🧠 Deconstructing Impulse’s $6M/mo ad engine: identity, curiosity, challenge 🧠

Welcome to Intelligent Artifice, the podcast that helps you become a 10x performance marketer. Intelligent Artifice explores the cutting edge of the intersection of AI, creatives, and performance marketing. Every week, we deconstruct the ad systems behind high-performing advertisers using our in-house semantic analysis system, BruteForce AI — or we sit down with top operators redefining how advertising gets done in a generative AI world.

Whether you’re scaling user acquisition, leading a creative team, or building a creative engine with AI, this podcast is your unfair advantage. Intelligent Artifice is hosted by me, Shamanth Rao — the founder and CEO of the boutique growth marketing agency, Rocketship HQ. You can find out more about us at rocketshiphq.com. Our services are ideal for advertisers spending over $50,000 a month on paid social.

Check out our socials!

Podcast website: intelligentartifice.net
Newsletter: intelligentartifice.kit.com
YouTube: @Intelligent-Artifice

Today’s Teardown: Impulse Brain Training

Today we are reviewing Impulse Brain Training — who are running over 50,000 ads on Meta. And yes, that’s not a typo, as you can see here. They are a personal development and cognitive performance app that seems to be crushing it lately, with over $6 million in monthly revenue.

And we are gonna break down exactly what powers that creative engine using BruteForce AI, our proprietary tool that processes and analyzes top-performing ads. You can see here the longest-running ads. None of these directly reference the product itself. All of these talk about the user — and this is a great illustration of the principle that your ad should be about your user and not about you.

These ads reference the different user personas — different user archetypes. For instance, it’s very clear that ADHD or neurodivergent users are a big part of their user base. They are targeting users who are curious about themselves, with ads like:

Your masculinity type
Your archetypes
Your strength tests

And so on and so forth.

You can see here some of the other longest-running ad creatives:

Archetypes
What’s your ADHD type?
How rare is your type of smart? — This lets users wonder:

Number one, what kind of smart they are.

But number two, also understand that they are actually smart.

Your toxic personality — again, makes users wonder if they are toxic.
Different intelligence types
Can you move all disks? — One challenge-based ad here.

So you can see a lot of these reference different types of user archetypes and personas — making users wonder which category they fall into. And this is a great example of prompting users and provoking users to introspect. And also with the CTA Take Test, there is the implication that they can find out more about themselves.

Show, Don’t Tell: Visual Hooks

If you look at their longest-running videos — visual hooks and hooks — you will see that a lot of these are puzzle-based, which is a great example of show, don’t tell. They demonstrate what is in the app rather than just talk about it. Also, having these puzzles prompts the users to wonder if they can solve these problems. You can see that the hooks and visual hooks:

Challenge the user
Call out ideal user personas — especially people with ADHD
Use bold lines like Only a psychopath — repeated in a lot of ads

It looks like it is something that has worked effectively for them.

Similarly, when they say:

“Only people with IQ over 130”

They’re appealing to who the users want to be. They’re appealing to the fact that users want to feel intelligent. They want to be smart. Here, you can see they’re challenging the users to solve this problem — to solve this puzzle. A lot of these are about triggering curiosity and making users wonder if they are smart enough.

Archetypes & Personas

You can see here the different user personas that they target:

1. Self-discovery — They ask about the different archetypes and which ones the users relate to.

What kinds of smart are you?
What is your masculine personality?
What’s your feminine personality?

These prompt users to introspect and think about what type they are.

2. Challenge and cognitive validation — They challenge users and make them wonder if they’re smart enough to solve this.

These also engage the user in attempting to solve the problem, which builds user engagement.

3. Neurodivergent empowerment — A lot of ads very explicitly call out ADHD users, which clearly are a key part of the user base they’re trying to appeal to.

You can see they directly speak to them by appealing to their sense of self-discovery.

4. Exploration and curiosity — Again linked to self-discovery, but slightly different in that it makes the user want to explore their own characteristics.

5. Mental health — There are a lot of ads that focus on mental health themes and topics like trauma and your toxic personality.

There are ads like these that focus on those. These seem to use optical illusions to intrigue users and draw them in — much like a puzzle would.

Creative Lessons from Impulse

Here are some learnings and takeaways from Impulse’s creative strategy that you can apply to any vertical — even if you have a product that is completely different.

1. Frame products and ads around user identity.

Speak to the kind of identity the users want to have: high IQ, smart, interesting.

2. Build curiosity.

Curiosity beats features any day. As you can see in Impulse’s ads, users don’t even get informed about what’s inside the app — they get asked and prompted: What will I learn about myself?

3. Use challenge to drive engagement.

Lines like:

Only psychopaths can solve this
Only geniuses can solve this
Only people with IQ over 130 can solve this

— create a dopamine trigger by challenging the user.

The puzzles that form visual cues also visually reinforce the challenge the user is experiencing.

4. Make the visual hooks interactive.

Use puzzles, illusions, and chart-type visuals that make users emotionally engage with the imagery and the ads.

Closing Thoughts

Impulse is a great example of using identity and curiosity to drive performance — and this is a playbook every brand can borrow from.

As closing thoughts: Impulse isn’t focused on long stories or narrative-based ads — although that certainly could be an opportunity for them to test. Its creative strategy is focused primarily on emotional puzzles — which are very personal, very validating, and deeply human.

Thank you again for tuning in. I’m Shamanth Rao, and this is Intelligent Artifice. If you found this useful, subscribe for more deep deconstructions. If you want the detailed deconstruction with the visual references that we analyzed, check the link in the description. Until next time.

Check out the full deconstruction here: https://intelligentartifice.kit.com/677ba90502