Building digital ads with Claude

One campaign might need five headline variations, three different body copy angles, platform-specific versions for LinkedIn and Facebook, and a handful of CTAs to test. By the time you've written all of that, briefed the designer, and gotten approvals, half a day is gone.

I wrote ads for several clients at once. So I built a better way.

The tool

It's a custom Claude workflow (a skill, in Claude Code terms) that takes a campaign brief and produces complete ad copy across multiple platforms and formats.

I gave it the context: who the client is, what we're promoting, who the audience is, what the offer is, and what platform we're running on. It gave me back structured ad copy already formatted for each placement.

What it produced

• LinkedIn adsIntro text, headlines, descriptions, CTAs
• Facebook/Meta adsPrimary text, headline, link description
• Display adsShort headline, long headline, descriptions at multiple character counts
• Multiple variationsDifferent angles (problem-focused, outcome-focused, proof-focused) so we had options to test

Everything came out on-brand because the tool already knew the client's voice, positioning, and audience. That context lived in my second brain and loaded when I called the skill.

Why I built it instead of using a generic AI tool

Generic AI tools write generic ads. They don't know who a specific client is talking to or which problems matter to that audience. Brand voice is knowing that.

With the client context built into the system, the output was usable. I made small edits and moved on, instead of rewriting most of it.

Where it fit in the workflow

I used it at the brief stage. Once I knew the campaign objective and the audience, I ran the skill and used the output as the starting point for the creative brief I handed to the design team.

The designer got structured copy with clear character counts and placement specs. Reviews were faster because the structure was already right.

The process went from most of a morning to about twenty minutes.

The lesson

The context does the work. A generic "write me an ad" prompt gives generic output. A prompt with the client's positioning, the audience's specific pain points, the offer, and the platform specs gives you something worth using.