Don’t Miss the Veo 3 Gold Rush

Yesterday, I posted a fake pharmaceutical ad and it hit 3 million views in a day. There’s something special going on right now with Veo 3 that you need to capitalize on.

Below, I’ll share my multi-step process for making the commercial, as promised :)

Also, at the end, I’ll include an insane Veo 3 generation that was so dark it would have gotten me canceled if I included it in the video 😅

I try not to email you more than necessary, but I feel like I should give a few tips and thoughts on how to gain similar traction.

There’s a massive opportunity to create viral content with Veo 3 over the next week or two, but before we get tactical with the step-by-step, you need to understand why things go viral in the first place.

First off, I’m still a bit in awe… I’ve never seen this many viral clips from so many creators in such a short time. There used to be a pretty big skill moat to getting content to break 100k views, but I’ve seen dumb 8-second clips getting hundreds of thousands of views in the last 48 hours.

My biggest tip is to capitalize on making content now. Like right now. Create content that interests you and can surprise and delight others.

People scroll for dopamine or content that adds value and helps them.

Unless you want to be a business guru threadboi, you should optimize for the former.

So how do you create dopamine for others? There are lots of ways, but I’d primarily recommend picking a niche or subject that’s interesting to you, and then follow this formula with your video:

Start with something relatively expected, but still attention-grabbing.

(In this case, a pharmaceutical ad shot of a woman with a logo speaking.)

Then, after a clip or two establishing the “norm,” subvert it with something zany, bizarre, or unexpected.

This is the essence of comedy writing, SNL sketch structure, Sunday comics, all of it.

Comedy often comes from contrast, irony, and connections between opposites.

One of my favorite sketches of all time does this perfectly.

It starts as a sex therapy support group, which is a relatively normal setting, but still hooks the viewer.

Then comes the subversion: Jordan Peele’s character isn’t there for sex addiction. He’s there because he has a food addiction and hopes this is the one place he can pick up chicks.

I know you’re probably reading this because you want the pharmaceutical prompts or process, but honestly, that’s less important than understanding why people will watch whatever video you make.

You need to hook them with a headline that makes them stop scrolling.

Your video needs to establish a relatively mundane but still interesting “norm” and then subvert it in a way that’s unexpected or delightful.

(Example: a boring prescription solves your depression by making puppies attracted to you.)

I was hoping to have a course finished by now, but I’m juggling client work for some larger brands, running a studio, and still making my own viral content. You’ll have to wait another month or so.

In the meantime, I’ll keep giving you tips and insight as I learn them, just from being in the arena daily. That’s more sustainable and, honestly, more valuable.

The technical steps to make AI videos are getting easier every day, but the taste it takes to go viral consistently is really hard to teach or master. I’m still figuring it out, but I think it’s more useful for me to focus on that in these emails than giving you a technical checklist.

Still, I promised the goods, so here’s a brief overview of my process for making the commercial:

1. Start with an idea that follows the formula: set the norm, then subvert it.

2. Write a rough draft of the script by yourself.

3. Improve it using ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini. Ask for ideas. Say, “I like these lines; give me more in this direction.”

4. Choose your favorite lines and ask for a shot list.

5. The shot list should just be 2–3 sentence descriptions of visuals and matching dialogue.

6. Take that shot list and use this structure for your prompts.

7. Sample prompt: Muted colors, somber muted lighting. A woman, SARAH (50s), sits on a couch in a cluttered living room. She speaks (melancholic, slightly trembling voice): “I tried everything for my depression. Nothing worked.”

8. Feed the prompt structure into ChatGPT (or any LLM) and have it generate prompts for each shot.

9. Review for errors and make sure you like how the location and everything looks.

10. Enter the prompts one at a time into Veo 3. You need to be a $250/month Ultra subscriber (only available to US customers right now).

11. Select text-to-video and make sure Veo 3 is selected. Only do one generation per prompt.

12. Kiss $3 goodbye and cross your fingers.

13. To speed things up, I usually enter a few prompts at once and leapfrog through the process. After 5 or so, the first generation is usually ready.

14. Review the clip. Make sure the voice sounds good and the animation looks right.

15. If your clip has weird subtitles, unfortunately, you’ll have to re-run it. Yes, you still get charged for bad generations ☹️ 

16. If you love a performance but want to tweak one thing (like changing the voice), you can’t really do that yet. It re-generates the whole thing from scratch.

17. You can achieve more consistency using image-to-video, but the camera movement isn’t as dynamic as with text-to-video. If you need consistent characters or voices, I recommend using Runway, Kling, or ElevenLabs. I’ll explain all of this in more detail in my full course.

18. If a clip has great visuals but bad audio, you can dub it yourself and use ElevenLabs to convert your voice to match the character’s age or gender.

19. I’m usually happy if I get a good shot in 3–4 generations. If I don’t get what I want after 10 generations ($30), I just change the shot.

20. Once I’ve got all the shots, I drop them into Final Cut. It’s fast and easy, but CapCut and DaVinci are great free options too.

21. I just used a track from a stock music site for this pharmaceutical ad. Epidemic Sound is great, around $10–20/month. I’m not big on AI-generated music yet, but it’ll get there.

22. Veo 3 exports in 720p. Instead of upscaling inside Veo 3 and spending more credits, I use Topaz Video to upscale to 1080p and add some film grain.

23. I added some logos and text to make it feel like a real commercial.

24. And that’s it—that’s how I made the ad.

25. I will do my best to make daily Veo 3 videos for the foreseeable future. There’s a six-month window to get a massive lead on pro filmmakers before studios flood the scene with professional content. Try to do the same!

Okay, this is the joke I wanted to include in the video, but it seemed a little too dark for the otherwise family-friendly commercial tone.

Note to PETA: No actual puppies were harmed while making this video.

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