Pencil
Pencil is an ad creative generation and optimization platform that uses AI to help brands and ad agencies create digital ads more efficiently. It not only speeds up the process of generating ad creatives but also uses its predictive and optimization features to help advertisers better understand their ad performance and improve their ROI and overall effectiveness.
Our Verdict
What is Pencil
Pencil is an AI-powered ad creative generation and optimization platform designed to help brands, marketers, and agencies produce high-performing digital ads faster and more efficiently. It automates the creative process by generating ad visuals and copy, while also using predictive analytics to forecast performance before campaigns go live. With built-in optimization tools, collaboration features, and multi-platform support, Pencil helps advertisers increase productivity, improve ROI, and scale their ad creation workflow. It’s ideal for teams that want data-driven creativity and faster turnaround times for paid ads.
Is Pencil worth registering and paying for
Pencil is worth paying for if you run frequent ad campaigns and want to scale creative production efficiently. Its AI-generated ads, predictive performance scoring, and ongoing optimization can save time, reduce testing costs, and improve ROI—especially for brands and agencies managing multiple campaigns.
However, if you have a very small advertising budget, or if you strongly prefer fully custom-designed creatives, the platform might feel unnecessary. Overall, Pencil offers strong value for businesses that rely heavily on digital advertising and want a smarter, faster way to create and optimize ads.
Our experience
I used to run a creative team of four people whose entire job was to churn out 50–80 new statics and videos every single week. We were good, but we were also exhausted, expensive, and still too slow. Every Monday was a bloodbath of “we need more angles” and every Friday was “sorry we’re still rendering.”
Then last year our agency slipped Pencil into a pitch deck like it was no big deal. I laughed — another AI creative tool, sure. They ran a 48-hour test: fed Pencil the last 90 days of winning ads + product shots and said “go make us 200 new ones.” Two hours later we had 212 fully edited ads with copy, CTAs, brand colors, the works. We launched 60 of them cold. Three of them became our top performers for the entire quarter. One is still running and has done $4.2M revenue at 6.8× ROAS.
That was the day the creative team stopped being a production house and started being a curation house.
Now the weekly flow is honestly ridiculous:
- Thursday afternoon: upload new product drops, hero images, UGC clips
- Tell Pencil the offer (“25% off first order”, “BOGO bundles”, whatever)
- Pick the vibe (clean, bold, funny, testimonial-heavy)
- Hit generate → grab lunch
- Come back to 300–600 ready-to-go ads already sorted by predicted ROAS
- The ones it scores 8+ we launch same day. The rest we archive or remix.
Real wins that make me look like a genius to the CEO:
- Q4 last year we needed 1,200 fresh creatives for Black Friday–Cyber Monday. Pencil spat out 1,800 in under 9 hours total (three separate batches). We launched, let Meta sort the winners, and did $19M in 18 days. My creative director just monitored Slack and approved brand safety stuff.
- Had a new flavor launch that was testing flat. Pencil saw the old winning ads were all “before/after energy” style, auto-generated 42 variations with that exact formula, four of them hit top 1% of the account within 48 hours. Saved the whole launch.
- The prediction scores are scary accurate now. Anything 8.5+ almost always ends up in the top 10% of spend. Anything under 6.5 we don’t even waste budget testing anymore.
Little things I love that nobody talks about:
- You can upload raw 9:16 UGC from influencers and Pencil instantly crops/resizes/adds captions for every placement. Saved us thousands in editor time.
- Brand guardrails actually work — we locked the colors, fonts, and “no shirtless dudes” rule once and it never breaks them.
- The “remix winning ad” feature is pure sorcery. Take your current $100k/month winner, click remix, get 50 fresh versions that keep the magic but don’t trigger fatigue.
It’s not perfect — sometimes the copy is a little salesy, and video edits can feel same-y if you don’t feed it diverse raw footage. But we just use it as a first draft machine and let humans polish the final 10–15%.
Bottom line: we cut creative costs by 70%, tripled testing velocity, and our ROAS is the highest it’s ever been. My creative team went from burned-out hamsters to strategic badasses who now spend half their week analyzing winners instead of slinging pixels.
If you’re spending more than $50k/month on Meta and you’re still waiting three days for a designer to “try a new hook,” you’re basically printing money and setting it on fire. Get Pencil. You’ll feel dirty how easy it is the first week, then you’ll never go back.
I haven’t opened Photoshop for ad creative in eight months and my boss thinks I’m some kind of wizard. Love it.
