You kind of went viral pretty early on, I want to say, in like this AI ad scene. What's the scroll stopping content? That's something I always tell our writers is like, how do we stop the scroll? And I tell this to brands like this brand is dead or alive based on the first 4 seconds. This ad was shown in the NBA finals. That's why it got a load of media coverage because was shown on the big screen. How did that opportunity come about? And then when BO3 came out, it went from like, oh, these are cool art projects to like, oh, these are actually insane ads. Hello and welcome to today's podcast by GenHQ. Today we're joined by PJ Ace, who's one of the most notable people in the AI admire globe. He had his advert featured in the NBA final made entirely using AI. Since then, that video got over 50 million views and went crazy viral and his AI agency has just exploded. In this podcast, you're going to learn how he landed that major client and how you can also use a similar strategy to get big clients of your own. He also breaks down a step-by-step framework as to how he actually creates these AI adverts and how he's able to charge up to $50,000 per video. There are some absolute gems inside of this podcast. So, please get your notebook out, start making some notes because there are some real value exchange to be had here. Enjoy the podcast. Okay, welcome today, guys. So, we are joined by Mr. PJ, the man himself. So, for those of you who don't know PJ, he is actually probably I want to say one of the most notorious AI creators kind of in the scene for all my crimes and infamy. PJ has worked on some really incredible projects. Um, and you kind of went viral pretty early on, I want to say, in like this AI ad scene that's now like emerging rapidly, um, with the Koshi ad. So, do you want to introduce yourself and kind of give a brief background as to who you are and some of the things that you've worked on? Yeah, super excited to be here. Obviously, we've been fans. I'm actually like I'm in your course, too. I'm learning this stuff. So, you never you never arrive each day. I'm like, "Oh my god, I didn't know you could do that." But but really excited to be here and kind of help contribute what I've learned. Uh 15ear commercial director. Uh grew a YouTube channel to a million subscribers. uh launched my own Hollywood show that I wrote, directed and kind of uh raised money for and and now you know essentially we were spending a million plus uh you know per episode last year last summer and I was like screw it you know like there's got to be a way to disrupt this with AI. I'm tired of Hollywood having, you know, control or, you know, brands having control of what's in budget, what's out of budget. Just AI just felt like, of course, what we all say is like, you know, democratizing creativity like and any the best idea wins now. It's not kind of what's possible, what's not possible. It's just like go do it. Don't wait for any gatekeepers, you know, and I know you kind of share that too, like don't wait for permission. Just go create crazy And it like the rewards always come, you know, on the other side of you just saying like, "Hey, I'm like it's like the whole pushing a a car, you know, gets you better than like hitchhiking there." You know, you're like almost at the gas station. People see, okay, this is what they're about. They're almost there. They're cheering you on, and you have to be the one to say, "Here's who I am. This is my unique point of view. This is what I do, and like we should make something cool together." M so it's interesting that you kind of mentioned this idea based like thing where it's like prior with traditional media it was like okay we have an idea and it takes what three months for it to actually come into fruition whereas now we can develop something much quicker. Do you believe now like AI ads and their success are really down to the idea more so than the execution or do you think it's a real combination of the two? It's a kind. Yeah, you have to have the technical skills to like execute on the idea, but but that's in some ways like relatively easy as the tools just get better and better. I think it really does come down to like what's the scroll stopping content? That's something I always tell our writers is like how do we stop the scroll? And I tell this to brands like this brand is dead or alive based on the first like 04 seconds or or not like the opening shot has to be viral. So, I'm really excited to kind of showcase like what I think broke through the noise with the Cali ad, why it went mega viral to have like 50 million views um on it across platforms and earn media and how we can kind of deconstruct this to like going forward. How how people in the program can learn how to kind of do this not on command but like go more viral consistently than not because there are a few techniques I've picked up and I'm excited to share them with you today. Yeah, that's super cool. Um, I think a bit of context as well is that this ad was shown in the NBA finals, right? And I think that's why it got like a shitload of media coverage is because, you know, it was shown on the big screen. How did that opportunity come about before we dive into it? Yeah. Yeah. So, I made a couple vir I mean, I've been making like viral AI videos for last year. I did this like Princess Monoke Studio Giblly live action thing like back in October. It got 22 million views. I did a Lord of the Rings Studio Gibli thing uh earlier this year. And then and then when VO3 came out, it went from like, "Oh, these are cool art projects." to like, "Oh, these are actually insane ads." So, my first one I did was this pepperon like fake depression commercial where they just send you a pill and you take the pill and it secretes a pheromone and attracts puppies. Everyone's like, "This is awesome." And I made it like the day that VO3 came out. I was at the Google IO conference and I knew I just left immediately when I saw that that's what was dropped. And I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna