Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved by LifeStreet Inc.
Interview – Chloe Rhys
SIGNAL + STORY
How Chloe Rhys Builds Creative That Performs—With AI, Audits, and Just the Right Amount of Scrappy
Creative that performs
is anything but lucky.
It’s the product of deliberate strategy, fast iteration and a team that blends instinct with evidence.
Few people understand that better than Chloe Rhys, a creative leader who formerly served as VP of Creative at OpenStore. She led creative across a large and fast-moving portfolio of DTC brands, each with different histories, needs and challenges. That scale made every new onboarding a herculean task.
In our first Signal + Story interview, Chloe shares the detailed playbook her team used to consistently deliver high-performing ad creative—without chasing trends or blowing budgets. Her approach is grounded in philosophy and practice: no one-size-fits-all solutions, no shortcuts, and no assumptions that what worked for one brand will work for another.
From deep creative audits to legal checks on asset usage, from remixing past ads to giving flops a second chance, and from AI-enhanced production to Pinterest-fueled brainstorms—Chloe’s method is rigorous, practical and proven.
She also explains the why behind each move: how a creative audit can uncover a hidden insight in a product review, or how a competitor’s content blind spot might reveal your next winning angle.
Watch the full interview below, or dive into the key takeaways.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Start with a full audit. Inventory every asset, review feedback and study the competition to uncover gaps and opportunities before building anything new.
- Use AI as a backstage boost. Let it handle repetitive tasks like image generation and voiceovers—but keep humans in charge of strategy and refinement.
- Think scrappy, not spendy. Reuse content, remix past hits and give underperforming ads a second shot before investing in new production.
- Make inspiration a habit. Hold weekly team sessions to share trends, creative sparks and platform insights—Pinterest included!
- Test, tweak, repeat. There’s no perfect formula. Your best bet is producing lots of intentional variations and iterating quickly.
Additional Interview Highlights
Start Smart: Why Every Creative Strategy Begins With an Audit
Creative instinct still matters—but it’s not the final call. The audience is.
So why do high-potential ads get killed in review? Bias. We’re quick to reject work that feels too loud, too risky or too off-brand.
But here’s the thing: users don’t see your internal mood boards or brand decks. They see a message. And the ad that feels a little uncomfortable in a meeting often ends up being the one that stops the scroll and drives action.
Use your gut to generate ideas—but let the data decide what stays in rotation. Go in with a hypothesis: Why do you think this version will work? Then track the metrics that will prove (or disprove) it. That’s how you challenge assumptions—and uncover creative that truly connects.
AI Won’t Save You—But It Will Scale You
Chloe embraced AI as a behind-the-scenes accelerator—not a replacement for creative instinct. She framed it as an amplifier: great for speeding up asset generation and batch testing, but far from a silver bullet.
Chloe’s team used tools like image generators to produce lifestyle visuals and AI voiceover services to scale video ads—always with human oversight and iteration. The real value came from the blend: letting AI handle repetitive grunt work while creatives focused on brand fidelity and nuance—things AI still can’t catch on its own.
A recent Coca-Cola experiment proved the point. The brand blended GPT-4 and DALL·E to create ad visuals—not to replace its creative team, but to power a bold visual concept that only worked because of strong creative direction. The takeaway: AI can absolutely scale your process—but only when actual people tell the story.
“We’ve done a ton of work with image generation. It’s not plug-and-play. It’s not 500 usable ads in one click. I get frustrated when I see LinkedIn posts saying ‘triple your output with image generation,’ because that has not been the reality.”
Chloe’s team used tools like image generators to produce lifestyle visuals and AI voiceover services to scale video ads—always with human oversight and iteration. The real value came from the blend: letting AI handle repetitive grunt work while creatives focused on brand fidelity and nuance—things AI still can’t catch on its own.
A recent Coca-Cola experiment proved the point. The brand blended GPT-4 and DALL·E to create ad visuals—not to replace its creative team, but to power a bold visual concept that only worked because of strong creative direction. The takeaway: AI can absolutely scale your process—but only when actual people tell the story.
Small Budgets, Big Wins: The ROI of Scrappy Creative
For Chloe, great creative was never about outspending the competition—it was about outthinking them. Her team regularly stretched budgets by repurposing existing content, remixing past hits and reviving underperforming ads with a second-chance strategy.
“Starting my career at Sephora, we had endless budget—and sometimes I’d see millions of dollars going to campaigns and wonder why we were spending so much. More recently in the paid social space, it’s incredible to see how you can drive so much revenue with a creative that costs less than $500 to make. It’s so much more rewarding to see an amazing result on something that was strategically created with limited resources.”
When resources were tight, creativity surged. Her scrappy, test-and-learn approach proved that constraints could fuel sharper, more effective work.
Just look at Dollar Shave Club. With a $4,500 budget, the brand launched a single irreverent YouTube video that went viral in 72 hours and drove a massive influx of customers. That one scrappy concept helped transform the company into a billion-dollar brand—proof that smart ideas, not big budgets, drive results. It’s the kind of creative philosophy Chloe champions: lean, bold, and laser-focused on storytelling.
Make Inspiration a Ritual: Chloe’s Creative Process
Chloe’s team didn’t leave inspiration to chance. Each week, brand strategists gathered examples of standout ads, design trends and creative sparks from the wild—then added them to a shared document. On Fridays, the full team came together for a structured brainstorm. It was part show-and-tell, part R&D lab.
“Pinterest is surprisingly underrated. Some of our top-performing ads were inspired by Pins.”
While many brands fixated on Facebook or TikTok trends, Chloe urged her team to look wider. Pinterest, often overlooked by performance marketers, became a secret weapon for finding visual and conceptual whitespace.
To support these efforts, the team used tools like Foreplay and Atria to monitor competitor ad libraries and track industry shifts. These rituals prevented stagnation and kept the team engaged, inspired and generating fresh ideas across dozens of brands.
No Formulas, Just Smart Iteration and Strategic Volume
Chloe pushed back on the idea that there’s a guaranteed formula for high-performing creative.
“The best you can do is maximize your chances by producing more and testing more. It’s not randomly throwing pasta at the wall; it’s throwing a very strategically prepared pasta that has the best chance of sticking.”
Her team created 10+ variations of a concept—tweaking intros, voiceovers, visuals, CTAs—then tested everything to see what clicked. Most versions didn’t work. But a few stood out. And those few got scaled fast.
It’s not about a magic formula. It’s about building a process that’s designed to evolve.
Scale with Systems, Not Shortcuts
Chloe Rhys’ approach combined creativity, rigor and humility. She didn’t believe in shortcuts—just process.
Whether you’re managing a startup budget or a Fortune 500 media plan, her advice holds up: Audit first. Iterate often. Stay inspired. Use AI wisely. And never underestimate the power of scrappy.
Disclaimer: The views shared here are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of their current or former employer.
Never Miss a Drop.
Get the latest Signal + Story content—sharp insights, creative strategies and industry perspectives—delivered straight to your inbox.
ARTICLE
Creative That Converts:
Why the First Three Seconds Matter
ARTICLE
The Perfect Ad Doesn’t Exist. But the Better-Performing One Does.
ARTICLE
CTA Chemistry: Finding the Right Call for the Right Moment
INTERVIEW
Conversation with Chloe Rhys
DTC Creative Leader