He took over an agency with the revenue gone and rebuilt it around a single, stubborn idea: the ad you should run is already sitting in a five-star review. You just have to go read it.
Will Sartorius. Runs a marketing company that would rather listen than brainstorm.
Will Sartorius runs SelfMade, a performance marketing company in New York, and spends most of his energy on Skipper, the AI creative intelligence platform SelfMade is rolling out. The pitch is not subtle. Marketing teams sit down, stare at a blank page, and try to invent what customers want. Sartorius thinks that is backwards. The customers have already told you. It is in the Amazon reviews, the Reddit threads, the Facebook comments, the testimonials scattered across the web. Almost nobody had built a systematic way to use any of it.
So he built one. Skipper scrapes roughly 25 sources and tags what it finds by persona, by angle, by the emotion driving the purchase. Out of that comes something a strategist can actually use: not a blank page, but a brief assembled from things real buyers actually said. Sartorius calls these "swim lanes." Constraints, in other words. And he is convinced constraints are where good creative comes from.
His conviction has a specific origin. At a marketing conference he raised his hand and asked the question that would reorganize his career.
"If email is entirely data-driven, why are we still brainstorming paid creative?"
AI handles the floor. Humans handle the ceiling. Not a war between them - a division of labor.
SelfMade was not his idea. It was founded in 2015 by Brian Schechter as an Instagram posting app, built on the bet that commerce would move onto the platform. The company raised somewhere around 19 million dollars and arrived too early. Commerce did move, eventually, but not on the schedule the fundraising assumed. SelfMade pivoted to conventional agency work, attempted an acquisition that came apart, and by the time Sartorius took the top job in 2023, the roughly 3 million dollars in revenue had largely evaporated and clients were leaving.
Sartorius had joined in 2021, and not at the top. He came in as an Integrated Marketing Associate. Then Manager. Then Head of Creative Operations. Then Chief Operating Officer. Then, when the company was bleeding, CEO. It is a strange thing to climb a ladder and arrive at the top just as the building catches fire.
The rescue came from something his team was already doing by hand. They were tagging customer reviews - persona, angle, emotion - one at a time, using the results to shape creative strategy. Slow, manual, and quietly valuable. When ChatGPT arrived, Sartorius saw that the whole tedious process could be systematized. Once it was, the insights, in his words, "started selling like hotcakes." That was the pivot. Not a new business, exactly. The same instinct, finally at scale.
Deutsche Bank, then a fitness startup inside a Snap incubator, then CMO of Inkerman, a New England-inspired footwear brand.
Joins SelfMade as an Integrated Marketing Associate.
Climbs to Manager, then Head of Creative Operations, then COO.
Becomes CEO after a failed acquisition leaves the company burning cash.
Builds and ships Skipper - scraping, tagging, and generating persona-driven creative.
Launches Sartorius Media consulting and develops "The AI Ad Studio" course.
Most people think creativity needs room to breathe. Sartorius argues the opposite. Hand a marketer a truly blank page and you get hesitation. Hand them a persona, an angle, an emotion, and a product, and the work gets sharper. The brief is not a cage. It is the thing that lets you move.
Skipper pulls from Reddit, Amazon, TikTok, X, Facebook and brand sites, plus a competitive layer that ranks top Meta ads by estimated impressions.
Content gets tagged by persona, angle and emotion. Copy agents iterate against those swim lanes until the output clears a quality bar, then convert to image prompts.
Proven winners get re-transcribed and tested with single-variable changes - the discipline that separates a system from a guess.
"Human beings work better under constraints. Write a brief for this persona, this angle, this emotion, and the output is dramatically better."
"Garbage in, garbage out. If you aren't building a step-by-step process, you're just guessing every time."
There is an obvious risk to building a tool that sits between marketers and Meta: Meta could build it too. Sartorius knows this. He believes there is a narrow window, maybe one year, maybe two, before the ad platforms automate creative intelligence themselves. So the roadmap is a race. Video animation using Google's Veo models. Direct Meta integration to close the loop between listening and delivery. UGC script generation drawn from the persona data Skipper already produces. An API so other tools can plug in.
Alongside SelfMade and Skipper, he has started Sartorius Media, a consulting practice built on the same bet: that a two- or three-person team, armed with the right AI system, can produce the output of a 50-person agency - roughly 80 ad variants a week. He has run the playbook with brands including eBags, Samsonite, LesserEvil, Otherland, Every Man Jack, Belgian Boys and Alaskan Brewing. A course, "The AI Ad Studio," is on the way for growth marketers who want to install the system themselves.
"Those insights started selling like hotcakes."
Sartorius walks through building AI video ads with Claude, Nano Banana and Veo.
▶ youtube.com/watch?v=v-BQQk1B3k0His path runs Deutsche Bank, a Snap-incubated fitness startup, a New England shoe brand, and then creative AI. Not a straight line.
He studied at Bates College - a small liberal arts school in Lewiston, a long way from the Meta ad library.
His name for Skipper's persona-angle-emotion structure. Lanes keep you fast. The open pool just makes you tread water.
The Sartorius Media spec: a tiny team producing what used to take fifty. The system is the multiplier.
Will Sartorius is the CEO of SelfMade, a New York performance marketing company, and the builder behind Skipper, an AI creative intelligence platform. He took over a near-dead agency in 2023 and rebuilt it around a single conviction: the data brands need to make better ads already exists in Amazon reviews, Reddit threads and Facebook comments, waiting to be scraped, tagged and turned into creative. His pitch to marketers is blunt: stop brainstorming, start listening to what customers already said.
Last updated: