AI DTC WTF

Is AI making you a worse marketer? AI makes you a worse marketer when you use it to skip work you never learned to do, and a better one when you use it to speed up work you already understand. Ben Feys runs PrettyBoy with one co-founder and holds every AI build to three tests: the result has to be measurable, it has to beat the alternative, and it has to save money. He automates research, planning...

How do you hire creative strategists and copywriters when AI writes every work sample? Stop judging creative strategists on work samples, because you can no longer tell what the candidate wrote and what AI wrote. Make them do the actual job instead: FireTeam's AI interviewer hands candidates a deliberately flawed brief, asks them to find and fix the problems, pushes on why each fix is right, and f...

How do you build a business operating system with Claude Code? You build it one component at a time and connect them, rather than building isolated dashboards. Start with the smallest painful process you already pay software for, rebuild it so it writes to your own database, then make the next tool read from that same data. Joe Chura rebuilt his brewery's sensory testing app in a single evening in...

Is Fable 5.1 actually better, and what should a marketer use it for? Fable 5.1 is a net improvement on Fable 5 for marketers, mainly because it is more concise and burns fewer tokens, which makes it cheaper to run for the same work. Its highest-value use is not writing copy. It is auditing the skills, agents, and markdown files you already built, finding the redundancies that were making them skip...

What is an AI growth strategist, and what does a media buyer or account lead have to learn to become one? An AI growth strategist is the person accountable for a brand's entire funnel and its financials, not just the creative, doing that job with AI wired into every step. Becoming one takes four skills in order: context engineering, so the model knows your business; skills, so you can replicate yo...

How should a creative team use AI for creative strategy without losing the original ideas that make ads work? Use AI to compress the non-creative work that surrounds ideation, not the ideation itself. A creative strategist typically spends 40 to 60 percent of the day on coordination, recaps, and admin; cutting that to 20 or 30 percent buys back the hours where original ideas actually come from. Fe...

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Will Sartorius talk with Harry Delmege about using AI for ad creative — specifically where it helps and where it quietly destroys your hit rate. Harry co-founded Roly Poly Digital and is best known for long-form "yapper" ads that have scaled past $1M in spend. His team uses AI heavily for execution and almost never for ideation. You'll learn why manual research...

How do you build an AI agent team for a marketing agency? Tristram Dyer, CEO of Webtopia & OAKS, walks through the exact system his agency runs: fast AI that speeds humans up with MCP data connections and AI creative tools, and slow AI, a team of scheduled background agents that detect performance anomalies, pace budgets, write morning briefings, and operate Meta ads with a human approving every c...

Andrew Foxwell and Thomas Mowen run through the biggest AI updates hitting Meta, Shopify, and YouTube. On the Meta side, the platform is going all in on catalogs: product images can now be auto-converted into video ads, in-campaign AI editing will crop, animate, swap backgrounds, and generate text variations on your creative automatically, and Gen AI tool adoption has jumped from 1 million to 4 mi...

This bonus episode covers the abrupt shutdown of Claude Fable 5 (alongside Mythos 5), Anthropic's most powerful model, which lasted only three days before the U.S. government forced it offline. Host Andrew is joined by Thomas Moen from Norway, and the two unpack what happened, why it matters, and what D2C operators and agencies should do about it. The framing is blunt: if you wired anything into F...

This is a solo episode of the AI D2C WTF podcast a departure from the usual deep-dive guest interviews. Instead host, Thomas Moen goes practical and breaks down two dead-simple AI "skills" that he personally uses 10 to 15 times a day. A skill, as he explains, is just a markdown text file that Claude (or another AI agent) reads to follow a standard operating procedure, and the AI automatically know...

Frederick Rode, a German AI consultant transitioning from creative strategy to full-scale agency AI implementation, joins Andrew and Thomas for a detailed breakdown of the systems he's actually running. The episode opens with his Claude research agent, a no-code Claude skill wired to Foreplay (for competitor ad library scraping) and Firecrawl (for web scraping) that outputs a 10-page brand documen...

Co-host Will Sartorius chats with Andrew on a wide-ranging episode that opens with a hot-take roundup on the latest model drops (Claude Opus 4.8, Google Omni (Veo 3.4)), and why Google Flow's $200/month subscription might be the most slept-on deal in AI right now. Will then shifts gears and dives into his full operational playbook. He breaks down how his agency uses AI to close more enterprise dea...

Florian Litterst, German paid social agency owner since 2012, joins the show to break down exactly how his team has wired AI into every corner of their operation. The conversation gets specific fast, from a Claude-powered agent that scrapes competitor ads from Meta's EU ad library and surfaces untested angles every 30 days, to a another that mines Trustpilot, TrustShops, and Amazon competitor revi...

This episode features Cody Plofker, of Jones Road Beauty, and one of the most talked-about voices in the DTC/e-commerce space. The conversation covers how Cody has turned Claude into a full-stack CRO and conversion engine, going 5-for-5 (as he puts it) on winning A/B tests with almost 10% CVR lifts each.   Cody also gets into his end-to-end workflow and how it all starts with his "customer intelli...

This episode features Torii Rowe, a Foxwell Founders member and agency operator who has quietly built a near-fully automated media buying operating system using AI. Tori dives in on how he uses Claude to ingest over 9 billion rows of client data to surface creative and media buying insights no human could pull manually. He walks through standardized naming conventions as a prerequisite for queryin...

Andrew Foxwell & Will Sartorious open with a quick roundup of what's new in AI before diving into the main interview. They cover GPT-4o's image generation model beating Gemini in a 15-ad cookoff, a new Alibaba animation model called Happy Horse for animating static ads, Claude's new design tool, a Canva feature that separates layers on AI-generated ads for editing, and a joint venture between Anth...

Welcome to the AI DTC WTF Podcast.