Case Study
How Cloaked gets nearly half its Meta purchases from AI-generated ads
Atharva Padhye
Impact at a glance:
About Cloaked:
Cloaked is a consumer privacy app based in New York. Users can generate unlimited email addresses and phone numbers that stand in for their real details. The product also removes personal data from broker sites and blocks spam calls.
Cloaked came out of closed beta in October 2023. It is a $10-a-month subscription, and close to 200,000 people now pay for it.
Its marketing is run by two people. Pulkit heads marketing and works with one performance marketer, while agencies support content production and PR.
In 2025, we published how GetCrux helped Cloaked scale 2X on Meta with AI-generated creatives. This follow-up covers the year since then, mostly in Pulkit's own words.
About GetCrux:
GetCrux is an AI creative intelligence platform for paid social. Growth and creative teams use it to learn why their ads win and to study what competitors are running. Those findings are then turned into on-brand image and video ads, ready to launch.
1. Sell the problem before the product
Cloaked has a long feature list. Explained one feature at a time, the product is hard to fit into a single ad, so the team chose to lead with the problems customers already feel.
"If I were to explain Cloaked as a set of features, it gets complicated. One of the things we realized early on was that it is much more sensible to frame the problem: the problem of spam, and the fear of financial fraud."
For the last 18 months, roughly 80 to 85% of Cloaked's messaging has focused on those two themes. Within each theme, the team A/B tests a range of sub-themes.
Paid social suits this approach. An Instagram or Facebook ad has room to set up a problem before the product appears, which a Google Search ad does not offer. For Cloaked, this made social the main channel for its ad campaigns.
2. Why creative velocity has to grow faster than ad spend
Cloaked's Meta budget has grown many times over since launch. Pulkit tracks two growth rates side by side: spend velocity and creative velocity.
"Say you are growing 20 to 25% month over month in what you spend on Meta. If you do not have a proportional increase in creatives, you are spending more against the same set of creatives. It is very likely that a good percentage of them are running inefficiently."
Over the last three months, the team made the creative curve deliberately steeper than the spend curve. Cloaked now tests more creatives for the same spend. Pulkit describes the resulting efficiency on the Meta ad account as disproportionate.
Meta's ad system rewards this kind of volume. Its Andromeda retrieval engine was built to handle the rapid rise in ad creatives that AI tools now produce.
3. The Creative Pyramid
Traditional production cannot keep up with that pace. A standard agency video costs $2,000 to $4,000 and takes about four weeks to reach the ad account. Pulkit's answer was to treat all creative on social as a pyramid.
The top of the pyramid holds 15 to 20 high-production videos. Agencies still make these. The middle and bottom, around 80% of the creative mix, consist of high-velocity tests built with AI. Most are AI static ads, and a smaller share are lower-fidelity AI video ads.
The bottom layer was first set up as a research layer. Themes that won there would move up and shape the expensive videos. That still happens, although the AI-generated ads also turned out to be strong performers in their own right.
"What we have realized over the last three or four months is that AI-generated statics by themselves perform as well, as long as we are surfacing the right insights and testing the right themes."
Today, close to half of Cloaked's purchases come through the middle and bottom of the pyramid.
4. How Cloaked chooses AI tools: crawl, walk, run
There are thousands of AI tools for ad creative. Cloaked sorts them with a crawl, walk, run model.
For video, Pulkit separates two places where AI can help: editing and content generation. Crossing the two gives a 2x2 matrix. The team has tested creative from every quadrant.
Every new tool starts with a small test. On Meta, a campaign can go live with $1,000 to $1,500, and that budget is enough to compare creatives and themes. Spend is scaled only after performance data comes in.
"Do a lot of experiments, see what works, and then scale up once the performance data comes in."
5. Where GetCrux fits in
Cloaked first brought in GetCrux as a creative analytics tool. The goal was to find insights faster and pass them to agencies sooner. That would make the top of the pyramid cheaper and quicker to produce.
"With the traditional agency model, if I have an idea or concept today, I will see actual videos on my Meta Ads account four weeks from now. Where I saw GetCrux as a good fit was: can we surface insights quicker? Can we funnel them to the agencies much quicker?"
The scope grew once the test statics began to convert. Cloaked and GetCrux now work closely on four parts of the process:
Creative insights: finding which elements and angles have driven results in Cloaked's past ads.
Competitor research: reviewing what competitors are running to find new angles worth testing.
Creative generation: producing on-brand AI-generated ads built around each new insight.
Ad operations: publishing approved creatives straight to Meta.
Over four to five months, Cloaked's creative pipeline has more than tripled, and the team now tests 600 to 800 creatives a month. Pulkit connects this growth directly to the efficiency gains of the last 30 to 45 days.
6. From insight to live ad in hours
Uploading and launching hundreds of ads is heavy work when done by hand. Pulkit describes the full workflow as a sequence of steps:
Surface insights from past ads and competitor ads.
Turn those insights into static ads and test the themes.
Commission high-quality videos around the themes that win on statics.
Launch the ads, let them spend, and move budget toward what performs.
GetCrux now supports the whole chain, so steps that took weeks with an agency take hours.
"We are now going from surfacing insights to ads live on our account in a matter of hours, and not the weeks and months that come with a traditional agency model."
7. What comes next: one ad per customer
Pulkit expects AI ad campaigns to move toward personalization at the level of each buyer.
"The eventual goal is to be able to customize the ad creative for each individual potential customer. Right now we are testing 600, 700, 800 creatives every month. What if these were 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 creatives?"
Key takeaways for consumer apps scaling on Meta
Plan creative volume with your spend forecast. If Meta spend grows 20% a month, creative output should grow faster.
Open ads with the problem. Customers respond to a fear they recognize before they care about features.
Keep the premium tier small. Use AI-generated ads for most of your creative testing and diversification.
Test tools on small budgets first. A $1,000 to $1,500 Meta campaign is enough to see whether a workflow works.
Judge AI statics as finished ads. At Cloaked, they now drive close to half of all purchases.
Frequently asked questions
What is creative velocity in Meta advertising?
Creative velocity is the rate at which a team produces and launches new ad creatives. Cloaked compares it with spend velocity, the rate at which its ad budget grows. When spend grows faster, the same ads absorb more budget and efficiency drops.
Do AI-generated static ads work on Meta?
At Cloaked they do. AI static ads were first used to test themes for higher-budget videos. They now bring in close to half of the company's purchases, provided they are built on sound creative insights.
How many ad creatives should a growing consumer app test each month?
The number depends on how fast spend is growing. Cloaked tests 600 to 800 creatives a month and keeps creative growth ahead of spend growth.
What is the Creative Pyramid?
It is a framework for splitting paid social creative into two tiers. A small top tier holds premium agency videos. A large base, about 80% of the mix, is made of fast, low-cost AI ad creatives used for testing and, increasingly, for conversion.
Want to know what is driving results in your own ad account? Get a free creative scan or book a demo with the GetCrux team. You can also browse more GetCrux case studies.
