, gut rot, like things that you probably wouldn't have even thought about already coming from an ICP. You may have already thought about it. And the thing is like, it doesn't mean they can't go after this. Yeah. I actually think this is great. She hasn't gone this specific with it, but I love, it gave me three headlines and I'm

10:42going to read these off. These one in the first one I thought is really, really good. And it said, stop the mile 18 calf cramp before it stops you. That's a really solid message. Yeah. The next one is the zero sugar secret to finishing your marathon strong. Okay. The next one was replace what you actually sweat out. 1000 milligrams of pure sodium. I liked that first one. The first one is really, really good because it's gritty. It's tangible. People feel that. I don't want to talk about, I don't want to say the same thing that everybody else is saying. I want to say something that's so unique that people are like, oh my gosh, I feel like you're literally in my brain. And that's a better message than just like, what was it? Like stop cramps or get rid of the cramps.

11:14Get rid of the cramps. But that's like specific leg cramps at a specific time, 18 miles. That's really good. Exactly. So only a long distance runner would understand that right now. It's like, boom, medic can go after those people. This next one is what started to shape things a little bit. The blue collar heat wave worker, construction, landscaping, roofing. Why? These workers are in the sun for eight to 10 hours. Water alone leads to hyponatremia. I have no idea. Water intoxication and headaches. They need salt to stay safe and alert. Headlines. Water isn't enough when it's a hundred degrees on the roof.

11:46Dang. That's a solid freaking message. Next one. Beat the 2 p.m. heat crash without the Gatorade sugar shakes. I don't like sugar shakes. The first headline is the best out of all of them. It is the best. The other one was the 66 cent tool. Every job site needs a summer. I didn't like those. But here's what I did like. It started getting us thinking about, ooh, ICP construction, landscaping, roofing. Roofers. Dude, you're on literally the hottest thing second of the sun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy, especially if you live anywhere else. This was another interesting one. It came up with the keto flu beginner. When people start keto, they drop water, weight and minerals rapidly leading to keto flu.

12:19Don't quit keto. It's not the diet. It's your electrolytes. Kill the keto flu in 15 minutes. It's with pink Himalayan salt, like whatever. Or stay in ketosis while staying hydrated. Zero sugar, zero carbs. That's great. But still wouldn't have thought of keto. Nope. Another one. Intermittent fasters, right? Extend your fast without the hunger headaches. The only thing you should drink during your 16 hour window. Zero sugar, zero sugar, zero calories, 100% hydration for fasters. So like now we're like intermittent fasting. On the night shift, healthcare workers, first responders. So it gave all of these. This is a funny one. This is a situational one.

12:50The 3 a.m. Charlie horse for seniors and athletes. Focus on the specific visceral pain of wake up at the middle of the night with a locked up calf muscle. And then it gave a creative idea. But anyway, all that to say, this gets the gears turning. It analyzes it and it expanded it. And I was like, ooh, okay.

Creating Prompts for AI Creative Tools

13:04So this is step number two. And by the way, it seems like these, like the Gemini headlines aren't great. Now you didn't, the prompt was like lifetime. So it probably wasn't like the best prompt it could have been. But you could also take all of this into your preferred AI or if you already have a skill for ICP creation or angles or whatever, you can then take these ICPs into that AI or that skill and potentially get better outputs. Yeah, and obviously this is not fed to have her ICPs as mine. So like this is, but this is really good. So the most important thing is this.

13:34So step number one, grab your top performing creative. Step number two, you're going to drop it into Gemini and you're going to have it analyze it and tell you what ICPs it believes you're targeting as well as other ones you could do. And to give three headlines that you believe you could use for other ad angles. Now, here's the thing. I don't really care if the headlines are bad because I could iterate on headlines later. I'm trying to get some golden nugget of an abstract thing that I could chase as an XP's. So what did we find? Well, we really loved the idea of, we loved the idea of going after, of, hold on, five times left.

