And if there’s anyone skeptical about AI-generated content, it’s me.

I don’t even use AI to help me write anything on this blog.

But, I have been on the lookout for AI tools I think are actually good. And now I’m here to give you a fully honest Arcads review.

There are some things I’m extremely impressed by. And some other things I think could use some work.

Maybe you’re trying to run ads for a coaching client. Or you’re trying to get more ecommerce sales. Or you’re trying to drive more newsletter subscribers. Whatever it may be, by the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what Arcads does, how it works, and if it’s right for your use case.

Okay, let’s get straight to it.

Who is Arcads for?

When you first land on the Arcads homepage, you can see that the value prop for the product is clear: Create winning ads with AI actors.

But, if you’re a performance marketer or business owner, you’ll know that not all ads are equal. How you approach an ad for an ecommerce product is different from how you approach an ad for a software product.

So, at first glance, it might be hard to know exactly who Arcads is for. But, that’s why you’re reading this. And after using the platform extensively, I can tell you that Arcads is best for those who sell digital products.

And by digital products, I mean things like:

• Courses
• Coaching programs
• Services
• Newsletters
• Templates
• SaaS
• Apps

Pretty much any good that is not physical.

I don’t think it’s great for ecommerce businesses with physical products — simply because you can’t get an AI actor to use your product and showcase it.

But, that doesn’t mean you  use it for your ecommerce business.

Let me put it this way, using the 80/20 principle (although I’m probably not conveying it in the smartest way here, so bear with me).

If you sell digital products, Arcads can take care of 80% of your ad creation efforts. It has amazing AI actors (who are trained based on real people) and clear voiceovers. The other 20% is you editing stuff and adding images and graphics that overlay the video to keep people engaged.

But, if you sell physical products, Arcads can take care of 20% of your ad creation efforts. What I mean is that you’ll still need to showcase your product physically. And that is the main bulk of your ad. But, you can get an AI actor to overlay on top of the video and have them do a voiceover while you demo the product — adding a nice touch to improve retention and engagement with your ad.

So, in theory, you can use Arcads for both digital and physical products. But, you can get more done if you’re trying to promote things that don’t require them to be physically shown by an AI actor.

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Arcads’ popular features

Arcads is a really impressive AI ad maker — honestly the best one I’ve seen when it comes to how real the AI actors look and the number of options you have.

Alright, what about the features?

When you first sign up and open Arcads, you’ll notice it’s quite bare-bones. I personally wish they would have had an onboarding walkthrough or something. It’s not apparent right away what you can do with it. But it does have a clean UI (user interface), so I’ll give it that.

When you add a new project, you’re prompted into a text-to-speech (or speech-to-speech) feature. This is where you add in your own script for your video ad. The speech-to-speech feature lets you upload your own audio, or you can record your script by talking directly into the web browser. Arcads will then turn the audio into text.

There is no built-in AI-generated text in the platform (at the time of writing this). But, you wouldn’t want to use AI to generate text blindly anyways — it’s not going to be great. If you want to get an idea for a script, you can use ChatGPT or Claude to help you with it. Or, you can also use Arcads’ hook generator tool to get some ideas too.

Their hook generator tool is actually pretty neat, and I found it to give me some great ideas (and I’m not just saying that — I’m a big AI text generation skeptic).

Okay, for the sake of this Arcads review, I’m going to create an ad for my marketing newsletter. I’ll get some ideas using Claude.

Don Draper may not be a fan of what Claude just generated… We’ll edit it and add it to Arcads.

Okay, now that the script is entered, we can start adding actors. We can actually add multiple actors to one script and generate a bunch of videos in one go. This is a pretty cool feature if you want to make a collage of a bunch of actors, or if you’re an agency and you want to create a bunch of assets for your clients to pick from.

Tell me this is not insane with how real these people look. (I mean, they are based on real people.) It actually blows my mind.

There are so many actors that I can’t even scroll through all of them. Some look more real than others. But I’d say for the majority of them, you can’t tell it’s an AI.

You also have tons of options for the vibe you’re going with. Do you want a male or a female? Age group? Skin tone? What kind of environment?

There’s just too many to choose from. I’m not complaining though. Most of these AI ad makers don’t give you enough options to sift through and find actors that feel natural. You can tell the Arcads team really focused on nailing down how real the actors feel. It makes sense why they didn’t jump into the video editing stuff yet and focused on the core asset first.

Okay, once you selected all the actors you want (I picked Helen and Vincent), you can listen back to how each of them sounds like before you actually generate the full video.

This is a cool feature because it allows you to preview the ad before you spend any credits on generating it.

Once you find the right actors for your script, you can click on ‘Generate videos’ in the top right, and then you’ll be prompted to this screen:

Here, you can see how many credits it will cost (2 for me because I have 2 videos). You can also see some final tips before you generate the videos.

You want to be mindful of their rules around avoiding out-of-pocket scripts (because these actors are real human faces). You also want to make sure you use proper punctuation because the way the actor talks is based on that. So, if you have a question mark, the tone will feel like the actor is asking a question.

Okay, once it’s ready, click ‘Generate video’ and Arcads is going to run one final review and then start processing the videos. This part can take a few minutes.

