We hired a guy at $70k whose only job is making AI ad creatives. heres what happened.

honestly i was in the "AI ads are slop" camp for a while. avatars that look slightly off, text flying in from 6 different directions. the delivery that feels scripted, creatives where you just know. easy to scroll past.

but i kept seeing teams quietly putting real spend behind AI creatives. so we tried it.

hired one guy. $70k year. no media buying, no strategy. just creatives all day.

the slop problem is a workflow problem, not a technology problem.

most AI ads look bad because people skip the research. open tool, type prompt, download, done.

our guy doesn't do that. before generating anything he pulls competitor ads that have been running 4+ weeks on ad library longevity means confirmed spend, confirmed spend means somethings working. then uses creatify ad Clone to rebuild the structure with our product in it.

not guessing what might resonate. testing what already proved out in market.

hit rate went from 9% to 20% before touching anything else.

then the volume.

60-80 variations per batch. genuinely different hooks, angles, narratives. top 20% go into testing. rest die. no attachment.

at $4/video you can afford to be brutal. that's the point.

the part most people miss.

when an ai ad breaks through we don't just scale it. we brief a real creator on the exact winning concept. not a vague direction. the proven hook, the proven structure

real creators win on performance. AI wins on cost. run both in parallel and neither is wasted. human ROAS catches up once it's properly scaled but only because AI found the winning angle
cheaply first.

before this it was agencies, shoots, revisions, delays. half those creatives never even made it to a proper test. the bottleneck was volume.

now the bottleneck is quality. making sure what goes out actually clears the bar. still figuring that one out.

but honestly? i'll take that over "why did we just spend $500 on an ad nobody tested" any day. traded one problem for a slightly less painful one. progress i guess.

curious if anyone else is doing something similar.