491: An Ex-Meta Insider's Guide To Scaling Ads With AI

the bossbabe podcast

Natalie Ellis

Self-improvement, Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship, Education

4.9 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Organic content builds your brand. But ads? Ads build your bank. In this episode, Natalie sits down with Brooke Shelton — a former Meta insider who helped train the platform's ad AI and advised advertisers spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Meta. Brooke delivers a full tactical masterclass on running Meta ads with AI: the strategy most founders get wrong, how to build AI agents that create and manage your campaigns, and why the next 9 to 12 months are a rare window to master this before Meta automates it all away. You'll learn the one-campaign, one-ad-set rule that stops you competing against yourself in the ad auction, why creative (not audience targeting) is your only real advantage in 2026, and how Brooke runs her entire business on AI with zero team after 6X-ing her revenue. She also breaks down the difference between an assistant, an agent, and agentic AI, then gives a step-by-step walkthrough for building your very first AI agent today. If you've ever felt like ads are too technical, too expensive, or too overwhelming to touch, this episode is the reframe — and the operating system behind it. And if this conversation lights you up, Natalie and Brooke are taking it live and hands-on at their AI hackathon in New York City on June 10th. All the details are linked below. Time Stamps: 00:00 - From Meta's ads AI team to building her own business 06:30 - Why organic builds brand, but ads build bank 09:49 - The 9-month AI window before Meta does it all for you 14:27 - The one-campaign, one-ad-set rule most founders get wrong 18:14 - How to let AI run your entire ad account 21:58 - Why creative is your only real bid in 2026 26:11 - Can AI really build hundreds of ads? The 10/80/10 reality 29:32 - Assistant vs agent vs agentic AI, finally explained 34:19 - The full AI tool stack behind a zero-team business 41:53 - How to build your first AI agent today 46:53 - Inside the June hackathon with Natalie + Brooke Resources + Links: Join Natalie + Brooke At The Freedom AI Hackathon In NYC On June 10th: Spend One Day Building Your Entire AI-Powered Sales + Marketing Engine, Done With You In The Room Get Inside Brooke's AI Ads Coaching Membership At Atelier AI Natalie + Jamie Kern Lima At GodMothers: An Evening Of Connection, Wisdom + Community For Ambitious Women Join The Earn Your Happy Live Podcast Taping With Lori Harder: Be In The Room For A Live Recording With Natalie + Lori Harder (plus a Q&A session with Powerhouse Female Entrepreneurs) Pre-Order The Freedom-Based Business Method.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Boss Bay podcast. Now, if you remember, when I said I was restarting this podcast,
0:04.3	I wanted to do things a little bit differently. I wanted to bring you into conversations that
0:10.5	usually happen behind closed doors or behind a paywall. I wanted you to take away something
0:15.9	incredibly tactical from every single episode. Now, what's really interesting is right now, between the next
0:22.2	nine to 12 months, there's a really amazing window for entrepreneurs to learn how to drive revenue
0:31.0	through ads using AI. There's a really, really big opportunity. And so I wanted to bring someone on the podcast that
0:38.7	could speak directly to that. And my guest today spent years inside the machine before she even
0:45.7	built her own thing. So Brooke Shelton worked at Meta, first writing and enforcing the global
0:51.3	ad policies that govern billions in ad delivery, then training the AI
0:56.3	systems that reviewed those ads, then advising high growth companies on how to actually scale
1:02.6	their spend. So she has seen the platform from the inside in a way that almost no founder ever gets to.
1:09.8	And in this episode, she goes into a lot of detail
1:12.6	on what opportunity is available for founders now. And for those of you who are really interested
1:18.2	in advanced AI, in really taking your business to the next level, using AI, she breaks down
1:25.2	exactly what the opportunity looks like, what is working on ads right now
1:30.4	and for the next year, as well as all the different parts of AI and terminology that you might be
1:37.8	hearing, but you're not necessarily used to executing. She also gives a very tactical masterclass
1:43.5	at the end for those of you that want to dive
1:45.8	in and actually start building an agent that can execute on your behalf. It really is such a masterclass.
1:52.8	I think it's going to be the kind of episode that you listen to more than once because there was so
1:57.6	much gold in there. What's also really cool is Brooke and I are partnering together on a hackathon in New York,
2:04.6	where we are going to be bringing together a group of founders
	...

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