Aliyan

I built a Claude skill that steals viral video ads. Not the idea. The whole thing. You give it one ad you want to copy. It pulls apart what's actually doing the work in that video: the background, the font, the zoom timing, how fast the cuts land, where the pattern breaks. Then it rebuilds the same structure around your product. Your face. Your voice. The one I tested had 8 scene changes in 9 seconds. I have never opened a timeline in my life. It's one skill file. You hand it a raw clip and the ad you're copying, and it gives you back something you can post today. Comment "EDIT" and I'll DM it. repost for priority access ⬇️⬇️⬇️

@gregisenberg I sell AI video so I should probably argue with this, but I won't. the tool has never once made something feel handmade. the personality has to come from the script, and most people hand that part to the model too.

The more everything starts to look like the same AI slop, the more a little personality goes a long way. I stop for the stuff that feels handmade. A funny landing page, a weird retro app, something with an actual voice. It's obvious a real person made it and had fun doing it. That feeling is getting rare, which is exactly why it's worth so much.

@IsabellaHan_ the testing point is the real one. though once production stops being the constraint, the constraint becomes deciding what's worth testing. I can ship faster than I can come up with angles now.

This is a great example of how Seedance 2.0 4K and Claude are changing UGC production. What used to take days of planning, filming, and revisions can now be turned into a polished concept much faster. That gives brands more room to test different creatives before launching.

@SarahLevinger I think it depends whether the traffic is warm or cold. if someone already knows the brand, association does the work. on a first impression ad to someone who has never heard of you, you're persuading whether you call it that or not.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think marketers should be *persuading* anyone to do anything. If I do my job right, people will naturally want to know more, try more, and buy more, just because they want to be associated with the cool and interesting things I’m doing. Period. Marketing is not sales. Sales is not marketing. My job is to make the businesses I promote impossible to ignore, insatiable to be around, and refreshing to be associated with. so much so that sales become the natural next step (not the ONLY next step). I joined the marketing industry in 2010. I started freelancing full time in 2012. I started running ads in 2017. I moved into ecom in 2019. All those years, I never once heard a customer say “damn, I’m so glad someone persuaded me to buy this today.” Not once. Ever. In fact, I’ve never once heard a customer thank any marketer for doing anything at all, because consumers genuinely don’t like us. 😅 Consumers don’t like what our industry stands for. They don’t like being sold to. They don’t like being overhyped, they don’t like how ridiculous marketing has become, and they definitely don’t like how shady some businesses are. I know this because IM A CONSUMER and I don’t like it. Every time I see an ad that tells me such-and-such product is going to “change my life” I get the ick. 9/10 times, I scroll right past the majority of the ads on my own feed. If we won’t even stop to watch our own ads because of how out-of-touch they have become…how can we ever expect our potential customers to do so?? These days, all I want from a brand is a little: Honesty Authenticity Humbleness (this one in particular) Openness Integrity Self awareness I want to follow brands that create content that exists just to bring a little joy and interesting ideas to the world. I want to buy from brands who are doing something good for others, striving to bring happiness to people who struggle to feel it, and who actively try and do the right thing, even if it means LESS for them in the short term. I’m putting in the work to become a marketer I would want to buy from. (End of yap 😅)

@TaylorHoliday creative production capacity. plenty of content on what to test, almost none on how a 7 figure brand actually ships 30 variations a month without hiring a full time editor.

CTC is doing an in-person ecommerce growth workshop for 7-figure brands Sept. 1st. Tickets open up next week. What topics would you want to see covered?

@binghott the CPA drop is the headline but the part I'd want to see is whether the creative ranking moved too. last click has told me the wrong winner more than once.

I'm genuinely trying to help y'all

@CarlWeische the bundle route is underrated, most people jump straight to ingredients. only thing I'd add is you rarely pick the right UM on paper. I run 3 or 4 framings of the same mechanism and let the ad account tell me which one people actually believe.