While the videos are loading, Arcads also offers to do some editing for you. Not in a self-serve kind of way, but rather, you’ll hop on a call and explain what you want, and they’ll give you a final product in 2 business days.

Okay, after a quick trip to the bathroom, the ads are done! (TMI, sorry.)

All I have to say is: whoa.

These ads came out so realistic it’s insane.

I will admit that Helen’s voice does sound ever so slightly like an AI. The average person probably won’t pick up on it, but if you’re a marketer you most likely will.

But Vincent, on the other hand, sounds so realistic I would not be able to tell it’s AI. Everything from the tone, hand gestures, body language, and voice is incredible. There are even people walking around in the background in the mirror in the Vincent video.

Same with Helen, the hand gestures and body language are on point it’s actually a bit scary. And no, Arcads did not pay me to say any of this. I’m genuinely impressed.

I wish I could embed the videos here, but they’re about 33MB each. Not a lot in general, but my CMS won’t allow for it. You’ll have to take my word for it (or look at the ads on Arcads’ homepage).

From here, you can download your videos and then take them to your video editing platform of choice. The output is essentially what you would get if you paid a UGC creator to do a voiceover with their face. So it’s not far off from a regular workflow when working without AI — it’s just a faster and cheaper turnaround.

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How much does Arcads cost?

When you first go on the Arcads website, you can see that there are no pricing options. But don’t worry, I got you. When you go through the onboarding process, you’ll be presented with the paywall.

Arcads pricing plans

Here are Arcads’ pricing tiers:

• Starter: Starts at $110 per month for up to 10 videos per month
• Creator: Starts at $220 per month for up to 20 videos per month
• Pro: Custom based on your needs and API access

As you can see, $110 per month might seem like a lot at first. But if you think about it, it’s actually reasonable. Each video turns out to be $11. For what you get, that’s a lot cheaper than if you were to go out and hire a UGC creator.

Just go to Fiverr and look up “UGC ad creator,” and you’ll see that they all charge anywhere from $80-$200+ for a video. Plus, it will take a few days of back-and-forth before you get your video.

This means Arcads is literally 10X cheaper and faster than using Fiverr.

You also don’t spend your credits until after you’ve reviewed the actor's voice. So you won’t by accident waste credits on voices you don’t like.

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Arcads’ customer support

One of the big things I look for in software, especially new AI marketing tools, is their customer support. Creating software is starting to become a commodity. But having good support and real humans behind and product who care about your success is not that common.

Luckily, Arcads is at a size where you can literally email the founder and get a response. It’s not common for many SaaS products to give you access to the CEO. But you can tell Arcads is genuinely trying to make a great product and not just do a quick AI cash grab.

And if you want quicker response times, you can use the ArcBot chatbot in the product as well. You can ask it questions related to the product and how to use it. You can also be routed to a real person on the team.

Overall, I’d say this is a solid customer service experience.

Arcads pros and cons

After using Arcads to browse through hundreds of AI human actors, ad scripts for ads, and create video ads, I can say it’s a solid product. Better than most AI ad makers I’ve seen (in terms of quality). But, there are a few cons with it as well.

Arcads pros

Here’s what I love about Arcads:

• Uses real human actors, that are augmented with AI.
• Includes over 300 actors to choose from, with uniquely different voices.
• Cheaper (and faster) than paying a UGC creator.

Overall, I do think the pros outweigh the cons. If you have the right use case and know that quality ads aren’t just created through a “one click” AI generated system, you’ll have a great time using the platform.

Arcads cons

Here are some things that I think need improvement:

• Need to use your own editing tool (like Capcut) to add all the finishing touches. I’m sure they will eventually add video editing features straight into the platform.
• You need to provide your own text scripts (no templates or AI-generated text).

Honestly, these are my only cons right now. It’s mostly around limited features. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s not a tool for handling the entire ad creation process (at least not today). It’s built to be a part of your ad creation tech stack.

TLDR: My final thoughts

If you made it this far, you probably have a good idea if Arcads is right for you. By now, you’ll also know what it can do and how well it can do it. But, if you’re just skimming through this article (which likely you are), here’s a summary of what you need to know.

Is Arcads worth it?

✅ Yes, if you’re a business that sells digital products (from software to services and courses) Arcads can help you create UGC video ads that look and feel realistic. The actors are based on real humans, so they look hyper realistic. The only thing that gets augmented is the mouth movements (and voice) when talking through your custom video script.

Note that the platform is for creating a video of a person talking about your product. If you want to edit your videos with graphics and text or showcase physical products, you will need to combine it with your own video editing tool. Or, you can pay Arcads to make a video for you (with a 2-day turnaround time).

Create winning ads with AI actors

Generate 100s of winning videos from text.

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What makes the platform unique?

What makes Arcads unique is that they train their AI on real humans. You can actually apply to become an AI actor on the platform.

Because of this, most of the videos you generate with Arcads look super real. It’s not some cartoony-looking AI person that you might get with some other AI ad makers. Everything from the hand gestures, body language, and environment the actor is in are real. It’s just the voice and lip movements that are augmented with AI to fit your script.

Overall, this platform is promising. And if you’re looking for UGC creators to make ads for you, this is one to definitely check out.