About Cloaked:
Cloaked is a New York-based privacy app founded in 2020 by brothers Arjun and Abhijay Bhatnagar; it’s an app, a web-based dashboard, and browser extension that allows users to spin up one-click “cloaked” emails, phone numbers, passwords and virtual payment details so people can shop, sign up or chat without handing over real personal data. It also does data removal from 140+ brokers, block spam calls, and offers $1M identity theft insurance. The startup is backed by marquee investors such as Human Capital, Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and Peter Thiel.
After coming out of beta in October 2023, Cloaked has raced to a community of 120,000+ users, protected 6M+ identities, blocked 7M+ spam calls, and scrubbed 200M+ records from data brokers - evidence of break-neck growth for a product that came out of closed beta less than 2 years ago.
About GetCrux:
GetCrux, founded in 2022 by three IIT Bombay grads, is a Y Combinator backed startup that has raised $2.6M in funding and is backed by Emergent Ventures and senior execs at Google and Meta. Our first product - AI-powered marketing reporting was acquired by one of the largest ad agencies.
Our AI Creative Strategist is used by growth and creative teams to iterate 10X faster and reduce CAC from paid social. The platform helps with 3 main workflows - Creative Insights, Audience and Competitor Insights, and Creative Generation.
Summary:
Problem Statement:
- Creative Volume - Ramping up creative volume to hit 2X scale in 3 months
- Creative Diversity - Diversifying creative mix to include new formats and concepts
- Creative Insights - Finding deep insights on what works, why it works to reduce CAC
- Message Testing - Testing new angles in line with product roadmap and user feedback
Agents Deployed:
- AI Creative Analyzer - Watches every ad, labels elements and finds patterns that work
- Copilot - Chatbot to ask any question, find insights, or brainstorm and write new scripts
- AI Creative Generator - Makes 100s of on-brand creatives using insights + competitor ads
- AI Ad Ops Agent - Creates dimension versions and publishes directly to ad platforms
Impact:
Situation:
On the back of excellent traction, the Cloaked team wanted to scale their ad spend on Meta with a lean in-house team and agency support.
But this came with 3 challenges:
1. Rising CAC - The privacy & identity protection market is getting increasingly competitive and CACs are rising faster than ever. What works in the early days, doesn’t sustain at scale - nor is it efficient to spray & pray
2. Creative Volume & Diversity - Scaling up meant that they had to 2X their creative volume while ensuring the right diversity and constantly testing new angles. Doing all this in a span of a few months was simply impossible to do manually
3. Complex Ad Operations - Larger scale also comes with tedious ad operations. Simply taking a campaign live took days which meant that they were always running behind
Creative Process Breakdown:
After spending time understanding their existing process and workflows well, we identified 4-5 key parts that could be overhauled.
1. Creative Insights
(learning from past creative tests)
Problem: The team wanted to dig deeper into what exactly is working, why it is working and then make calculated bets on what to try next
Solution: Our AI Creative Analyzer watched every ad, labeled every element and then found patterns across what’s working. For e.g. we found answers to:
- Which demographic of influencers builds the best trust for each persona?
- When should we introduce Cloaked in the video - first 5 sec, 10 sec, or the second half?
- Which messaging angles and narratives drive lowest CAC for each product/feature?
- Do fear-based emotional triggers have a positive effect on conversions?
2. Competitor Insights
(keeping an eye on what’s working for others)
The team found net new concepts by identifying what is working for competitors, finding gaps in our own creatives and converting those into new creatives for us.
3. Audience Insights
(learning from the audience via comments, reviews, etc)
Finding top objections, concerns as well as customer delight and testimonials from comments and using that to create a new pipeline of creatives.
4. Creative Generation
Cloaked generated 500+ creatives over the last month using this workflow:
- Use text prompts + reference image to make 4 variations of on-brand creatives
- Create dimension variations (1:1, 9:16, 4:5)
- Add logo and other brand elements
A few examples of AI-generated creatives:
5. Ad Operations
Once approved, creatives are auto-published to the ad platform with all the right settings including creating campaigns, adsets, setting budgets, adding custom copy and headline.
