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0%Hey!
I cloned two very different AI ads at the same time, for two different products, in one afternoon. What surprised me is that they needed two completely opposite workflows.
The two ads I ended up with
Clone 1: the AI Disney character
Their product, in blueTheir product, in blue
My product, in red
StarpopMy product, in redStarpopClone 2: the story ad
Their product, for menTheir product, for men
My product, for womenStarpopMy product, for womenStarpopBoth reference ads are playing above, next to the real products that went in. The hair serum went blue to red. The creatine went from a men's gummy to a blend made for women.
Same afternoon, same chat, same first move. But one of them needed a research step the other did not, and knowing which is which is the whole skill.
Secret 1: you never write the prompts
Everyone assumes cloning an ad means describing it to an image model until it looks close. That is the slow way, and it never quite lands.
The AI video breakdown: visual understanding, beats, and the full script pulled out of a competitor ad
Instead you hand the ad over and let the AI watch the video. You get the script, the beats, and a visual description of every single frame.
A breakdown turns a 60 second video into a numbered list of shots with a line of script attached to each. You are no longer writing prompts, you are swapping your product into a structure that already converted for somebody else.
Secret 2: one question decides everything
This is the fork, and it takes five seconds to answer.
The two AI ad cloning workflows: straight clone for the same avatar, research-led for a new avatar
Is the ad selling to the same person you sell to? If yes, copy it almost exactly, because everything that made it convert still applies to you. If no, the structure is worth stealing and the words are worthless.
My hair product sells to the same man the reference sells to, so the clone is nearly a recolour. My creatine sells to a woman where the reference sells to a man, so the script had to be rebuilt from scratch.
Get this backwards and you produce an ad that looks right and sells nothing.
Workflow 1: the straight clone
My hair product had the same benefits and the same buyer as the reference. So the only real work was regenerating the visuals with my product in them.
- Pull the analysis, keep the script, change the brand name
- Regenerate the start frame for every beat with your product
- Generate one voiceover, then let it get sliced per beat
- Lip-sync each frame to its own slice
Half an hour of work. The full walkthrough is in how to clone your competitor's AI Disney ads.
Workflow 2: the research‑led clone
The creatine ad was aimed at men. Mine was aimed at women, which means different objections, different desires, different jokes.
Copying that script would have produced something written by someone who has never met the customer. So I copied the shape and researched new words to put in it.
Swapping the brand name in a competitor's script feels like cloning. It is not. If the buyer changed, every objection the original ad handles is now the wrong objection, and the ad quietly stops working.
The research step is what fixes it, and it is covered in how to create and clone a competitor's ad using AI.
Secret 3: the references are already collected
You do not have to hunt your feed for something worth cloning.
A library of handpicked high-performing AI ads with the breakdown already done
There is a library of handpicked AI ads that already performed, and the analysis is sitting there before you click. I still ran the full process for this walkthrough, because that is what you will do with an ad you found in the wild.
Secret 4: you can teach it a style that does not exist yet
The reference ad was crochet. There was no crochet style built in, which in most tools is where the project dies.
Uploading a custom crochet style skill so every generation follows it
You write your own style guide, upload it as a skill, and every generation after that follows it. If you use Claude, it will write the skill file for you in a couple of minutes.
Secret 5: it is one chat, not six tools
This is the part that actually collapses the timeline, and it is easy to miss because nothing dramatic happens.
The full AI ad cloning workflow: video breakdown, customer research, script writing, then generation
The breakdown, the customer research, the script, the storyboard, the voiceover, the slicing and every clip all happen in the same place, holding the same context. Nothing gets re-explained, nothing gets exported and re-imported, and the character stays consistent because the chat already knows what it looks like.
Stitch that together out of six separate tools and the same job is a full day of copying files between tabs.
One continuous voiceover, sliced automatically. Generating audio per beat gives you a different voice and broken pacing on every clip.
Export everything without reviewing it. Pull all the clips into your editor, and if one is bad, regenerate that single clip. Reviewing each generation as it lands is what turns 30 minutes into 3 hours.
Next Steps
Pick an ad you keep seeing in your feed and run the breakdown on it. Then answer the one question that picks your workflow: same buyer, or different buyer?
- Clone your competitor's AI Disney ads, for when the buyer matches
- Create and clone a competitor's ad using AI, for when it does not
If you get stuck on either, come ask in the Starpop Discord. I am in there most days and I would rather see your attempt than answer in the abstract.
