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How to run marketing with AI employees.

Three seats. The media buyer, the content desk, the copywriter. Each one a single role with the rules written down. This is how marketing runs in Brad Hart’s company today.

Marketing is the department most founders think they cannot delegate. It is the one they end up running until midnight. It is also the department where AI employees have the longest live track record, because the work is the most measurable: ads that cost X and return Y, pages that convert this percent, emails that open at that rate. Where you can measure, you can set rules. Where you can set rules, you can hire an AI employee.

Seat 1: the media buyer

Live number: 75 ad campaigns run this year, no human media buyer. The seat does four things.

• Writes the ad. From the one belief of the offer and the four-question copy test, draft a cold hook, a retargeting hook and three objection answers. Hand the hook over to a static image render and a short-form video render.
• Uploads it paused. Never flipped live from an agent. The owner reviews and activates; that line is one of the rules.
• Reads every campaign every six hours. Pulls the Meta API, puts yesterday’s cost per lead against the kill bar and the keep bar, flags any set over the kill bar and any set that is tired.
• Fixes the one it is allowed to fix. A tired set gets a new creative from the same brief, uploaded paused. A set over the kill bar gets a pause recommendation with the number in the message.

What the rules look like: $50 per creative for the first test, kill at $10 per lead, keep under $5, trending between. (This is the $50 test — the same discipline, on an agent.) The media buyer never spends more than one hundred dollars on anything that has not earned its budget.

Seat 2: the content desk

Live number: 562 videos cut, 75 websites shipped, in five months. The content desk is three sub-roles that run on one schedule.

The vertical cutter.

Finds the arc in a long-form clip, cuts a 9:16 version with captions, adds a two-second breathing pad and a tail card or a replay loop. Uploads the result to Vimeo on the same video id as the previous version so links do not break.

The lead magnet builder.

Scaffolds a new squeeze page from a template, writes the copy from one belief, creates the Resend audience, enrolls the subscriber on the portal, writes the three-email drip and verifies deliverability. Five domains bought one afternoon, five sites live by evening.

The video sales letter.

Renders a webinar-style VSL in the founder’s voice with a HeyGen avatar in picture-in-picture, slides word-timed to the audio, hosted on Vimeo with a domain whitelist. One prompt in, one video out.

Seat 3: the copywriter

Writes the page, the emails and the ads from one belief. Every line gets the four-question copy test applied: does it name what the reader means by success, is it a thing they are allowed to want, is it framed as a shift from the old way, and does it make them feel the heaven or the hell of the decision. Lines that fail get rewritten before they go live. This page was written by that seat.

What stays human

• The offer. What you sell, who you sell it to, and what you refuse to say about it. No agent writes that for you.
• The one belief. The sentence the entire campaign is organized around. The agents work from it; they do not pick it.
• The activate button. Ads go live only when the owner says so. Spend goes up only when the owner says so.
• The hard call. When a campaign loses money for a reason the rules did not anticipate, the agent surfaces it. You decide.

Where to start

If your lowest-scoring department on the scorecard is marketing, do not try to hire all three seats at once. Pick the media buyer first. It is the seat with the most measurable success criteria and the clearest kill bars; you will know in a week whether the hire is working, because you will know whether cost per lead went down.

“An AI employee costs what subscriptions cost, not what salaries cost. That difference is the margin.”

Marketing on AI employees is not cheaper marketing. It is the same budget directed at the test instead of the hire, and the test tells you faster than the hire would have.

Frequently asked questions

Can the media buyer agent spend my ad budget on its own?

No. In Brad’s rules, every new creative is uploaded paused. The owner activates it. Budget increases above a floor are a decision the owner makes with the agent’s recommendation.

What tools does the content desk run on?

Meta Ads for the campaigns, Vimeo for the videos, Resend for email, the portal (optimus.university) for the enrollment, and the house render pipeline (hyperframes) for the statics and VSLs. The seat is the agent on top of those tools, not a replacement for them.

What if my offer is complicated?

Then the one belief is harder, not impossible. Spend an afternoon writing it with the agent as a sparring partner, not a replacement. Once the belief is written, the three seats below work from it in the usual way.

How does this compare to a marketing agency?

An agency gives you a team at an agency price. These seats give you the same work at a subscription price, and you own the rules. The trade is the time to write the rules up front; after that, the seats run.