AI content is a crutch, not a strategy

Many brands I work with are behind on content.

Our team recycles the same few content pieces across their entire Meta account and wonders why there's no breakthrough.

So we tell them the truth. You need more content. A lot more.

And when they can't produce it fast enough, we fill the gap with AI creative. Our team is good at it.

AI content pulls its weight... it adds variety, it pumps volume, it keeps the account fed so the algorithm has something to work with.

But here's what I've learned running both an agency and a brand.

AI content is a volume play. It's not the performance play.

The real heavy hitters are still the same things they've always been. Founder on camera talking about the product. Customers sharing real experiences. Taking the product out to the streets and letting strangers react. Raw footage with real people doing real things.

That stuff outperforms AI slop every single time.

At VIBAe, we’re filming content at our retail location constantly now. Not occasionally. Not "when we get around to it." It's a line item. It's part of the operation. And honestly, the cost is way more affordable than most brand owners assume.

What it's done for our paid media has been massive.

The quality... but more importantly the volume of raw content our creative team can now work with has completely changed what we're able to do on Meta. We spent $400k on Meta in March. ROAS 2.9. Net MER after refunds... comfortably above 3x.

That doesn't happen without content infrastructure.

And that's the part I keep coming back to. Brand owners will write a $200k check for ad spend without blinking. They understand customer acquisition costs money. But ask them to invest $4k/month into someone creating content consistently? Suddenly it's a "nice to have."

It shouldn't be.

Content isn't secondary to advertising. Content IS advertising. The ad account is just the distribution layer. If you're not feeding it real, human, raw material on a consistent basis... you're asking a machine to do the creative thinking for you.

AI can help bridge the gap. We use it every day for our clients. But if your entire content strategy is "let the AI figure it out," you're building on a foundation that every competitor can replicate overnight.

The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best AI tools. They're the ones with a camera running every day and a founder who isn't afraid to show up on screen.

That part is still hard to fake.

— Eddie

P.S. If you're spending real money on Meta and your content pipeline is basically "we'll figure it out as we go"... that's probably the first thing worth fixing. Everything else gets easier after that.