14:10Oh, because there were two different ones we did. So one of the ones it recommended was you could do, you could, your, your website mentions that you have five times the electrolytes in the leading sports drink. This could, you could line five bottles of Gatorade up in one, with one scoop of electrolyte. And then the headline is why drink 150 grams of sugar to get the same electrolytes is this one scoop. So, so we did two different ideas. So number one, we're like, okay, this is more of like a comparison. And for her comparison stuff crushes. We can compare her against element and it does really, really well. So I was like, okay, let's start with the comparison. So we actually followed two rabbit trails here.

14:41Number one was comparison. And then the second one was actually landscapers. We're like, that's, they're in the sun all day. We're going into summer. Let's really target landscapers here. And so what happens is once you get the analysis, the third step, this is really important, is you need to ask it for the prompt to put into your AI creative tool. AI. Yeah. Your AI creative AI. So your creative AI tool. And so what we said, we said, we love the idea of the five times leverage. Can you give us, give us the prompt that we could feed into chat GPT to create the image for us.

15:13We're, we're going to include the image. If you could just go ahead and okay. There I'm talking to Texas pretty bad, but here's basically what I said. Give me the prompt to plug into the chat GPT and Higgs field, which we did in order to give me the creatives that I need. Now, this is important because you will not be able to, from your brain, come up with the prompt that's going to get the output that you want. AI can give you the prompt. You could tell AI to create the prompt to get the output that you want. And AI knows how AI works.

15:44Exactly. So I just want to, I'm not going to get super nerdy into this super deep, but I want to just give you some example. This is what you could not come up with. It said, roll. You are a professional product, product photographer, an advertiser, designer, a subject, create a high definition commercial advertisement image comparing a specific electrolyte supplement to the competition. And this is visual inspiration. And then it says left side, the competition, a neatly arranged of five identical recognizable bottles of leading sports drink in a generic fruit punch red color, similar to the shape of the leading sports, but without explicit name. Brands prompt next to these place, a huge, uh, visible pile of refined white granulated sugar representing 150 grams.

16:20And then here's the text. If you, if you're watching online, you, you see how specific this is. This is a massive prompt. You coming up with this would not be very good. So I just copied and I pasted. And truly it needs all of that. Oh yeah. Nothing there is, is not necessary. It's got the text. It even says where it needs to be middle of the headline, middle of the image. It has specifically show sugar that equals 150 grams. Cause you could say just show sugar and it, you have no idea what it's going to come up with.

16:51Like it's so specific. Yeah. So this, this is, uh, this is the hack here. Prompt AI to create the prompt for AI. Yeah. It's like a prompt dream inside a dream. It's an exception here. So here are the outputs output that we got from chat GPT. It's pretty good. This is, I know anyone online can see if you, if you're not, this is a pretty good, would you say this is pretty good creative? I think this is a pretty good creative right here. The only thing I don't like, I don't know what that text at the bottom says. Oh, I don't, I don't either. Like this is the first take.

17:22I didn't iterate on this, but like first take on this. Holy cow. This is really good. Yeah. This is really, really good. You see the five water bottles pile of it in the center. It says five times the electrolytes, zero sugar, more sodium, more potassium. And then go to Higgs field. This is what Higgs field came up with. I actually like chat GPT is better. I do too. I think chat GPT is better. Like you can see like the water droplets on this. Let me see if you can't, you can't see those here. This is more generic. Yeah. And in the, the text design in Higgs field is there is none. It's just like aerial text all, but this actually has like some hierarchy.

17:55It got like the big drop shadows of the product. Like it's, it's really, really good. So this one is really good. Um, and then we said, Hey, we're going to go ahead and I'll do one more to give more an additional style here. I said, this is great. Love the idea of going after intermittent fasting. So we kind of did that, but let me get to the one, the one that we really liked was a landscape heat wave. So we said, let's go after the landscape heat wave. And it came up with a thing and we prompted it. And I'm going to give you her, I'll, I'll show you my final that it came up with and I'll show you hers. So this is the final that came up with me.