make the next viral ad." And it got like three million views the next morning. And so, you know, like I think time uh of like timing your viral videos around new products is definitely like a hack because people always want to know, okay, midjourney V7, V8 just dropped, like who's making the So, like just kind of understanding what's coming up really helps you to hack the system. But like you said, you know, essentially I uh I did the Pupperman commercial. I did this Bible influencer thing where like opening shot Jesus on a cross. He's like God about to BRB. Like I mean with an opening shot like that, come on, man. was like destined for Tik Tok glory. So yeah, I got that like 8 million 8 million views on Tik Tok and I had like 500 followers on Tik Tok, you know, it's it's actually not a platform I like because in in the sense of like I don't really do our ads on Tik Tok because it's it's rare that like you know company ads are going viral on Tik Tok, but it is possible. Yeah. Um and so yeah, like we did went for Popeyes and that got like three million views on Tik Tok. So it's definitely possible. Just has to be fun. You can't you can't have like a B2B SAS company come to you and be like, "Okay, what's going to go viral with like 18 year olds?" I'm like, "Right." I don't think so. I really don't. We can make some crazy but uh we're not going to make it go viral. So there there's always, you know, but it's kind of that like, all right, well, what what taps into X? What goes viral kind of on like the Twitter platform with the tech crowd? like and we've had a lot of success kind of finding like viral niches just because something doesn't you know it's like like Kali is an anomaly in some ways that I don't actually think even I can recreate in the sense of it was like first major NBA finals pretty crazy ad okay that's what went like 3 mil organic then like well 10 mil across media and then 40 mil um earn media because it was a story about the story so that's that's a pro tip that I do want to tell filmmakers is that like it's you're telling brands that like, yeah, this is cheaper and it's faster than live production, but it's also the story about the story. Like, we talked to brands now like whoever is making the first um NFL spots with AI, they're going to win because again, it's like the story about the story. Um why these tools are different, how you're making them, and like what we can talk about at the end is like how I even do my Twitter posts and breakdowns because like that's half of why people click on this stuff is they just want to know like how'd you make it? Like even all my peers like there's stuff they can teach me and like I'll watch their ad because some of them are cool but at the same time I'm just like what are the new techniques you're learning? What are the tools? And like that's what gets the engagement virality because you want retention to the end of the video. You want people to bookmark it. You want people to like it. You want people to comment it. But just saying comments, like and subscribe like doesn't do in today's day and age. You have to you have to basically give value. And then if you give value, people kind of give it back with their attention. Right. Right. And I think this is a really interesting point for the viewers to take away is that really leveraging socials and actually making those breakdown videos like after the fact that even if you're making a spec ad and you're just posting that to try and grab some attention, sometimes the breakdown videos of those actually perform better than the way in in general will perform better than the actual like performance of the spec ad. you know, you notice it with people who create like um they'll show like the editing timeline underneath the video that they've created and it just adds another element of interest. So providing that insight, people love it. They love value. Um so PJ, let's dive into uh like this actual breakdown that you're going to cover right now on the ad that you know got all of these impressions. It's really interesting that you've kind of like capitalized on comedy as well and like especially leveraging social and like focusing on social for your your ads. I guess you kind of as you're pulling that up, if you want to share your screen, I guess like with that like what what's interesting is that with using social to like actually promote the ads is like less traditional format in terms of like creating ads for TV and things like that. Do you see that ads on social is kind of more what brands want as opposed to like ads that live on on other platforms? Yeah, it's there's pretty much only social ads now. I mean TV TV TV TV ads I guess kind of exist as their own medium and I don't want to discount them but like TV viewership's dying people are just watching less and less TV traditional you know like you can you should always be formatting ads in many ways for social which what what that means is like you don't have to have like a hard 30 second uh timer but you know essentially like we're still even our most viral like recent ads like they're still like 30 to 45 seconds so I'd still aim to pretend you're making a TV ad but what social means is like the stakes are so much higher for the opening shot in TV commercials like people are on the couch it's too much effort to hit the mute button you know you spend three calories reaching for the mute button just further uh so so definitely it's like yeah just you have to focus on the opening hook so so we'll talk through that as I show this kind of couch video what worked what didn't work etc etc let me pull it up cool okay so so this is this the ad and like I just want to like I we'll break it down afterwards but what do you see in this opening shot I mean One, you see it's pixelated and morphy because V3 still has a long way to go. When you see it in motion, you know, it's it's it's a lot more engaging. But I just pictured like old man in his 90s in tidy whitey underwear getting arrested by