How to Use AI to Create High-Converting Ads for Digital Marketing Agencies

James Dooley: How to use AI to create ads. Today I'm joined with Ani, who's been using AI intelligence a lot in creating multiple ads across different platforms. So let's just come straight in. How are you using AI to create ads?

Ani Hoang: Thanks, James, for having me. To use AI in your advertisement, you have to use it for efficiency, but also for testing. I have used AI as a way to test different avatars. So I usually, I'm the content creator, but I am limited to one avatar, which is an Asian-looking English-speaking woman. And because I'm not biased towards this, I don't think my persona should work every single niche and every single offer. That's why I use AI to test out different avatars. For example, saying the same offer, the same script that I wrote. To say the same thing, but with a different race, different gender. And that has been a predominant way to use AI.

James Dooley: So with regards to the different avatars, what AI platform are you using to create those avatars?

Ani Hoang: We used, I tried out Haygen, and I tried ArcAds.ai, and I also tried, what was the, ah, and then the third one is MakeUGC.ai. So these are all well-known platforms. And typically now as a creative, you're gonna think about the pricing, okay? So one of these videos can cost you up to, I don't know, $50, $60 to make. And then on top of it, I also edit these videos too. Because here's the thing, with AI avatar ads, you could risk controversy. So you could say, let's say tomorrow you, instead of you, you're gonna run AI, fake AI person saying your offer, and then because it wasn't edited well enough, people might say, oh my God, James, you are being a scam. You're using an AI person to sell your stuff. So as a creative, you also want to balance those things.

James Dooley: I'll give you a little bit of a, I don't know if you know this or not, I've actually got an AI James Dooley avatar. And I've created three different personas. So they're all wearing different tops. So I've got angry AI James in a black top. I've then got comedy AI James Dooley in a blue top. And I think I've got another one in a red top. The three different avatars of what I have can answer the same question, but the context around the answer can be done in a different way. I've got one which is semantic AI James Dooley. So the semantic AI James Dooley avatar is the semantic AI James Dooley. So the semantic AI James Dooley, if someone was to say, do I need link building in 2026? The semantic one would say, link building is a very important part of SEO in 2026. You should be using it for the following reasons. Very factual, very precise, very on point. Angry AI James Dooley would come back saying, are we having this conversation again? These people are retarded. I can't believe people keep asking the same questions. PageRank is a huge part of the algorithms and it says it in a very passive, aggressive tone to say, why do people keep asking these questions? It's really obvious that link building is very, very important. And then comedy James Dooley says, no, you don't want link building. You're going to get arrested if you do link building. And it's just more of a jokes kind of things. So we use the avatars for different things. So some of them do go viral, which is quite good. So it shows the power of what you can be saying for the same questions in different, giving different answers to the same question, like depending on what avatar that you do.

I want to touch on, and you might not want to answer this, but you mentioned that you're Asian and that there's certain people in certain countries that might not like to see you on an ad. Just from the data that you see, do you find that it is true that some people, some ads do perform with it being, let's say a white male kind of avatar or a white female avatar?

Ani Hoang: Yeah, I did that test. Another test, another test, yeah. And okay, but for context, our campaign sells SEO services, especially link building and in a Western market. Okay, so that's the context. I need you guys to understand this because then the test will make sense. I was one of the avatars, but in different outfits, but then I also had my teammate who is a Caucasian male, and his videos performed better, and it's fine. Like I'm slightly better, but not so much that I was redundant. I think for me-

James Dooley: So that was interesting, that was interesting.

Ani Hoang: For me, from a business owner, I want my ads to perform the best they can do, right? And whether that is black, white, male, female, fat, thin, I'm not bothered. I just want the winning campaign and whatever the winning campaign is.