It feels like everyone in ecom is talking about the importance of unique mechanisms but no one's really explaining how to find/create a good one. (or they greatly overcomplicate it) So I’m gonna break down what I know about finding/creating good UMs after doing this for 7 years: First, what is a unique mechanism actually? It’s the unique way you deliver your promise, the unique way your product gets the result. & as for how you use it: When you have your unique mechanism you position that as superior to your competitors’ solutions. So you explain in pre-sell pages for example why the way your product gets the result works better than other products. The easiest framing that works well for most brands is “here’s the root cause of your problem, other products don’t solve that root cause, here’s where that leads, here’s our unique solution that solves the root cause” Very simple. Second, how do you find or create a good unique mechanism? There are 2 ways I’ve found: 1. Bundle, repackage, rename, & use the included products as the UM (pretty unknown strat) Take products you're already selling, combine them into one offer that delivers a complete outcome (& preferably have these products be something people don’t usually sell together to achieve the transformation), then give that offer new packaging & a new name. For example: We worked with a brand that had a testosterone supplement that couldn't scale on ads, because the US testosterone market is competitive af. So we combined the supplement with the pre-workout & a digital product, gave the whole thing new packaging & called it a challenge. Now we weren’t selling a testosterone booster alone. We sold a 30-day challenge to get in shape, get leaner, get stronger & increase your testosterone. This of course increased AOV & all of that good stuff that bundles do, but it also changed the perspective of the offer It was now solving a larger problem, & the combination of the products inside the bundle became the unique mechanism for that offer. (kinda like how having unique ingredients in a supplement can be a unique mechanism) In short: solve a more holistic problem by combining different products into one bundle offer, & you want the combination of products in the bundle to be what people don’t usually sell/bundle to deliver that transformation. & then market the whole offer as superior to other solutions because “it has all of these different products included that together achieve the transformation better than other products because…” 2. Ground it in technology or ingredients (the one everyone knows) A lot of the time (not always, not everyone can do this) the unique mechanism already exists inside your product. You just have to find what it is & highlight it in your marketing. So with every ingredient/component/feature your product has, tie the unusual ones to the specific benefit they create, then take the strongest one of those (the most unusual & most impactful) & feature that in your marketing. For example: Let's say you sell an oral care product, & that product has a component that helps clean your mouth in a unique way (ultrasonic micropulsation, or whatever). Then that’s your unique mechanism, so your marketing should now feature that everywhere & tie as many benefits back to it as possible. Like ”the micropulsation is tough on plaque while staying gentle on gums because [enter some science]” & you position all of it directly against the competition: “unlike regular somethings that either are too weak to remove plaque or just do [some bad thing] that hurts your gums in the process” Now of course, that’s a pretty easy example, but a lot of you have something unique in how your product works. If you’re not making your own products, speak to the manufacturer, do some digging into how it’s made, & see if you can find anything unique about how the product is built, what it contains, how it works, etc. To be clear, neither of these 2 methods work for every brand & every product. At the end of the day the final limiter of how much unique mechanism you have to play around with is the actual product(s) you sell. So if you’re creating your own products, have UMs in mind from the start. Hope this helps.

@AlexHormozi true, though automating the wrong thing is how I found out it was the wrong thing. built a whole pipeline for a step I deleted a month later. that was cheaper than arguing about priority in the abstract.

It’s more efficient to decide something isn’t a priority than it is to automate something that isn’t a priority.

@shauneng the format question always comes last for me. I've run the same script as AI UGC and as a static and the winner tracked the angle both times. format mostly changes how fast you can test, not what wins.

"Should I run AI UGC?" "Can I scale with just native ads bro??" ⠀ You're asking the wrong questions. ⠀ This is how you end up burning through your ad budget with 0 winners. ⠀ Here's what to focus on instead:

@zackpaid agree the window is open. though the cheap part isn't the video, it's the testing. I can ship 16 a day now and the bottleneck moved to having 16 angles actually worth testing.

calling it now - this is the last cheap-creative window we get for years. sleep through it and you're ngmi. read this NOW:

@__AnoniMouse__ I sell AI video and I still think you're right. what was ever scarce was the thought, not the production. most slop is just people saying nothing, faster.

When the marvels of generative AI began enchanting humanity a few years ago, there followed widespread and understandable panic among creatives. Was this tool going to mean that everybody was out of work? Why would we need human artists when machines could create for us infinitely and on demand? However, in 2026, we’re beginning to see more clearly what generative AI really is. It undoubtedly has value, particularly in technical areas such as computer programming, and it can produce stock images, spin up marketing websites, create infographics and generate snippets of video. Yet, when used to create content, it is generic and derivative, and the material is now widely recognised in popular culture as AI slop. So this is quite a different situation. In a world of AI slop, far from creatives simply being out of work, we’re beginning to see a renewed need for human intelligence capable of creating meaningful and inspiring work. A world drowning in slop creates consumers desperately seeking something real - something human. Sadly, if your job consists largely of producing stock content for marketing and other corporate purposes, your role probably is going to change dramatically, if not disappear. But for the creative professions as a whole, the situation is looking quite different. Increasingly, our technical ability to produce things is not our real asset. Our asset, as intelligent, creative human beings, that live and breathe and experience things, is to capture that slice of imagination, that unique thought or observation, and to breathe that into the medium of our choice. That expression of the lived experience of humanity is what still grips people, and it's something no quantity of GPU compute will ever be able to reproduce. So get creating 🙌

@leonabboud the wording in that policy is "mass-produced" and "low-effort", not "AI". worth keeping the distinction. i make AI video for a living and the stuff getting throttled is templates with a new face on top, which would have died as human content too.

