How-to guides

Create ad creative

An ad card is the finished ad or channel message: the actual media plus the actual copy, reviewed inside the exact placement it will run in. No moodboard or "concept deck" sits in between. What you approve is what runs.

From the photos you already have to every size the campaign needs, in two minutes, filmed in the real app.

What an ad card is

An ad card holds the finished thing: the media and the copy. It has no free-form body to hide notes in, because the ad is its media and its words. It comes in five shapes, and for the message shape the card reads Message instead of Ad:

Single image
One image plus primary text, headline, and a call to action. The workhorse ad.
Video
The same, with a video as the media.
Carousel
An ordered set of 2 to 10 cards, each with its own image and optional headline and link.
Vertical video
Full-screen 9:16, the Reels, TikTok, and Stories shape.
Message
A WhatsApp Business template or an SMS: the same finished-copy discipline, applied to a channel message instead of an ad.

Staging in real frames

You never judge an ad floating on a white page. On the board it's staged inside the placement it will actually run in: Instagram Feed, Reels, or Stories, Facebook Feed, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, a WhatsApp thread, an SMS conversation. The frame shows that surface's copy limits as a truncation preview, so you see exactly where a long headline gets cut off before the platform does the cutting for you.

The frame only affects how you review the ad. What ships is the media and the copy, unchanged. The limits guide the preview rather than police the card: write the full copy and let the frame show where it clips. To see every frame before you ask for one, browse the Previews page.

The drafting prompt

Copy-paste prompt
On my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper, draft two single-image ad concepts for P&P Bookstore's summer sale: one leading with the 20% bundle offer, one with the feeling of summer reading. Stage both as Instagram Feed, apply the workspace guidelines, keep the copy within the frame's limits, and use placeholders for the images. We'll shoot those ourselves.

Making the images

Your agent makes the images, with its own image tools; Plainpaper never generates or edits one. It makes one image per placement (a story, a feed post, a TikTok ad) at that placement's own size, and files each in the board's Creatives under the idea it carries, like "Bundle offer". There you see every size side by side at its true shape, and send back the ones that need work with a note. Your agent answers each note with a new version.

Copy-paste prompt
On my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper, make the images for the bundle offer concept: one for the Instagram feed and one for Instagram Stories, each at its own size, with our fonts and colors from the guidelines. File them in the board's Creatives under the message "Bundle offer" and tell me when they're ready for a look.

When the images look right, Use in… puts them into the ad: a new ad card with one image per placement, or the one your agent already drafted, replacing its placeholders. Your agent can do the same step for you. The ad and its images are then approved together, and if a newer version of an image lands later, the card offers to switch to it.

Shooting your own? Add the photos to the board's Creatives yourself, or keep them anywhere in Assets and put them on the card with the file picker.

Variants & other platforms

An A/B variant is a sibling card, linked to the original as a variant: same phase, one deliberate difference. The same idea for a different platform is also a sibling card, staged in that platform's frame, because one export never honestly fits every surface. Each card stays a single reviewable, approvable thing.

Copy-paste prompt
Take the winning summer sale concept and make a vertical-video version: one ad staged as Instagram Reels, and a sibling card with the same idea staged as TikTok. Link each to the original as a variant, and use a placeholder for the video until we have the cut.

What approval requires

"Approved" claims this ad is fit to run, and Plainpaper checks that claim before the status moves:

  • At least one staging frame. Review happens inside a placement, so an unstaged ad doesn't qualify.
  • A click destination for ad shapes. Single image, video, carousel, and vertical video all need a call to action and a destination URL; an ad you can't click isn't finished. The message shape is exempt: an SMS can be linkless.
  • No unfilled placeholders. Every image or video slot must hold real media before the card can be approved.
  • No ended licences. If a photo on the card, or the photo a creative was made from, has a licence that has ended, approval is refused and the photo is named. Licences are set in Assets.

The full lifecycle is in Approvals & control.

Where budget and targeting live

Not on the ad card. That's deliberate: an ad card refuses budget, objective, schedule, and targeting outright. Those live on strategy cards, connected to the ad on the board. Two reasons: the ad you approve is exactly what runs, without settings smuggled in beside it, and at decision time the connections still show you the audience and plan behind it. See Cards & connections for how the graph ties it together.

Handoff to the ad platform

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Plainpaper never touches your ad account. After you approve, your agent pushes the ad through the platform's own connector. With Meta's own ads tools, for example, writes land paused in your ad account. Nothing runs and nothing spends until you switch it on yourself in Ads Manager.

Copy-paste prompt
The two summer sale ads on my board are approved. Propose pushing them to Meta as paused drafts, taking the media and copy exactly from the approved cards. Show me the proposed action first; nothing goes live until I've checked the drafts in Ads Manager myself.

The full Meta workflow, connector setup included, is at Claude + Meta Ads, with a deeper look at the tooling in the Meta Ads MCP server guide.