How to build a video ad with AI: Step-by-step guide

Growth marketing leaders hear a lot about AI.

Maybe you’ve played around with ChatGPT prompts, but you haven’t actually made it a part of your creative strategy process. 

Today, we're going to fix that—here are some super tangible ways you can use AI tools in your daily workflow.

Meet our AI guides: John Gargiulo + Reza Khadjavi

To frame our AI walkthrough, I’ll reference insights drawn from ReadySet’s John Gargiulo and Motion’s Reza Khadjavi during our recent virtual event—you can grab the recording there as well.

John is an absolute master of AI & advertising. He’s the co-founder of the digital agency Ready Set (producing ads for DoorDash, SmileDirectClub, and hims & hers)—and his team just secured their first patent for using AI to assemble video ads. 

As Motion’s CEO and Founder, Reza is at the forefront of creative strategy as a discipline. Plus, he’s privy to how DTC’s top creative strategists optimize billions of dollars in ad spend across Meta, TikTok, and Youtube.  

John and Reza were determined to leave the audience with tangible AI advice.

In fact, John built an ad in real-time during the event using his own AI tool. He’s currently calling it, “First Draft Assistant.” 

He selects the brand, an avatar, a prompt, the number of ads, and variations, lets it bake for a few minutes…

…then, well, just watch the replay—it’s awesome. 

It’s a workable first draft. An editor could clean this up and have it ready to go live in significantly less time than starting from scratch. 

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

I don’t want AI to overwhelm you. Let's start by breaking off one piece of the AI cookie at a time. 

4 AI tools for ad production 

We're going to use AI to help us with these stages of the creative strategy process: 

1) Help us find customer pain points 

2) Turn those pain points into a script draft

3) Turn the script draft into a quick video ad

4) Increase CVR from the ad with landing page tips

Let’s use my imaginary candle company as a tangible example for each.  

1. Use GigaBrain to quickly find your customers’ pain points

GigaBrain scans billions of discussions on Reddit and other online communities to find the most useful posts and comments based on your inquiry. 

I’ll keep my search query simple: “Pain points with buying candles online”

GigaBrain scours the internet for you, providing a TLDR summary and highlighting the most relevant threads. 

Based on one second of work, I now have a few creative angles to try that hit on my target audiences’ pain points:

• Non-toxic ingredients 
• Small business
• Avoid overbuying

2. Use a Custom GPT to create tailored ad scripts

Create a custom bot—tailored to your brand, product, customer demographics, reviews, top-performing ads, compliance reqs, and more—to help you create rough script drafts.  

John referred to his Custom GPT as an “intern.”

After “onboarding” your new GPT, you can ask it to perform basic tasks relevant to your job and brand, without needing to give it the same context everytime. 

The Custom GPT Builder pretty much guides you through the entire creation process. 

It asks: What would you like to make?

I started with the basics: Make a performance marketer who writes scripts for ads on Meta and TikTok. 

→ You work for an ecommerce candle company called Fresh Candles. 

→ Your target demographic is females aged 25-35 with disposable income. 

→ Our candles are non-toxic, use all-natural materials, and handmade. 

→ We are a female-owned small business. 

→ Our brand style is warm and inviting, with a neutral color palette. 

The Builder creates a name and image for your bot, and follows up with some refinement questions:

→ What should be emphasized in the scripts, and are there any specific phrases or elements you'd like to avoid?

→ How do you want the tone of the communication to be? Should it be more inspirational, educational, or perhaps a mix of both?

→ Would you like to add any personal touches or specific messaging angles that resonate with the brand's core values?

→ Would you like any specific examples or themes to start with for your next ad script?

Here’s where I entered those pain points I discovered using GigaBrain. 

You can also mention a competitor or similar brand to use as an example. 

Your Custom GPT will remember everything you tell it here, so—although the setup is not very time-consuming—you’ll be able to move even faster when interacting with it in the future. 

It even provides some suggested prompts based on your inputs. 

You can select an option to: “Create a Meta ad focused on our eco-friendly materials.”

…and now we have a script!

It’s not perfect, but—it’s a workable first draft. 

You can see how valuable this Custom GPT could be to performance marketers. 

Keep feeding it more information about your winning ads to refine these scripts and help you churn out more concepts to test. 

3. Use Kapwing to turn the script into a video

Kapwing is a content creation and video editing platform with a ton of AI features. 

You can literally copy a script from your Custom GPT and paste it into Kapwing to automatically generate a video. 

It uses the text from the script to create images, animations, videos, voiceover, and subtitles to match each section. 

It’s a bit stock-photo-looking, of course, but you could definitely use some of it as B-roll. 

Is the video perfect? Nowhere near!

Is it a workable rough draft? Absolutely!

Plus, Kapwing’s video editor is wonderfully intuitive. 

You can easily replace images, text, and audio to fit your brand—while still letting AI do the bulk of the initial work. 

4. Use Landing Page Optimizer GPT to convert more customers 

Your ad is up and running, now you want to make sure your landing page is converting as many customers as possible. 

With Landing Page Optimizer GPT, you can submit a URL and immediately get actionable changes for your landing page copy.

I used a “competitor” DTC candle brand’s landing page for this example.

The copy suggestions are a little basic. You’ll want to infuse your brand voice more. 

But the explanations and CTAs should get your mind working in the right direction. 

Using AI for Meta & TikTok ad production

Reza had a good perspective on using AI in creative strategy: 

"Don't just wander around with AI—focus on a painful, time-consuming part of the creative strategy process and then use AI as an assistant." 

Which part of the creative strategy workflow could you use help with?