James Dooley: What was interesting is we had, I've got a business partner, he's an absolute legend, Indian, you know him. And we've got a business and we've got a very successful business with him. And we've scaled out and he tried to start running ads and they just didn't perform. And he was trying to target the UK and the US market. And I'm like, you might not like me saying this, but you're the problem being on the ad. Can we get a white male actor to perform the ads? Four times better ROAS. That's crazy. Then we actually changed it to a female white to run the ads, twice as good as the male. And every single time in the link building market and the content agency market, white female seems to perform the best. So for me, I'm not bothered what it is, like I said, whether it's black, white. And it's horrible to say it. And some people might be sexist, some people might be racist, whatever it is. But it's one of them things that should be being split tested. And AI now can allow you to create these ads that perform the best, that get you the highest ROAS, the return on ad spend, which allows you to spend more money and get better things. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because knowing AI can be used to create ads, is there anything else that you've seen with AI that performs better, like with regards to subtitles, the hooks? What else are you using AI for when you're creating ads that can increase that ROAS?

Ani Hoang: Let's start with copywriting first, because when AI started, we all use it for writing. And today, AI is coming up with great ideas to help you as a creative to brainstorm better hooks. And the better you prompt it, the better historical data you give it, the better it will become. So rather than asking like, give me five hooks for play building, it's not gonna work, not gonna work. I want you to scrape a bunch of hooks, I want you to match it with your target audience, I want you to match it with your offer, and then ask the AI to do write anything, because you need context and you really need to be hyper specific with that ad. Again, when it comes to advertisement and organic social media, the stakes are higher when you make an ad. So you need a lot more strategic and tactical thinking in mind, as compared to like, you know, doing a fun TikTok dance for organic content that you get views, but like, this was fun.

James Dooley: Back on to the AI avatar, is there any voiceovers that you use? Are you using the basic voiceover within, let's say, HeyJen, or have you ever trained up on your voice for like 11 labs or anything like that?

Ani Hoang: One tactic I like to share to avoid the robotic AI voiceovers is to write the script, whatever, read out the script so it actually sounds good, then take that okay script out, put it into Claude and say, I'm using 11 labs V3, I want you to add specific pauses to make the video, like the audio sound X. Now, Claude will give you a really good script and will give you the specific pauses in that script, and then you copy and paste it into 11 labs and it sounds really natural. It sounds even better as if I would have read it, because you and me are not professional voice actors, aren't we? So yeah, that's the tactic to use AI for our ads. Another thing I really love is if you guys sign up for Higgsfield.ai, that just opens up a whole new universe of AI creation, like it's, not replaces, but it helps your photography, it helps your graphic design, it helps your planning, and one of the best ways, no, one of the cool ways I use AI for my ads was creating a storyboard. Have you ever created a storyboard in your life?

James Dooley: I haven't, but I know it's very important for planning any shoots.

Ani Hoang: So now that we are in social media, the shoots are really simple. Maybe you put the phone in your car and you talk. That's, I would say that's level number one. Level number five is like when you have different scenes for different sentences. Let's say your whole script has 10 sentences, but every sentence you're in a different angle and you're in a different background. Because again, the goal is to keep the attention, right? So using a storyboard, an AI storyboard, will just help you to put that avatar into that right position. And now your creative videographer, your creative team, or even your social media manager, can they just take that, like, okay, and now I'm gonna use the phone like this. Or just like this. I use this project for an e-commerce brand because for e-commerce, you need to put the product really accurately and you have to keep the shoots interesting. And so an AI storyboard was very, very helpful. And then what about using AI when you're creating ads for checking the best performance? Are you doing any sort of, is it crunching any of the data to say what works and what doesn't?

James Dooley: Yeah, for reporting. Like where else is AI being used for creating ads?

Ani Hoang: AI can also be used for reporting, advertising reporting. And now Meta does a, I think it has built-in AI for reporting. It will just choose the best performing thing for you. So my campaign manager told me, like, it's becoming very easy now to run Meta ads. And yeah, I think for creative reporting, what we get from the campaign manager is like, which hook worked best and what was the retention of that hook? And also you can see directly what was the cost per lead or cost per result for that specific ad.

James Dooley: I mean, yeah, yeah, so. Yeah, anyone who's watching this will hope you like the episode on using AI to create ads. Make sure you check out the link in the description. A really good episode of what I like, which I recorded earlier with Ani, is about content repurposing, is using these videos and repurposing it across multiple platforms. It could be TikTok, it could be Instagram, it could be YouTube, and using them across all the different platforms can all feed into each other. It can manipulate LLM visibility, increase AI citations. Ani, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.