HomeSmile
80 AI ad concepts. 30 days.
the brand
HomeSmile is a home improvement concierge for Austin homeowners. the pitch is built backwards: HomeSmile only gets paid when a project actually closes, so it has no incentive to ship leads to anyone but the right contractor. homeowners get one pre-vetted contractor match per ZIP and a pre-negotiated offer they couldn't get calling the contractor direct. phase one is bathroom remodels, tub-to-walk-in-shower conversions, $15K average job, Austin metro only. the brand is positioned against the lead-site marketplaces that get paid on form submit regardless of whether the project ever happens.
the challenge
HomeSmile came in with a tough brief and a three-vendor trial running in parallel. 25–30 videos a week at a quality bar high enough for cold paid traffic. every concept ships with five to seven hook variants for fast testing across the awareness stages, unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware. bathroom visible in the first frame on every cut, no exceptions. no AI artifacts (two shower heads, extra faucets, melted tile), every render sanity-checked before delivery. and no high-end aspirational look, marble countertops and custom tile beautiful in the render but misleading to a lead who'll get a mid-tier contractor and a standard install. the first delivery was the audition.
what we did
a production pipeline tuned to the brief, not retrofit to it.
Higgsfield-based AI video production, with a tight quality gate before anything left the studio. every render checked against the artifact rules (no double fixtures, no relocated windows, room structure consistent across before and after, no competing brand logos), and against the aesthetic rules (mid-tier bathrooms, Zintex-branded apparel on any on-camera crew, no luxury creep). nothing shipped that needed fixing on Nick's end.
five to seven hooks per concept, structured for testing.
every concept came with hook variants designed to hit a different awareness stage, the unaware lead-site-pain hook, the problem-aware safety hook for the 60-plus buyer, the solution-aware "one contractor not six" hook, the product-aware HomeSmile-specific pre-negotiated offer hook. the variant structure gave Nick a clean testing matrix instead of a pile of one-off creative.
Old Way vs HomeSmile Way as the dominant framing device.
first half of the ad builds the lead-site pain, chaos, spam calls, salesman pressure, ghosted deposits. second half flips to the HomeSmile calm, one match, transparent offer, project closes. that contrast structure scaled across the concept library and held up at the awareness-stage breakdown.
what didn't work first:
the first batch of bathroom renders defaulted to marble countertops and custom subway tile, beautiful but off-brand for HomeSmile's actual delivery quality. they would have pulled the wrong audience and tanked CPL on lead quality. killed them in the first review pass and rebuilt the asset prompts around real Austin mid-tier bathroom references.
the thing nobody expected.
locked-camera time-lapse renders of a full bathroom install outperformed every dynamic-cut version we shipped. the reveal at the end did the work, not the cuts. it ran against the conventional ad-cut instinct, but the data was unambiguous. we made it the new template for transformation creative and the rest of the concept library moved with it.
the result
80+ AI ad concepts shipped in the first 30 days, each with five to seven hook variants, every one delivered inside the 48-hour concept-to-ad window Mariano needed to keep the testing cadence moving. after the three-vendor trial wrapped, HomeSmile consolidated AI video production with us. volume's still climbing as phase one expands across the Austin metro.