Inside the Campaign Research Step

What the Research Step Does

When you click Create Campaign, an AI research step runs in the background before the campaign is fully ready for creative work. The step pulls structured information from your inputs and produces a campaign brief that every creative inside the campaign draws from.

The research step runs once per campaign, at creation. It does not rerun on each creative. Get the inputs right at campaign creation and every creative inherits a strong starting point.

Inputs the Research Step Reads

The step reads three sources:

1. Product Name (from the campaign form).
2. Research URLs you provided (up to five). Pages our research step reads to understand your product. Usually the product page on your own site, a landing page, a competitor product page if positioning matters.
3. Client Description (from the client's settings). The brand summary, audience, and tone you wrote when you set up the client.

If you skipped research URLs, the step still runs using just the product name and client description, but the output is thinner. Adding even one strong URL noticeably improves the result.

What the Research Step Produces

The output is a structured brief that includes:

• Product facts. Category, primary use, key features, materials, pricing tier when extractable.
• Audience inference. Who this product is for, based on the product page and brand context.
• Positioning angle. What makes this product different, based on competitor pages and brand description.
• Tone direction. How creatives for this product should feel, derived from the client description.

Every creative inside the campaign starts from this brief. The dialogue proposals on the Copy step, the hook variations the AI offers, the persona suggestions: all draw on the brief.

How the Status Appears

After you click Create Campaign, the campaign sits in a Processing state while research runs. The badge on the campaigns list reflects this. Once research completes, the badge moves to Ready and the campaign workspace becomes fully usable.

Most campaigns complete research in well under a minute. You can navigate away while it runs; the campaign will update on its own when ready.

If research fails to complete (rare), the campaign moves to a Failed state with an explanation. The team is paged automatically, so failures rarely persist long without follow up. You can also message your account manager from the campaign to ask what happened.

How to Make the Research Step Work for You

A few practical levers:

Use a live product page as your first research URL. A real product page contains pricing, features, photos, and customer reviews. The AI extracts more from a real product page than from any other URL type. Make this your first URL.

Add a competitor URL when positioning matters. If your product wins on a specific differentiator (price, an ingredient, a guarantee), drop the competitor's page in. The research step picks up on the contrast.

Keep the client description current. Brand tone and positioning come from the client description more than anywhere else. If the brand has shifted, edit the client description first, then create the campaign. Editing the client description after the campaign is already created does not retroactively update the research; the research is captured at campaign creation time.

Use the actual product name your customer sees. "Hydrating Face Serum" beats "Product A" or "the supplement". The research step uses the product name to anchor downstream dialogue and on screen text.

What the Step Cannot Do

A few realistic constraints:

• It cannot read login walled pages. A research URL behind a customer account or paywall does not work.
• It cannot read PDFs or non public spreadsheets. Drop a clean web page instead.
• It cannot generate facts that are not somewhere in the inputs. If your product page has no pricing and no reviews, the brief will be thinner on those dimensions. Either add a richer URL or include the missing context in the client description.

After Research Completes

Once the campaign is Ready, every creative you start inside it inherits the brief. You can still influence each creative further on its own product, persona, and copy steps, but the foundational understanding of the product is already in place.

For the full submit flow built on top of this brief, see How to Submit a Creative for Production. For the inputs that drive dialogue quality, see Writing Effective Product Descriptions and Dialogue.