u/dmdbGroup

Your last line is the whole game. Demo polish is a trap. The prettiest render usually loses because it looks like an ad, and people scroll past ads.

What I'd actually score before spending a dollar on media:

1. The first 3 seconds. Does a real human stop scrolling? Veo3 footage can look incredible and still lose here because it feels staged. Native beats cinematic in feed almost every time.
2. Product clarity. Can a viewer say what the thing is and why they'd want it by second 5? Creatify pulling from the product page is a real edge here. Most tools make you fight for this.
3. Delivery believability. Arcads wins talking heads because the cadence sounds like a person, not a presenter. Corporate training video energy (your Heygen note) kills trust instantly.

Run all 4 as separate creatives in one ad set, $20-30 each. The winner won't be the one you'd pick watching them on your laptop.

I spend most of my time on the creative side, so my stack skews that way.

For UGC-style video ads I use hermoso.ai to spin up hook variants and rough storyboards, then I cut the finals myself in a real editor. The win wasn't the generation, it was walking into a test with ten hooks instead of two. ChatGPT for research summaries and first drafts like everyone else, Claude when I want something written cleaner.

One caution from experience: I stopped asking AI tools for marketing "insights" and only ask them to clean and summarize data. The insight layer hallucinated patterns for me more than once. And AI-voiced ads: I've shipped a few that flopped purely on pacing, one re-cut with a real voice doubled hold rate. Human pass at the end, every time.