18:26Not bad at all. There's like a mower in the background. It's sitting on a tailgate, all dirty has like big old thing. It has the, the intense hydration electrolytes right there. Now it's an interesting truck bed. Yeah. Now this guy is sitting halfway through the, the tailgate here. You can see it's kind of like cutting him off, but like a week, we could tweak that. And that would be an easy fix. Look at the output she came up with. She, she just sent this to me. Uh, now this is different, but like, this looks really, really good. Real work needs real hydration. It breaks it all down in the background. You see them like laying, this is actually not landscaping.

18:57She went with construction. It looks like here and they're laying the foundation of some kind of a house in the background and they're in the dirt. So you could tell that it like real work needs real hydration. I think it looks like UGC too. It does look like person taking the picture, holding the, holding it, holding the thing to everybody and everyone's working in the background. So immediately that ICP starts to feel that now I believe she could call out the ICP a little bit better here. I would agree. Yeah. Like a real construction work needs real hydration. Just use a little bit more context, but, but, but that's fine. She has more iterations of this, but, but this simple process guys takes five minutes.

19:31Number one, go grab your top performing creatives. Number two, go plug them in and say, Hey, what ICPs and messages do you see within what I have? And please explore different abstract ones I've never considered with some one liners. And then the third thing you do is once you find something that you like the breadcrumb, follow that breadcrumb and say, please give me the prompt to go build a square creative that I could, I could, that I could prompt any AI to build the creative for it. Now I didn't even have Gemini build one for me, but I could have Gemini do it as well. Yeah. But this is it.

20:02Like this is a simple process. If you'll stuck, go do this. This is really, really easy. If you, if you don't have top performing creatives or creatives you want, use this for creatives that you're inspired by. Go grab creatives that you're inspired by and like go to the meta ads library or use a tool like Atria, pull those things that you really like and say, I really like this. I want to model something similar, not the exact same thing, but I really like this concept. Please, please help me prompt what I need for this. And if you're doing video, the same thing applies, but instead of actually creating a video, this is what, if you're, if you're doing video, we don't, I'm not a huge fan of AI

20:35video right now. It's a lot of work and it doesn't look very good. But if you're doing video, just say, Hey, based on all this, please write me some scripts for this ICP. And then it'll like write you scripts into a bullet stuff out for you. And that's the other way that we're using it for video. And the other thing too, if, if you, cause I know some people I've had, I've had people tell me this, they're like, well, the AI creative just doesn't look good. Okay. Well, if, if you, if you are a designer and you really have like high standards for it, you could always use the AI creative as inspiration for your own creative and kind of recreate

21:05it if you wanted to, because it'll still give you ideas that you probably would have never had. But I think with a little bit of finessing, you can even get the creative to look the way you want it to. Cause I think this creative that, that is on the screen right now, it fits our brand. Like it's doing a great job. The product looks great. It fits the brand. So I think you can, with a little bit of finessing, you can even get AI creative to, to hold up to your standards. Yeah, absolutely. And then even in Higgs field, you could upload your own tons of your own photos. It'll be in build an AI avatar of you. So you could do UGC style stuff of even you, whether it's video or image.

21:39And anyway, we could add a rabbit trail with that, especially because Higgs field now integrates with Claude via MCP. So like there's a lot of really, really good stuff that could happen, guys. I hope this is really valuable. If you found this valuable, please drop a note in the comments. Once you do it with your feedback on how you feel about this, if you're watching on YouTube, if you're not, you should go watch on YouTube, please give this a thumbs up, hit subscribe to the channel. And if you're listening on, on Spotify or Apple, please rate this. We're trying to be the number one podcast for e-commerce business founders looking to really grow. And so if you would, please, it would mean the world to us to just leave a review.

22:11I know it, it might seem like a lot of work, but it's not as hard as it might be as you, once you get through the process. And it means a lot to us. And if you leave a review, here's what we'll say. If you leave a review, just email team at ecommerceally.com and we will send you a $10 Amazon gift card as our thank you for helping us in the process of achieving that mission. So with all that said, you're amazing. We'll see you in the next episode.

22:32We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode.