How Alinea made its best performing video ad creatives with SecretSauce
About Alinea
Alinea Invest is the fintech company making investing accessible to Gen Z and women, founded by Eve Halimi and Anam Lakhani. With over 1M users and a revenue run rate of $6M, Alinea has become one of the fastest-growing consumer fintechs in the US.
Most of that growth runs through paid social, which means their creative team has to move at the speed of TikTok. That team is run by Joseph, Paid Ad Strategist at Alinea, who joined specifically to lead ad concepting and execution across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Learn how Joseph uses SecretSauce to produce Alinea's top performing ad creatives, and why they bring in higher quality users with strong retention.
The execution bottleneck
Joseph's team tests between 30 and 40 new video ad concepts every week, always looking for the next winner. But instead of spending time on concepting new ideas, production eats most of the work day. “There's a ton of barriers when it comes to execution."
Generally, Joseph would approach creative production in one of three ways:
1. Stock footage: There's usage rights involved, website terms that prevent you from manipulating it, and it’s impossible to customize. So when Joseph needed clips of characters on vacation, hiking, in a hot tub, taking a selfie in their car, he’d find something close and accept that it wouldn't be quite right.
2. Content creators: Joseph would spend time searching for a creator whose style already matched the concept, writing them a brief, and negotiating them on turnaround. He’d go through multiple rounds of back-and-forth before the creator ever hit record.
3. AI tools: Naturally, Joseph uses “a ton of different AI tools: Nano Banana, ChatGPT, Claude, anything you can think of … But for the kind of content we create, I want something that looks authentic to an iPhone video. AI tools generally over-index for that. They try to make things really glossy, really HDR, and I find that it's hard to prompt that out of the coding."
Ultimately, Joseph had three imperfect options: stock footage that looked stale, content creators that were slow and expensive, or AI tools that made everything look like a Super Bowl ad. None of them got him to an authentic winning ad.
Making Alinea’s winning creatives
After using SecretSauce for 3 months, the platform quickly became Joseph’s default for making video ad creatives. "I usually generate the same asset on multiple different platforms just to see who gets the best result, and I've definitely had more consistent success with SecretSauce."
The control he never had with stock footage is now a given. "Now if we want a very specific type of footage, we just find a reference and then recreate it in SecretSauce. We can put a phone in someone's hand, we can change the backdrop, we can change the pace of the video, which are things that just weren't possible before." The footage Joseph used to hunt for in stock libraries - someone on a hike, at the beach, filming a selfie in their car - is now B-roll he creates directly in SecretSauce.
According to Joseph, the benefit that separates SecretSauce from the other AI tools Joseph’s tried is the consistency. The hardest part of producing 40 creatives a week isn't generating one good one. It's generating the next one, and the next one, and making sure they all look like they’re part of the same brand. Most AI tools start from zero on every prompt. SecretSauce's Brand Brain learned Alinea’s brand once, so now everything Joseph creates comes out on-brand. "SecretSauce does consistently keep things the same. You don't have to go back and re-prompt edits you've already made. I never have to keep describing what the character looks like over and over."
That consistency frees up Joseph’s time. Instead of re-describing the character or the style of every generation, he can spend his time on the part that moves performance: the details. "SecretSauce is a lot better at doing things like adjusting a lens flare, adding smudge to the camera, adding a haze overlay to make it look more realistic. I can edit micro movements in facial expressions or background elements. Things like that are super granular but are what helps to create the best assets."
Generating 3 of Alinea's top-performing video ads in SecretSauce
The clearest result is the win rate: out of 30 ad creatives Alinea tests every week, 3 winners emerged, both of which were made with SecretSauce. "The video creatives made with SecretSauce definitely brought in users with higher quality and higher retention."
SecretSauce has also massively sped up production, which means Joseph spends less time chasing execution and more time on concepting. "It definitely sped up the process dramatically, especially for our more niche styles of content. Now producing ads is really seamless.”