What AI Still Can't Do with Will Sartorius

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. Chapters - 00:00 - Intro: what's left for marketers when AI can build the strategy - 01:28 - Will joins: taking over Selfmade after a failed acquisition - 03:45 - What working every role at Selfmade taught him - 05:28 - Automating review tagging, and the one skill AI can't replace - 06:49 - Activity vs. strategy in your ad account - 09:06 - The cover-the-logo test and "spend purgatory" - 10:50 - Failing his own test - 11:50 - Where humans show up: the dumbbell model and the last 5% - 14:48 - "80% is fast, 100% is what ships": AI statics and storytelling - 16:22 - Inside Selfmade's multi-agent static ad system - 19:12 - New York's AI disclosure law for ads - 20:52 - A landing page for every angle you test - 21:32 - First fix: pull a year of Meta data into Claude - 22:29 - Lightning round - 24:26 - Jason's top three takeaways Links & resources **Guest** Will Sartorius - CEO, Selfmade Selfmade website LinkedIn Twitter Newsletter About Frank Growth Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow - real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton. Promotional links - Work with Winston Francois - Subscribe / Follow Jason