The TLDR

Highlight: For our friends who run paid ads, you know that it’s a key business driver but it also comes with a lot of pain points. We’re sharing a few tools that can help, from performance analysis to ad creative generation.

Musing of the Week: Prolific technologist, Judy Estrin, just published an article in Time advocating for AI guardrails. She cites the 1970s/80s (era of Internet infrastructure development) as an optimal example of how the public and private sectors should partner to mitigate risk while ensuring technological advancement. Can we replicate that success with AI?

💰 Make paid ads easier for your team

We’ve both spent a lot of time running marketing creative and paid ads, and we know it’s a really important growth driver for many businesses.

However, paid acquisition is accompanied by a lot of pain points. To name just a few:

• Constant updates to social platforms’ algorithms mean campaign results are not 100% predictable

• Increasing ad fatigue from audiences, especially the over-targeted millennial buyer

• (In gross overgeneralization) scaling businesses need more creative for more ads, which can burn out creative teams

There are some really advanced AI tools supporting different pieces of the paid acquisition process that can alleviate a few of these pain points. Let’s take a look at some tools that would complement a paid ads team:

Performance Analysis

• Hyros - starts at $99/mo

  • Several of the ad creative/copy generator tools also track creative performance, but Hyros tracks holistic performance across a variety of channels (including calls and emails). The tool creates actionable insights so that teams can better allocate budgets and double-down on successful, high-converting sources of traffic.

Ad Creative Generation

• Pencil - starts at $119/mo

  • Pencil connects to your historic data and creative asset libraries to generate new static and video creative.

  • Check out their ads library! Pencil has created 1,000,000+ ads to date.

  • Starts at $119/mo

• AdCreative - starts at $24/mo

  • AdCreative incorporates your brand identity to create perfectly-sized assets for the critical social platforms (FB, IG, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest)

  • AdCreative learns from each ad’s performance to continuously optimize CTAs, font size, colors, messaging, and more.

Ad Copy Generation

• Phrasee - starts at $500/mo for unlimited seats

  • Phrasee calls itself a complete content platform that learns from your brand’s tone and assets to generate unique, high-performing copy.

  • Not just for ad copy, but also for emails, blogs, and product pages

• Scalenut - starts at $20/mo

  • Scalenut is an SEO copilot that can help you plan, research, and create authority content that ranks and converts.

  • Primarily for long-form content but can easily handle ad copy, emails, and website

🧠 Musing of the Week

Judy Estrin's new article (The Case Against AI Everything, Everywhere, All At Once) in Time has us ruminating on the unchecked development of AI and what it might mean for the future. The rapid proliferation of technology, as we saw with social media and smartphones, is usually a double-edged sword. It catalyzes progress, drives growth, and creates new opportunities, but without careful reflection, it can also lead us to unintended consequences.

By now we know that we can develop new tools rapidly, and the key question is more around how responsibly we can integrate them into the fabric of our society. Just as we grapple with the societal impact of online connectivity, we must equally contemplate the ramifications of including AI in every aspect of our life. Like any tool, its impact is shaped by how we use it and who ultimately has control over it.

Even in AI’s early state it often feels like we've taken a step into science fiction. However, based on the governments’ historically reactive (not proactive) responses to other technological developments, it seems unlikely that we can rely on them to move quickly enough to guide us down a positive path. As a result it falls to us prosumers to take responsibility over who we support an how we use AI products.

🙌 If you’re hyped about the generative AI industry specifically, here are some of the coolest roles we’ve seen this week:

• Customer Success Manager @ OpenAI

• Business Development Representative @ Jasper.ai

• Principal Product Manager, AI Products @ Demand.io

• Video Machine Learning Engineer @ Apple

🔨 Check out these other AI tools we’ve been playing with this week:

• Murf AI - Voice cloning and text-to-speech content generator

• Steve.ai - AI-powered text-to-video tool

• Durable AI - Build a website in 30 seconds with AI

That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

Lorel & Reily