This is happening across every social media platform right now. AI slop SEO articles are getting deranked. AI slop copy and video are getting their distribution throttled on IG. There's never been a better time to build your personal brand. A personal brand is the most valuable asset on earth. The strategy to build your personal brand does not have to be complicated. Get out there, share the things you're learning. Comment on conversations happening in your niche. Capture interesting moments that happen on calls you're on. Cross publish your posts on X and LinkedIn. Turn the content pieces that resonate with your audience most into long form content or short form snippets.

@MediaKing the new product point is right. but bids and creative don't really belong in the same bucket. bids are capped by definition, a genuinely new angle isn't. creative only feels like a 3-10% lever when everything you test is a reskin of the same idea.

Just finished the greatest single month in company history. Revenue growth north of 50%. Efficiency improved year over year. We can talk bid strategy and AI ads and hooks all day. But that isn't where the alpha is. You get 3-10% lifts there. The truly asymmetric bets happen outside the ad account. Sometimes you just have to make new stuff so your customers have something to buy.

@jhueri finding them isn't usually the hard part though. adapting a format from another niche means betting a shoot on something unproven, so people quietly default back to their own pool. it's more a risk problem than a research one.

@avcanthony_ the order is the useful part here. formats are last on your list and they're also the cheapest thing to change, which is exactly why everyone starts there and then wonders why nothing moved.

When you have a winning angle, I like to then branch out into awareness levels. Try to figure out what's the best place to pick up the conversation. After that, I go heavy into different stories and frameworks. The same angle, wrapped up in a new story, different ad copy, can have drastically different performance. Next, POVs/personas. how does this problem affect the OTHER people who could buy this product for your main avatar? example, most shoppers on fb are women so if you sell to men with sciatica how can you unlock that persona of the WIVES of these people, whole other audience, but still keeping that same angle next, landing pages for me scaling with landing pages is the best, they have the most longevity out of anything, just look at how many people still using my purrify advertorial 1 year later haha then lastly, formats expand into other types of static ads AI vsls and ugc too with ALL of that you should have what you need to squeeze the maximum profit out of the angle but also keep in mind, that every angle has a certain ceiling. so you also need to be testing new angles as well. eventually all angles will die out, so while you want to squeeze as much as you can out of one you always gotta keep testing new angles as well.

@inzino "more creators, fresher content" is doing a lot of work in that list. ripping a winning product takes a day, ripping someone's 200 tested angles takes a year. that's the part nobody actually copies.

software is just now figuring out what ecom operators have known forever. people can rip your winning product and be live with the exact same thing tomorrow ever since AI made coding a commodity, anyone can do the same with your software too. the only moat left is distribution so how do you actually win in a market like that? > your distribution has to be stronger > more creators, fresher content, more spend > your buyer journey has to be 10x smoother > your support has to be better > you need to optimize for LTV > your offer has to hit harder so the same click converts more often it's all boring stuff but that's how you win

@cartiernoahh the scatter is the whole point. you can't pick the yellow squares in advance, so the only real move is making the grid bigger.

What your next 500 ads are going to look like. Raw action > Calculated action

@SarahLevinger the catch is it breaks the moment you try to reproduce it. the whole format is "unrehearsed", so any planned version is already a different thing. easy to admire, genuinely hard to brief.

SOMEBODY TEST THIS!! 🤩🤩🤩 I’m a yapper. But this woman YAPS, if you know what I mean. (Organic a rolling FTW.) 136,000 views 25,700 likes 683 comments 3691 shares There’s so many things she could connect this amazing yap too, and this is why people love this type of content. It’s not scripted, it’s not curated, it’s not rehearsed. She’s not selling anything and that’s why we buy into it. (Marketers, take note: the times are changing.)

@max_rosewater the 20/80 point is the one that matters. if that holds no matter the structure, the only variable you actually control is how many creatives go in. that's an argument for volume, not tinkering.

