Episode #241: Will Sartorius – AI didn’t kill the creative job, it moved it
How to split ad creative work between AI and people so your ads stop sounding like everyone else’s.
For founders and marketers running paid social who launch plenty of ads but learn little from them.
Will Sartorius, CEO of Selfmade, took over the performance creative agency after a failed acquisition left it with very little money in the bank, and rebuilt it with AI tools as GPT came out. He and Jason Shafton break down which parts of creative work AI now handles well, like tagging reviews and running time series and gap analysis on a Meta account, and which still need people: copy that makes someone feel something and angles no one has tested yet. Will walks through his “cover the logo” test, the multi-agent system Selfmade uses to write and review static ads, and why he tells lean brands to spend 50 bucks a month on a hundred AI statics before investing in storytelling.
WHAT YOU’LL HEAR
– How to tell activity from strategy: run a time series analysis on your ad account, correlate persona, angle, and emotion to ROAS or CAC, and relaunch winning cohorts you haven’t run in months.
– How Selfmade’s static ad system works: it scrapes a brand’s website, picks untested formats from 15 to 20 static types, runs copy through multiple copywriting agents (including one built on Daniel Kahneman’s heuristics), and has 10 more agents review each image before a human signs off.
– The common mistake of copying competitors’ creative, which Will says leads to “spend purgatory,” and what he learned when his own top ads failed his cover-the-logo test.
– Where to start: connect the Meta API (not the Meta MCP) to Claude, tag a year of ads by persona, angle, and emotion, correlate them to ROAS and CPA, and ask what you’re missing.
