I taught 600 marketers about AI, here’s what I learnt...

Hey guys,

A couple of weeks ago we wrapped up our AI Creative Strategist Blueprint Program where Jimmy Slagle and I taught 600+ marketers how to conduct creative strategy with the help of AI.

Today I want to share with you some of my biggest lessons from the course and how you can apply them to your creative workflow.

But first, here's what I've come across in AI this week:

• GOOGLE DROPPED NANO BANANA! Here’s some of the most creative use cases with it so far

• Frazer Cottrell showed off Nano Banana's capabilities by generating a realistic product ad

• This guy uses Nano Banana and Quickdesign to generate hundreds of AI ads daily

4 lessons I learnt teaching AI to 600+ creative strategists

Creative strategy isn't a linear process (and that's okay)

One of the biggest misconceptions I see is people trying to oversystemize creative strategy and turn it into complete step-by-step AI workflows.

But that's not how creativity works.

Sometimes I start with a message, then find the format. Sometimes I start with a format, then craft a message. Sometimes I have 50 tabs open and I'm jumping between Claude chats, Foreplay boards, and customer reviews all at once.

It's messy. It's scrappy. And that's exactly how it should be.

I think the people who succeed with AI aren't the ones trying to systematize every part of the creative process with complex Gumloop or n8n flows. They're the ones who use AI to enhance their existing natural, messy creative workflow.

The way to do this is through Claude projects trained on your data

We did a survey at the start of the course asking what people wanted to learn most.

80% of people said they were most interested in learning complex workflows (Gumloop, n8n etc.).

But in my experience, this is not the best use case of AI.

The real magic is in AI-assisted creative strategy.

In creating Claude projects trained on your brand context and ad account data.

We produce these by spending hours creating multi-page documents on how to complete each stage of the creative process (e.g. writing headlines, crafting scripts…)

I made a video on our full process for this here:

Most people want to jump straight to the automation without doing the foundational work. Coming from someone who runs an agency that puts out thousands of ads a month, this is the best use case of AI in creative strategy today.

Be ruthlessly selective about which AI systems you build

When image gen came out, I spent 20 hours creating the perfect prompt.

Then 3 weeks later they released an update. What took me 20 hours to achieve with prompting now took 5 minutes with the new features.

And I think this can be true for a lot of AI tools.

You waste massive amounts of time building the perfect system or prompt, only for it to become obsolete overnight.

Now, before building any AI system, I rank potential projects on three factors:

• How much time it currently takes me

• How much business value solving this would create

• How defensible the system is (will a tool update make this irrelevant?)

Only build the systems that score high on all three. Otherwise you can fall into the trap of building workflows that are more sexy than practical.

90% of AI tools are useless

Not that most of you need to be told, but it’s true lol.

I try almost every AI tool that crosses my feed, and here's the truth: most of them provide zero business value.

A lot of people think that you need to be first to every new tool or your competitors will get some massive advantage.

The reality is, that’s very rarely true.

If a tool is genuinely that good you’ll know about it.

You don't need 47 different AI tools in your stack. You need to get really good at using the few that actually work.

For us, that’s: Claude, Gemini, Poppy, ChatGPT and Veo. (and probably now, Nano Banana)

Announcements:

We’re hiring (again)! I’m currently looking for an Account Manager to join Adcrate:

If you have experience working in account management or know someone who does, check out this link to apply.

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See you next week,

Alex

P.S. If you're spending $100k+ monthly on paid social and want help implementing AI systems like these, my team at Adcrate is accepting applications to work with us. Check out our case studies at adcrate.co.