MarketingStack runs a brand's social media on autopilot: set the brand, pick a narration style, choose a pace, and the posts go out on their own. It's built for founders who would rather be building than posting.
Wissem Ksantini, its founder, had hired me before, for Solciety. This time he handed me the keys: a few reference ads, the logo, the robot mascot, the website, a keyword list, and the company's sales call script. The direction, and the one line the ad would make people believe, were mine to find.
The ad runs cold in a feed, in front of people who have never heard of MarketingStack. Too slow and they scroll past. Too fast and too flashy, and they never learn what it does. The ad had to do both: stop them, then explain itself.
I started from the sales call script. It exists to move one person on one call to a yes, so it already knew the audience and the problem they agree they have. The ad needed one sentence to carry that into 43 seconds:
Your brand stays consistent without you.
Wissem also sent me nine posts MarketingStack's AI had generated for other brands: what the product actually makes.
The keyword list asked for glass, gradients and texture. I set the visual direction and designed four new product screens in it, built to be read at feed speed. An arrow turns into the word Detect as the cursor arrives. A frequency field opens into its options. Pick a brand colour and the whole screen follows.
Every scene got a reading time before it got an animation. The first opening failed that test. It asked: "What's stopping you from narrating your story? Budget? Time? Brainstorming?" Ten words, about seven seconds, in a slot meant to last two to three. Speeding it up would have kept the words and lost the reader. So I cut the words: "Is your brand inconsistent?" Four words, two seconds, same job.
The narration style scene was the ad's eye candy: the styles a user can pick from. The note was that eight would be too much. I kept all eight and cut them on the beat of the music, each card set in the look of the brand that owns its word: Professional in LinkedIn's, Luxurious in Rolex's, Technical in Vercel's. Eight changes in four seconds read as rhythm instead of clutter.
"I was sure this scene wouldn't work and that we'd end up cutting it. It's actually good. It works!"
After several versions, I dropped the voiceover: the pictures already told the story, and a voice would only have repeated them. Every word now lives on the mascot's screen, an old CRT face with scanlines and a blinking cursor, and the camera pushes through that screen into each next scene.
MarketingStack has the ad as one master built for LinkedIn, YouTube and X, set for a future campaign. I posted it on my LinkedIn.
This project changed how I pace. Slowing down is what catches attention, and effects and transitions are tools for the message, never the point. An ad for marketing you forget about runs on restraint.
"Was definitely smooth sailing working with you as always Baha! And the result is great!"
Thank you, Wissem, for the keys.