My favorite tweet of the year. My take: I've tested every Meta account structure that exists over the past 12 months. ABO, ABO with 20% budget sharing, CBO, plus every setting layered on top. Enough changed that it warranted retesting everything. Honestly, all the debates on here even made me ask "can Meta be trusted?" Here's what I learned: every single time I've been forced into an ABO testing structure, it's become a major cost center. It happened again this week. A brand i'm working with forcing testing in ABO, and we torched cash in the name of "learning." Forcing spend into low-budget ad sets creates fragmented learnings, zero statistical significance, and you end up bidding against yourself (if you're launching way too many ad sets). And, i'm still yet to understand what anyone learns when an underperforming ad gets $300 more spend than it should have. Unless you're launching every ABO test with the proper daily budget (CAC * 7.14) I won't hate on you. Otherwise, you're wasting and fragmenting your media dollars. I am becoming a firm believer that ABO gives media buyers the illusion of control in an extremely complex environment. It feels like you're steering spend to the right ads. In reality, you'd get the same outcome, or better, by consolidating and giving Meta budget flexibility. And, you may be shooting yourself in the foot if you're not getting enough consolidated data signal in fewer ad sets. If you disagree, go into any account of yours and sort by amount spent at the ad level. You'll see the same thing every time: 20% of the ads get 80% of the spend. That's how Meta works. It will look the exact same at the ad level blended across the account on a long time frame (whether it's CBO or ABO). And if you understand the breakdown effect, it makes perfect sense why this is. Some ads will never get much spend. And people think that's a bad thing, or that it's different from ABO testing. It's not! The exact same outcome will occur in ABO testing. Many ads will spend pennies to dollars. You just didn't break best-practices to achieve that same outcome when consolidating down. And hey, if you want to break out a new CBO for a different business objective (sale moment, new product drop, etc). Go for it! That's how "campaigns" are supposed to work. Otherwise, consolidate and don't assume you can game the algorithm. The probability is not in your favor if you try to. Do what you want. But all that tinkering ends the same way: a consolidated campaign scaling most of the budget anyway. You just took the long road to get there. What do you think? If you disagree, would love to hear it.

@binghott CBO only concentrates when there isn't much to choose from. give it 20 genuinely different creatives and it spreads. give it 3 near-identical ones and of course it picks one.

Everyone says CBO dumps your budget into just one or two ads. I keep hearing it, but something about how I do my media buying seems to... not do that. Huh, interesting... I'm normally suuuuuper private about anything like this, but I wanted to share this screenshot because I haven't seen anyone share anything like this before. Here's one CBO campaign last month, $800+k spent. These are just the 30 highest-spending ads. Top ad spent $80k, but look down, ad #30 still spent $5,800+. This campaign has over 200 ads that spent $1,000+ last month. The budget is spread across a deeeeeeeep bench of diverse ads supporting each other and relevant to different users in different stages of their journey. Now look at the 3 ads I highlighted. High CPAs. Ugly on this screen. Could I have turned them off based on what you're looking at? Sure. But this is only June. It doesn't show the stretch before, when those same ads were crushing. And it doesn't show what came after. Those 3 combined spent ~$30k in June. Guess how much they've spent in July so far. . . ---------------------------- But before I tell you that, let me ask you a quick question: Would you be able to prove to me what changed on the site you're running traffic to last week or last month? That's why I built URL Love It, to monitor, catch, and flag the page changes that impact your ad and business performance. Join the waitlist to be the first to join and get prelaunch pricing, launching soon: URLLoveIt.com Ok, back to the story... ---------------------------- Did you guess? $94. Not $94k. Ninety-four US doll-hairs. I didn't turn them off. Meta stopped spending on them. (TBF, I lowered the cost cap on one of their ad sets too) And because they're still on, if Meta finds a reason to spend on them again, they're sitting there ready. If that never happens, fine, costs nothing to sit there. Not every ad is built to be your last-touch closer, but that doesn't make it useless. It might be assisting the conversions your "good" ads are taking credit for. Can I prove that with hard data? NOPE! Can you prove I'm wrong? NOPE! We can't see how users interact with ads without leaving the platform. So when someone tells me their experience with CBO (or any other ad function), my honest first thought is: what are YOU doing to make it do that? It's usually: see a high apparent CPA, panic, turn it off, heroically report it as a win to their boss/client, get thanked for their vigilance, go tweet about how elite they are at media buying, and the cycle continues. They keep believing what they believe because they never question or challenge it. The only ads that rise to the top and stay live are those rare "unicorn" ads that can somehow spend and have a low apparent CPA. These are great, but not every ad can be a unicorn, and your account needs a few of them, but also needs a ton more workhorses. And every ad you turn off is one Meta can't optimize between anymore. This creates a vacuum that requires you to replace it with other new ads to hold your spend, or your CPA drifts up, or you spend less. The more ads you leave on, the more room the system has to spend. OH, and this is why so many of you see your "graveyard" or "zombie" campaigns doing well, it's because you probably shouldn't have turned them off in the first place lol Check the screenshot. What do you see, what would you do differently? What am I missing? How would you optimize this differently based on what's here? I'm always down to hear it.