cops, but being interviewed while he's being arrested while wearing an American flag. Like old people in their underwear wearing American flag. Must be like some sort of weird kink of mine. But I just think it's the best I just think it's the best thing to see on screen. So a lot of my ads have like old people in their underwear. Uh, don't don't search my browser history. No, I'm just kidding. All right, here we go. Calcy ads. Indiana gonna win, baby. We're in Florida asking people what they put their money on. I'm all in on OKC. Indiana got that dog in them. Will egg prices go up this month? I think we'll hit $20. How many hurricanes do you think we'll have this year? Calci Koshi lets you legally trade on anything anywhere in the US. OKC. Amazing. I guess so much of that is just like I guess each scene when you were making that was were you what was the thought process? Was it just like is pretty much each scene that we're creating here like going to be almost like a viral hook in itself to constantly re-engage? kind of like yeah, I view this as like cocaine marketing. It's just like straight dopamine in your face with every shot. Like I I it I'm I'm not I'm like I I do a lot of like comedy work, but I'm not I'm not that funny with like my writing. I'm I'm funny more with like kind of the visualization because I'm more of a director than I am a writer. So I I you know, like and I grew up in Florida, so like I've seen a a truck on the side of the road in like central Nowhereville, Florida that says fresh manity. Like a lot of these characters are kind of GTA inspired, right? But, you know, in a sense, like growing up in in Florida, which I don't know, you know, it's like almost like bo, you know, just just total bogus craziness. Um, so yeah, I mean, I'm trying to build each scene with um, you know, that in mind of like what hooks you visually and then how do we start to to to switch from like opening crazy visual to connect it to the brand. So, you know, in the case of this, and I'll walk you through the script in a second of how we did it, but essentially like the brand's like it's a sports betting man. You know, I've got different people saying like whether who are they putting their money money on and you've got, you know, you've got people saying like OKC, you've got, you know, unhinged old people. Uh they actually had to pull this back quite like they're like old people don't use our app, it's college kids. So, I had to have a like young attractive college kids being the ones who are interviewing old people is kind of like, yeah, that was like the the tiein. And then there's there's a couple just tips and tricks I have. So, like in V3, this is this was all like text to video, but essentially, you know, like I his face is super morphy here, but as you see, like what I did is I did cut in as like a separate shot. And so, um, I was able to kind of have like this cutin shot and then the chickens in the background. But V3 will actually do a cut in here and you're it it'll like give you higherility. That was one generation. Yeah, that's one generation. You basically say her line, which I'll show you that, and then and it says cut to in brackets, and then it he finishes the line. So, this is like a an 1/8 second clip. And that's really helpful for like scene consistency, character consistent because otherwise it would actually be pretty hard to have like the same setup here, but definitely hard. Yeah. Yeah. It's like same exact farmer, same exact coloration, same framing. So I find this like cut two um once you have a starting image. And then you can also like you can also do some crazy stuff now that they allow image upload. So you could take like a screenshot of this and you could even go like close-up of her face, go to close-up of her. You can almost get like a reverse closeup of her as she's turning around. If you take a screenshot of this anyway, there's there's a lot now. Like cut two is now like the best tool within VO3 now that you can upload. I never knew I never knew that. So you're basically like almost using like almost like a flux context kind of derivative, but inside of VO just through prompting. Um, are you are you using um image to video obviously more so than text to video right now or do you still see a use case for text to video now that we have image to video with audio? Yeah. So, so this this whole ad like it this came out like two weeks after V3 launched. So, all we had was text to video. Now, we do a fair bit of image to video because I like with the clients, I like like they like us being able to storyboard, but for a lot, especially like young creators, like no, just just do VO3. And I've got some really crazy like ads that that we've done that are just all text to video based. It's fast, it's easy, but like on really high-end productions, like they're gonna want to like kind of pre-sign on everything because otherwise like it's just honestly you have to regenerate the commercial like six times if you're generating one as a rough draft for the client and then they want tweaks and it's it's a lot easier in the long run if you do everything image to video because you can just get pre-approvals. But if you're just doing it yourself and spec ads and all that kind of stuff, I think there's a lot of power in just text to video. Um, so you know, essentially everything was just pretty like high energy. I like to have like characters screaming. Um, you know, it's like screaming, she's screaming, and put it all in like caps. You'll see the prompts in a little bit, but it's like she screams at the top of her lungs, you know, characters screaming, all that kind of stuff. Um, and then, you know, yeah, just characters, more characters screaming, running from the cops, running from the cops on a boat, you know, the boat explodes, she explodes, like that's how it ends. So, for sure. Exactly. Exactly. So, let me stop sharing one second and then I'll um I'll take you through the prompts. Mhm. So, so when the when the client came to me and this