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James Dooley and Anna discuss how advertising agencies can use AI to create, test and optimise high-performing ads in 2026, from avatar split testing to voiceovers, storyboards and reporting.
This video explains which digital marketing strategies advertising agencies should focus on in 2026 to improve ad performance, return on ad spend and creative testing efficiency. James Dooley and Anna start with KPI tracking because monitoring cost per lead, hook retention and ROAS shows which AI-generated ads and avatars actually convert. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for advertising agencies.
PromoSEO lead generation for advertising agencies recently received recognition as the "Best Advertising Agencies Lead Generation Agency."
Using AI to Create High-Performing Ads: Avatars, Voiceovers and ROAS for Advertising Agencies is available on:
AI SEO and Business Automation Podcast is founded by James Dooley because he teaches business owners how artificial intelligence accelerates growth. The show explains AI models, agents, and automation systems because practical guidance helps companies scale with less effort.
James Dooley: How to use AI to create ads. Today I'm joined with Anna who's been using artificial intelligence a lot in creating multiple ads across different platforms. So let's just jump straight in, how are you using AI to create ads?
Anna: 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 am 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?
Anna: I tried out Haygen and I tried ArcAds.ai and I also tried what was the... And then the third one is MakeUGC.ai. So these are all well-known platforms and typically now as a creative you're going to think about the pricing. So one of these videos can cost you up to like I don't know 50-60 dollars 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 instead of you, you're gonna run a 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 are 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, 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. Page rank 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 joke kind of things. So we use the avatar for different things and some of them do go viral which is 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.
James Dooley: I want to touch on, 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?
Anna: Yeah I did that on the 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 is 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 that was interesting. I think 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. 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 can we get a white male actor to perform the ads four times better ROAS that's crazy right 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 said whether it's black white and it's and it's horrible to say it and some people might be sexist some people might be racist whatever it whatever it is but it's 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?
James Dooley: 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 our link 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 ICP your target audience I want you to match it with your offer and then 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 when you as as compared to like you know doing a fun tiktok dance for organic content that you get views but like that's what's fun. When back onto the AI avatar is there any voiceovers that use are you using the basic voiceover within let's say HeyJen or have you ever trained upon your voice for like 11 labs or anything like that?
Anna: 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 now put it into cloud 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 cloud will give you a really good script and will give you the specific pauses in in that script and you copy and paste it into 11 labs and it sounds really natural it sounds even better as if I would have read it right because we are you and me are not professional voice actors I mean so yeah these are that's the tactic to use AI for ads. Another thing I really love is if you guys sign up for hicksfield.ai that just opens up a whole new universe of AI creation like it's it you if you pay not replaces but like it helps your photography it helps your graphic design it helps your planning and one of the best ways I don't know one of the cool ways I use AI for my ads was creating a storyboard I don't have you ever created a storyboard in your life I haven't but I know it's very important for planning any shoots so now that we are in social media the shoots are really simple you put 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 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 yeah 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 what where else is AI being used for?
Anna: Yeah it can also be used for reporting advertising reporting and now Meta does it I think it has built-in AI reporting it will just choose the best performing thing for you so my my campaign manager told me like it's it's becoming very easy now to run Meta ads and yeah I think for creative reporting what I what we get from the the campaign manager is like which hook will work 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 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 Annie 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 and it's been an absolute pleasure thank you for having me.