Before deciding what ad to make, I figure out what the audience actually responds to — and why. Here's the repeatable system I run, and how I use Claude to move through it 10× faster.
Five steps, run every cycle. Steps 1–3 gather honest signal; step 4 turns it into strategy; step 5 hands off to the Iteration Engine.
Start in the account and the comment section — not just the dashboard. Top performers tell me what works; the comments tell me why. That real reason for engagement is the signal everything else is built to amplify.
Study the longest-running ads in and out of the category — the ones still spending are the ones still working. I capture structures, hooks, and formats to borrow (never direct competitors' words), building a swipe bank of proven mechanisms.
Reddit threads, reviews, and forums give me the audience's exact language — their objections, desires, myths, and the words they actually use. This is where authentic hooks and angles come from.
I feed all the raw research into Claude and use it to cluster the mess into angles, avatars & sub-avatars, awareness levels, sophistication stages, mechanisms, and emotions — then turn the strongest into testable hypotheses. Hours of synthesis become minutes.
The system ends with a prioritised angle bank and ready-to-shoot creator/editor briefs — each mapped to the 5-part formula and flowing straight into the Iteration Engine to be multiplied.
Claude is my research co-pilot. It doesn't replace judgment — it removes the grunt work so I spend my time on strategy and decisions, not sorting through tabs.
Paste in hundreds of comments, reviews, and transcripts; Claude clusters them into themes, objections, and desires I can act on.
It tags each angle by awareness stage, persona, sophistication, problem, and emotion — so I instantly see what's a true new message vs. a restyle.
I give it the brand voice and winning structures; it spins multiple hook and script variations I can refine and brief out fast.
I argue with it — is this hypothesis actually testable? what would falsify it? — to kill weak angles before they cost spend.
It drafts creator and editor briefs against my templates, so creators, editors, and AI tools all ship on-strategy.
Paired with n8n and AI avatars, the highest-leverage steps run as a system — not a one-person bottleneck.
AI-accelerated, human-judged. Claude speeds up the thinking; the strategic calls are mine. 🤍