is kind of this is very like simplified scripting that I tell I tell people like one if you're going for this more like dopamine centriic advertising style like just think through your your visuals like your scenes and you know like in some ways you could generate midjourney shots and then animate them but like again this is back when there was only text to video. So I just watched the GTA 6 trailer and I was just like okay let me just think of some crazy things. So, we've got like Muscle Beach in Miami. Um, outside of a gas station, freshly caught manatee. Um, old guy surrounded by a ton of hot girls. Like alligator entering a gas station while the customers don't even care. Fast and Furious street race cops holding guy in handcuffs. He's wearing, you know, so you can see a lot of these and these were just me like ideulating. You can work with Chad BT too. Hey JBT, I want like a, you know, GTA inspired Florida man style bunch of locations. Go. you know, so like it's very very iterative. And then they were saying like, "Okay, here's your different things you want we want you to talk about. You know, Indiana vers OKC because that was the NBA finals teams. We want you to talk about egg prices, how many hurricanes were this year." There was a couple other ones that we didn't use of like just kind of betting on major world events. But, you know, in the end it was essentially just these three things that we kind of talked about. Um, and then I just basically started taking what are different lines. So, okay, Indiana going to win. I need a bunch of variations on that. I'm all in on OKC. Will egg prices go up this month? How many hurricanes this year? And then it was just like I mean that's that's it. So it's like these lines and then I just started copying and pasting these ones from up here of you know like what are the locations and then it was like man getting escorted by police in basketball court. Uh iced out kids in in their 20s and a on a swamp boats lady in front of the pickup truck. Um you know country bumpkin farmer. And then and then essentially you can just copy and paste this in a chatbt and say, "Okay, here's my script. I want you to go one by one and create um prompts for these." But here's the big tip. You only want it to give you one prompt at a time because because I can give it a prompt structure like this, which I'm happy to share with you. Um but like it will condense the crap out of this if it gives you 10 prompts at a time. Yeah. So you you have to basically say, "Okay, here's the context here." Now is like I want you to spit it out one at a time. So then you just you just upload a chat GBT. Okay, copy and paste. It's like here is your your prompt structure. And then that's that's that's the one of prompt one. So if we go into here, like initially I didn't I didn't I didn't realize I needed it to be an old man. You probably can't see that, but it was like it wasn't an old man. So, well, yeah, it wasn't as funny. So, then so then I essentially I just had to to change it. But how I changed it is instead of like going into here and I would just I would just copy and paste this back into chat GBT and I would say make him an old man or like make it a bit closer, make the H cam like make the camera shape and then catch GBT would give me a new prompt which I would paste back in a VO3 here and that's how you kind of iterate rapidly back and forth. So, this was more of a close-up version. M got it. Lot better. Yeah. Just let's summarize that for the viewers then. So your your first step was to if we go up to those like shots or like almost like the scenes. You kind of laid out these uh these crazy ideas for scenes that you uh wanted to put into the ad. So you you kind of worked for that GTA kind of style. Then next step you had like some lines like actual active speech delivery that you wanted characters to say and then you married up that speech to certain locations. So like people would say that in this location. Then with that combined, you then took that to chat GPT to build out a master prompt for each of these individually. Yeah. Yeah. And this this master prompt works from project to project to project. It's like a very universal. It's not the stupid JSON prompt. Like I think that's like super overrated. You essentially just need like um you know it's it's just a description. So like you I do say like uh cinematic handheld medium shot. I there I you say cinematic to try and get the like slightly blurry background. You say handheld because I think that like if things are handheld, it get it like helps offset the AI mystique or whatever. You say medium shot because for the most part like medium shots, they they're not they're not as blurry as like wide shots can be with like face details. And then you essentially go into like your person next, what the action the person doing. if there's a secondary person um she's you know walking beside and then he says Indiana gonna win. So all of this comes through. Um and then sometimes like this this is not even always necessary but you can do the whole like time of day, shot type, lighting, environment. But anyway, once you have that this like I could take this into a 100 different projects and I can still tell it, okay, with this new script for Coca-Cola, I'm still going to tell you this prompt structure and then I need you to like, you know, do go through my shot list and turn my shot list right here into a prompt list, but only one at a time. Got it. So that's really interesting. So now once you have that single prompt structure, you would then take that to chat GPT and be like this is the exact pro prompt structure I want but just replace out key parts. So like the location, the person and they say this. So then you're like sticking with that original prompt structure. If you guys viewers who are watching this would like uh a breakdown of that prompt structure, let me know and we'll go ahead and build that out for you. So you can kind of use a similar one. This is uh you can also just screenshot