
The Mobile User Acquisition Show
How to win with deep customer research for mobile ad creative strategy & user acquisition (without focus groups or calls): with Karina Tukanova
Most creative strategists treat audience research as a box to check before the real work starts. Karina Tukanova, freelance creative strategy consultant, treats it as the actual work. Karina is a freelance creative strategy consultant working with health, wellness, fitness, and lifestyle apps. She made the jump from performance marketing manager to creative strategist right around the iOS 14 shift, back when creative strategist wasn't even a defined role. In this episode, Karina breaks down how she found an entirely untapped audience for a stretching app by scrolling TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit instead of running customer interviews, why the comments section is the most underrated research source most teams ignore, how she uses AI as a second brain to store and surface insights, and how AI uncovered a hidden script formula running across hundreds of UGC ads that would have taken forever to spot by hand. We also get into why she thinks Meta's push for constant net-new creative volume (the Andromeda era) isn't sustainable on a human level, why handing 100% of ad production to AI just produces slop, and where she thinks AI genuinely earns its place in a creative workflow versus where a human still has to sit in the loop. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:27 The iOS 14 shift and the rise of creative strategy as a role 04:12 The stretching app that found a new audience in older users 07:21 How to surface real audience insights without endless customer calls 08:39 Why ad and organic comments are an underrated research goldmine 09:39 Using AI as a second brain to store and surface creative insights 10:44 How AI spotted a hidden script formula across hundreds of UGC ads 13:22 What makes UA and creative teams work well together 16:17 Deciding what's worth making before you spend anything 18:34 The Andromeda craze and the myth of 100 new concepts a week 20:19 Fighting Meta's sameness penalty with visual variety 22:18 Where AI should and shouldn't touch ad production 24:31 Advice for bridging the UA/creative skills gap 26:44 Closing: how to find and work with Karina Connect with Karina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karinatukanova/ About RocketShipHQ: Newsletter: https://intelligentartifice.kit.com rocketshiphq.com

