Hey, happy Friday! Hope you're having a great week. Still not in the habit of sending these regularly, but I'm trying.

Winks is taking up a lot of time, and I'm not gonna lie, it's definitely a struggle. We're having success in some areas and challenges in others, but it's a lot of fun. We're still trying to find the right offer and nail down the messaging.

The good news is it's clear how many people struggle with sleep. The hard part is getting them to take out their wallets and pay us. But we'll get there.

I've also been doing weekly creator calls. I'll share more about those once we have a little more success with them.

And I've been making some time for Mentorpass calls and consulting. There's been a lot of demand, especially heading into Q4, but time on my calendar is limited. So we just launched sprints, a mostly async way for me to audit your account and provide strategy, a roadmap, and recommendations.

You can check those out here. Also big thanks to my longtime newsletter sponsor Insense. Q4 is here and you need ad creative. Insense makes it really easy to get low cost, high quality ad creative to test. If you book a free call with them using my link, you can get 10% off your Q4 campaign. Sponsored.

Today I want to talk about AI. I think, ironically, two groups are going to benefit the most from it: creatives and people with real subject matter expertise. A few things I've seen lately, a couple of them at the recent Runneth event, made me pretty optimistic about that.

I was on a panel with Jamie Gannon, and she shared how she creates AI images that don't look like AI slop. It was pretty impressive.

The TLDR is that she goes into a ton of detail in the prompt. The camera, the lenses, the lighting, the shadows, the angles, the direction. Then the wardrobe and styling. She was describing things in more detail than I even have in my vocabulary.

If I prompt an image model, I know enough to get something okay. But I have a lot of limitations. Watching Jamie do it, I could see how much more she was able to give the model because she actually understands all of those things.

The prompts were long, but the detail was the interesting part. She could describe the image she wanted in a way I couldn't, and the output was much more vivid and realistic than what I usually get.

I know a lot of creatives are scared of AI. But I have tremendous respect for the ones who've leaned in, like Oren, who's editing videos and doing a lot with it. I really think it's an amazing time to be creative with AI.

I have a friend who's pretty much solo running a brand. He's not very technical, but he's very creative. He understands content, he can make it, he can design, and he can do brand strategy.

Now he can develop landing pages and websites with Claude. He can run ads without having to do the manual targeting. A lot of the work he can put his time into is creating the ads and designing the pages, which are things he's good at.

That's a pretty exciting setup for someone building a brand. Watching him, I think a lot of the benefit is coming from the creative skills he already has and being able to do more with them.

At Runneth, I also saw my friend Dara Denny present on some winning ads her team had made with AI. I was blown away.

She started by sharing the research process and how they found the insights. It took really good creative strategists to uncover those insights in the first place. Then she showed the videos, and they felt super organic.

I spend a lot of time looking at AI, and I couldn't tell they were AI on the first few watches. When she walked through how they were made, there were a ton of details that went into them.

It was clear to me that you needed expertise in creative strategy and editing to do what her team had done. I wasn't watching someone just type a prompt and get a winning ad back. There was a lot of research and creative work behind what she showed.

If you ever get to see Dara share her process, I highly recommend it.

There are times when I'm working on a website or landing page and I think, this is a Cody limitation.

Sometimes I'll have a designer mock something up and give that to the model, and the result gets much better. The model was capable of producing it. I hadn't given it the right input.

I can spend a bunch of time trying to get something to look right, and then a designer gives me a mockup that gets us there. I've seen this enough in my own work that I think expertise is going to keep being really valuable.

If you're a creative, I'd lean into learning these tools as much as possible while continuing to get better at your craft.

I like the Jeff Bezos framework of thinking about what's going to stay the same while everything else changes. Creativity, or taste as a lot of people call it, and expertise are the things I'd focus on. I think they're always going to be high leverage.

We're still going to need people. Personally, I wouldn't fear AI. From what I've been seeing, I'd be pretty optimistic if I were a creative building right now.

Partner Of The Week - BFCM is the most expensive time of year to be feeding Meta bad data. CPMs are at their highest and you're spending more than any other week. But between cookies dying, browser restrictions, and the native Shopify integrations dropping a bunch of events, a lot of the clicks, add to carts, checkouts, and purchases never make it back to Meta or Klaviyo. Then the algorithm goes and finds you more of the wrong buyers right when it matters most. Elevar fixes that by sending clean, reliable data from your site to all your marketing platforms. It's not the sexy part of ecom, but it's one of those things you don't think about until it costs you. The best part is you don't need to take any work on yourself. If you qualify by November 6, they'll do a free White Glove Installation. Their team handles the setup, data layer, GA4 reporting, consent management, and QA, so you can focus on actually running BFCM. Check it out here.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Cody