this and like take it, you know, preview or whatever and I I'll can send it to you, Ror. Um but this is also on my my Twitter. I'm happy to share. Like I found that there's no more moes anymore. Like processes, everyone knows most of them. Prompts don't really it's it's taste taste is the one thing. So I I try and just give away everything. And I would actually encourage everyone to do the same. Like the more you're helpful to other creators, the more helpful people will be back to you in return. big time. I mean, like PJ and I met at a free pick event in San Francisco, similar time to when Vio was coming out. And yeah, I think that like since then, we've kind of kept in touch. And I've been saying to the other guests that we've had on here is that community and like actually making sure that you scratch other people's back is so important in this industry right now because it's still very small. Like this industry still feels very small, especially like the top 1% of creatives. So like yeah definitely provide as much value as you can to like colleagues, peers, friends, whatever you can um and it will pay you back in dividends. Yeah. Yeah. Exa Exactly. Exactly. Cool. So then honestly like the rest of the ad was it's I I don't even have to go through it too much. It basically you know spits out per shot you know like the next shot on this and then you know it goes to this. Mhm. So, this one didn't have the cut, too. So, then I I did it again with the cut. Wow. It's so effective. It really is. And just so you can see what it looks like. Um, so this previous shot was not this. That's the only difference in in between these two shots. I but then added we cut to a close-up shot of him responding and then it's this and you can actually see in like the morphiness of his face. He looks like terrible here. I would probably I would probably just in the edit I would start as she's saying this line. So I'd cut on my end point here and then as soon as she's stop saying it here so you barely even see his face. He just kind of rises up above and then we cut out this dead space. We cut out this dead space. Wow. I don't even know what that is. Yeah, that's crazy. Mo then, but then we hit our input right as he starts to speak. Yeah. And then, you know, and then we cut out. So, you're always like, you know, and that's that's I think what makes the difference between a lot of like amateurish creators between like more advanced filmmakers is just knowing how to cut out as much fluff as possible. Yes. Thank you for saying that. Oh my god. Yes. this these 8-second generations that you get or whatever it is 5 to 10 seconds out of these tools. Please do not just use those as your as your like actual output. You have to mine the actual useful data from inside of these videos and take that and please like condense everything to be as short as possible to like the maximum value that you can squeeze out of that clip. And yeah, I think that's super super important. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, I was showing their team this this other I was talking to the creator of Bombast and I was basically he was like, "How do we insert our product?" And and then it gave him the weirdest leg. Anyway, sorry. So random. Um, yeah. Yeah. So that's that's the process in in a nutshell. Um, maybe now that you kind of understand it, like truly that's how I made the entire ad. The ad was like very simple. I didn't add complex sound design. Sound design's built in. I just added like a basic uh movie or music track and then and then like you said it's just condense condense condense condense condense because the algorithms want retention. So it's better for you to have an a 30- secondond ad that's tight that everyone watches through to the end than it is a 45 or 60-second one that like people only go halfway through. Things that do not go viral if people do not watch until the very end. And you'll actually see this in Mr. Beast videos where at the start of the video he'll do a crazy fast montage of like all the things that you're going to see throughout the video and then he hooks you with like why you're going to watch until the end and then he and he waits and waits waits and then when finally like the payoff happens at the end he's out within like two seconds of it because he does not want anyone to like jack out prematurely. It's interesting that you're applying this retentionbased strategy to advertising too. This is something that I've been trying to do for years and like I've been doing it with brands in the creative AI space just like you know using all of that knowledge of social media and understanding the power of retention and applying that to you know the AI scene and creating effectively ads constantly like my entire page is basically just ads for these creative AI tools but they're conveyed in like an educational way that's also you know the each video on my socials takes me about 13 hours to make and the first eight hours is the first 5 seconds of every single video that I make because it's so fundamentally important. And I guess applying that new retention strategy to ads seems to be the meta right now. So maybe that's something that if viewers aren't doing right now already, they should really start trying to focus on that as a strategy to to help pull uh pull people in. Um do you have anything else? Go on. You you you keep going if you want to touch on that. Yeah, I can I can show one more ad that's kind of via3 text to video. So, that's all we have time for on YouTube, but if you want to go and watch the rest of this podcast, then you can click the first link in the YouTube description. Gen HQ is the world's largest creative AI education platform where we share educational content on all of the best creative AI tools. We also have interviews for some of the top 1% of AI creatives from all around the world. The entire goal of GenHQ is to make you a top 1% AI creative. So, if you want to check it out, click the first link in our description, and we'll see you in