Normally, our Forward Deployed Creatives partner with our customers to build incredible ads in Ad Studio. This time, Hightouch was the customer. We had a 15-second billboard spot in Times Square and wanted to use it to show what Hightouch Ad Studio does best: help teams make quality, on-brand ads.
So we handed over the brief — make a really cool ad about making an ad — to two of our Forward Deployed Creative team members, Josh Baron and Doni Goodman, and had a film crew document how they brought it to life.
We sat down with Josh and Doni to talk about the concept, their creative backgrounds, what actually makes a good ad, and where they think AI creative is headed.
Take a look at the full behind-the-scenes and a Q&A below.
First things first. What's a Forward Deployed Creative?
Doni: We work between the product team, sales, customer success, and our customers who are using Ad Studio to advise and solve problems from a creative lens. Whether a customer is creating ads, building out branding, or making new assets, we help them understand their brand and interpret it into amazing ads.
Josh: A big part of the job is meeting with the customer and helping them get the most out of Ad Studio from a creative and brand perspective. Every customer's challenge is unique, so we get to try new things, experiment, and explore. Really, we're there helping them make cool ads.
What's your background, and how did it set you up for this role?
Doni: I'm a graphic designer by training, but I came up through the ad agency world where I worked about 15 years on creative direction for big brands like Oreo and Google. A big part of that was understanding what makes an ad appealing and what makes you want to interact with it.
Josh: I'm primarily a brand designer. I started in advertising and marketing and fell into motion design. Being the only motion designer on a team taught me to scale my work really procedurally. That ended up being the perfect bridge into AI-forward work, since I was already thinking that way.
What was the premise of the Times Square ad, and why did you agree to do it?
Josh: The brief was an ad within an ad, which I think is hilarious. I love stuff like that. For a designer, a Times Square billboard is a bucket list item, so honestly I was an automatic yes before I even heard anything beyond that.
Doni: For me, the opportunity was a unique challenge. The billboard is around 40 feet tall with another 40-foot extension. Most of the Ad Studio work we do is performance-based and lives on your phone, so this was a completely different canvas. It's also a sound-off placement, so you have to tell the whole story visually, in about 15 seconds, to people walking by.
The bigger challenge was that the ad was for Hightouch, not a customer. So we started at the drawing board: what do we want to say? How do we use this spot? We landed on a stylized interpretation of what it's actually like to use Ad Studio.
How did you get from a blank page to the final concept?
Josh: We usually start with AI to get all the ideas out of our heads. I'll have a chat with Claude, we'll spitball, and there's a tool recording us so we've got a transcript of everything. Since our name is Hightouch, I wanted to see a hand to get "craft" across instantly. From there it's really the normal creative process: gathering references, generating, trying styles. This way is just at 10x the speed and scale.
That's where taste matters most, because you can hit analysis paralysis fast. Your instincts are what find the path through everything you're generating.
Doni: A big part of getting there was the combination of skill sets. My background is advertising and creative direction, and Josh's is motion design, so we could each lean into our strengths and land on concepts and visuals neither of us would have come up with alone.
Once we landed on the idea, we got into the nitty-gritty with our copywriter on the line you'll see on screen and the story we're telling. The layout actually has two units, so we're using the top space to filter content into the bottom, almost like an interactive story. We pulled references and inspiration into Ad Studio, generated a bunch of elements, and built it into one cohesive idea.
What makes a good ad?
Doni: A good ad is one you don't see coming; it’s one you don't even think is an ad. Nobody likes to be advertised to. But advertising at its best is honest: it gets your attention and genuinely makes your life a little better or more enjoyable. Anything that’s honest, engaging, and catches you in the natural flow of your day instead of interrupting it is a good ad.
Josh: A good ad is clever, fun, and smart. It makes you stop and look. That's hard to define, because it all comes from taste. You need a good idea to start, and then the image and copy have to work together, plus pacing and rhythm if it moves. Ad Studio has great instincts for all of that, but then it's up to a person to inject taste and make it feel special. There's no machine that can make an ad that feels really good all by itself. It takes a person to drive the feeling.
What's your favorite part of using Ad Studio?
Doni: The signals it provides to marketers. It combines an understanding of where your brand is with a creative brief, so it can take something like a trending consumer moment and figure out how it should interact with your brand. It gives you a strong starting point.
The real power, though, is being able to iterate at scale. I can generate a thousand ideas in an hour — something that used to take me tens of hours of mocking things up. And I'm not just waiting for a brief. I can create the brief, pull the insights myself, and bring that straight into the work.
Josh: I really enjoy being able to brainstorm and iterate really quickly. It's a great place to try new ideas and explore, and the output on its own is already really high-quality, so I can spend my energy pushing it further and making it feel special.
What does the future of AI and creative look like to you?
Josh: A lot of designers feel like AI is encroaching on their space, and every industry is feeling some version of that pressure to adopt, mixed with hesitancy about new technology. But I don't see it as competition; I see it as an accelerator. What used to take me a week I can now do in a few days, which frees me up to pursue more ideas and experiment more.
The past year and a half has been wild for brand designers, because we can be builders now; we don't have to just live in Figma or Photoshop. Going from zero to one is easier than it's ever been, and it makes work feel brand new again. Ad Studio is almost like a translator: designers put in the groundwork, the framing, and the guardrails, and marketers get a space to explore and create within them. It makes design accessible to more people without losing the brand. What doesn't change is that it still takes a person to drive the feeling behind the work.
Doni: It's an evolution, and I want to be at the forefront of it — that's a big part of why I'm here. It's a little like the horse and buggy giving way to the car. For creatives, this is a whole new kind of tool. Instead of a team spending days mocking things up, I can iterate through a thousand ideas quickly and get to the good ones faster. It genuinely shifts how you create, how you hire, and how you build a team.
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