Do AI-generated ads really work?

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Good morning friends!

Today I want to share with you something a bit different.

I want to touch on a topic that's been hot in the space lately:

AI-generated ads.

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Over the last 2 months, we’ve tested a bunch of AI-generated Facebook ads for different types of businesses:

• Newsletters

• SMB-focused B2B SaaS

• A tech platform that helps to create ebooks.

• A language learning mobile app

• An e-commerce store

Having run Facebook ads in all of these niches, here’s what I can tell you:

AI-generated ads work! But it’s not what you think.

We’ve tested all kinds of AI generated ads: images, and complete AI UGC videos with text. combination of AI voiceover and product demo, a real human video combined with AI-generated avatar video.

Here’s what we’ve found. The answer largely depends on the funnel but GENERALLY speaking…

Videos starting with AI-generated people or fully AI generated don’t work well at scale.

They might get a few conversions here and there but generally, people can sense AI pretty well.

Here’s an example of a fully AI generated ad we’ve made for this newsletter:

Now, the good and scary news is, AI is getting better. And soon I am sure things will change, as they usually do.

Now to what’s working really well right now:

• AI-generated UGC creators combined with real human videos.

What we found is most people can actually sense AI-generated UGCs, and that’s why they automatically skip them. But as soon as we added a human to the beginning of AI-generated video, ads started to work and scale.

Another thing is ads that don’t show people at all.

You totally don’t have to show people in most of the ads.

It’s social media content and people don’t care about your or someone else's face except maybe when they are a celebrity.

So if you’re testing AI-generated ads right now, try to put real human footage in the beginning of the ad.

Or try to overlay most of the video with different footage of the product and outcome

That’s it.

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