How to build an audience-specific ad campaign with Ad Studio

The closer your ad creative matches the audience seeing it, the better it performs. That’s not a secret. But actually delivering unique creative for different segments has always been the hard part.

Running ads for a specific audience means a time-intensive design workflow to target a relatively small group. Briefs, revisions, resizing, handoffs. Most teams can’t justify the creative resources, so they default to one or two generic concepts, and true personalization remains out of reach.

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to use Ad Studio to build an audience-specific ad campaign end-to-end, from defining who you’re targeting to generating creative grounded in your brand, editing in-product, and launching directly to your chosen ad platforms.

Watch how in the video below or read on for the step-by-step guide.

• Hightouch workspace with Ad Studio enabled
• Relevant brand context in Ad Studio. The most robust version includes: brand guidelines, direct integrations with DAMs, Figma, and other creative tools, your product catalog, and your competitor list
• Meta connected

Every audience-specific campaign starts with a signal.

• Proactive: Ad Studio surfaces something worth acting on. Monitor and react to creative fatigue or performance shifts, or review trending topics, competitor moves, and market moments relevant to your brand. You spot an opportunity and build a campaign around it.
• Intentional: You come in with a strong internal business signal. Sales tells you a vertical is heating up. Leadership wants to push into a new segment. A product launch needs campaign support. You know who you’re targeting and why, and you just need the creative.

A few examples of what this looks like in practice:

• A fintech company wants to target free-tier users who’ve hit a usage threshold with upsell creative for the paid plan
• A B2B SaaS team gets a signal from sales that retail media buyers are a priority, and they need campaign creative tailored to that vertical
• A reseller marketplace wants to run distinct campaigns for high-value repeat customers vs. first-time buyers at different points in the journey
• A restaurant wants to target consumers who live near their new storefront that’s opening

Tip: Use Customer Studio for data-driven segments: If you're a Hightouch Customer Studio user, you can build and save audience segments directly, layering in behaviors, predictive scores, lifecycle stage, geo, product affinities, and exclusions. This gives Ad Studio richer context for generation. But Customer Studio isn't required. You can define your audience manually in the prompt and get great results.

Your prompt tells Ad Studio everything it needs to generate useful concepts, including who the audience is, what you’re promoting, what the creative should look like, and how many concepts you want. A good prompt means less editing later.

Prompt formula

Use this structure to build your prompt:

1. Goal: What business outcome are you driving?
2. Audience: Which persona, funnel stage, or segment?
3. Offer: What product, SKU, or value prop is being promoted?
4. Inputs: What files, URLs, reports, or reference ads should it use?
5. Creative direction: What formats or styles should it explore?
6. Output spec: How many concepts/assets, and how different should they be?
7. Constraints: What brand rules or asset restrictions must it follow?

Prompt template

Copy this template, fill in the brackets, and paste it into Ad Studio to start a new campaign:

    Create [number] ad concepts for [channel] promoting
    [product / offer] to [persona / audience].

    The goal is to drive [business goal].

    Reference these inputs: [brief / report / URLs /
    files / competitor ads / existing assets].

    Explore [creative directions or formats].

    For outputs, give me [number of concepts] with
    [number of assets] each. Keep the concepts [similar
    message with varied execution / completely different
    messages].

    Follow our brand guidelines.

    Ask me any questions before you begin that will help
    you get the best answer.

Once your prompt is ready, navigate to Ad Studio, create a new project, and paste it in.

Ad Studio will start generating the first batch of ad concepts automatically. Each batch takes a few minutes. Generate enough variations to give yourself a range to work with.

Go through the outputs and evaluate them:

• Does the concept land for this audience?
• Is the message clear?
• Does the positioning feel accurate?
• Does it look and sound on-brand?
• Would you actually put this in market?

Star or favorite the strongest options. If the first batch isn’t quite right, give the agent feedback in the chat (e.g., “more editorial,” “less text,” “try a different angle on the value prop”) and generate another round.

Take your strongest concepts and make final adjustments. You have three ways to edit:

• Agent chat editor: Prompt the agent to make changes for you. This is fastest for high-level adjustments such as “make the palette warmer,” “swap to the linen-suit asset,” or “try a shorter headline.” The agent applies the edit across selected ads, so you’re not repeating yourself.
• Self-serve visual editor: For hands-on, pixel-level control. Ad Studio’s editor is built as a layering engine. Headlines, CTAs, backgrounds, and product shots are independent layers you can move, restyle, or replace directly. Tighten a headline, swap a visual, adjust CTA placement, or remove a distracting element.
• Figma integration: You can also export to Figma if your design team wants to finish in their existing workflow.

Once a concept is approved, generate the placements and sizes you need. Ad Studio resizes across formats while preserving brand and product accuracy. Generate localized versions for any additional regions or languages without rebuilding the concept from scratch.

Once your ads are ready, queue them for launch in Ad Studio. Review everything in one place, add final details like headlines and CTAs, then launch directly to Meta. For other platforms like Google Ads, TikTok, etc., you can export and upload.

Tip: Pair with Customer Studio for end-to-end targeting. If you're also using Customer Studio, you can sync the audience segment to the same ad platform in parallel. Because Ad Studio and Customer Studio share the same data layer, the audience and the matched creative arrive at the ad platform together. No CSV exports, no manual audience uploads, no mismatched targeting.

With Ad Studio, the number of segments you can target is no longer constrained by bandwidth. Now, marketers can spend their time on strategy and judgment instead of managing handoffs between teams.