Mickey Bowen

AdConversion’s Mona Lisa framework assigns different jobs to Create, Capture, Accelerate, Revive, and Expand.

• Create reaches people before they are shopping; Capture speaks to prospects who recognize a problem and have engaged.
• The point: each motion calls for different creative.

In one post, Bowen describes Create ads that help an unaware prospect connect the dots, followed by Capture ads that remind an engaged prospect of the problem and present a path to a solution. The post also names Accelerate, Revive, and Expand as later motions.

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The five fields are motion, audience, story, offer, and success metrics. Audience means what buyers believe about their situation, not just demographic details; the motion should tell the team what the ad needs to accomplish.

Bowen suggests making the prospect the hero and the product the tool that helps them.

• They also recommend replacing a conventional demo offer with a discovery conversation, expert chat, or diagnosis.
• A campaign should name the exact action and the metric that defines success.

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Together, they help prospects understand product fit, position, and value. They argue that a single ad rarely decides a B2B purchase; buyers encounter signals over time, so message and visuals should work together throughout the process.

Bowen compares the partnership between storytellers and image-makers to griots and artisans who carried meaning through stories, shields, and mosaics. The comparison highlights their shared job: words and images together make an idea understandable.

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They are enthusiastic about faster workflows but set a clear limit: the tool does not replace a person’s craft.

Bowen lists research, analysis, writing, and design for ads and landing pages among the tasks Claude can produce quickly. They say the work is not ready for full autopilot and that people must stay focused on craft.

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Bowen argues that most B2B ad creatives fail before anyone opens Figma because the campaign plan is wrong.

• The post lists five fields: motion, audience, story, offer, and success metrics.
• They contrast Eugene Schwartz's linear awareness stages with B2B buying that can be months or years away, and describe AdConversion's Mona Lisa Playbook motions as Create, Capture, Accelerate, Revive, and Expand.
• Motion is the most critical field.
• Examples include making the prospect the hero and the product the magical object that gives them super powers, and repackaging demos as discovery, chat with an expert, or get a diagnosis.

For brands planning a campaign

For a B2B SaaS campaign, use this template to decide on funnel motion and offer before creative production. The motion should dictate the creative approach, not just the ad format.

Bowen says most B2B marketers segment the funnel as TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, but AdConversion reframes the top around prospect awareness.

• CREATE ads reach people who do not yet know they have a problem.
• CAPTURE ads remind people who already know and have engaged.
• CREATE uses industry tips, thought leadership, and customer stories.
• CAPTURE proves expertise with blogs, white papers, or industry reports, then plugs the product and offers a path to transformation.
• The Mona Lisa System also includes Accelerate, Revive, Expand, and ABM.

For brands planning a campaign

Use this to decide whether a campaign should create demand or capture existing demand, then set the content type and offer accordingly. A launch with low problem awareness needs CREATE content before product-heavy CAPTURE.

Bowen pairs the copywriter and designer: the copywriter crafts the message and story, while the designer builds the visuals and symbols.

• Together they guide prospects toward a decision and form a kind of marketing mythos.
• They compare creative teams to griots and artisans who told stories and carved tablets, painted shields, and pieced together mosaics.
• B2B customers do not buy because they saw a single ad; they are influenced over time by conscious and subconscious signals.
• B2B products can be narrow or broad, which makes ads hard to get right.

For brands planning a campaign

This supports a multi-touch creative program rather than judging a campaign on one ad. For a B2B SaaS brief, budget for a sequence of message and visual signals, and align copy and design as one system.

Since 2023, Bowen says they have been helping to build AdConversion with Silvio Perez.

• The post lists a free online academy that now supports over 10,000 students; an agency serving over 30 clients and managing more than $3 million in ad spend; and hundreds of ad creatives plus landing pages.
• One landing page is for Sami, an AdConversion SaaS product that marketers can use to automate ads and help manage campaigns.
• They describe the agency as a lab for experimenting with advertising strategy, which is then shared in the academy.

For brands planning a campaign

For assessors, this shows the operating context behind the creative direction: agency client work feeds academy content and a SaaS product. Use it to judge whether the advice is grounded in ongoing client spend and product-building, not only commentary.

Bowen says Claude has changed how they work.

• Uses include organizing work into projects trained on specific data sets, building skills that analyze ad performance and team metrics with simple prompts, combining data from multiple tools into functional dashboards, and doing research, analysis, writing, and design for ad campaigns and landing pages in minutes.
• They also connect Slack, email, and ClickUp notifications in one place and respond inside Claude.
• Bowen cautions against full autopilot: Claude is a remarkable tool, but stay focused on craft, and 'Claude isn't you.'

For brands planning a campaign

For brands considering AI-assisted creative operations, this post shows Bowen's practical use cases for analysis and production, alongside a clear limit: human craft and judgment remain essential. It supports a pilot focused on ad performance analysis and landing page drafts, not fully automated publishing.

Bowen describes AdConversion winning Paid Advertising Agency of the Year at CyberMarketingCon 2025 in Austin, voted by a panel of marketing peers, for the second year in a row.

• The post says AdConversion manages more than $3 million in monthly ad spend, has an Academy with over 8,500 B2B marketers, and launched Sami in 2025.
• They quote a vision board note about providing best-in-class design for the world's best marketing teams, and say they joined Silvio Perez to elevate B2B advertising.
• They sign the post as Head of Creative.

For brands planning a campaign

This confirms creative leadership inside an agency with substantial client spend, a community, and a SaaS product. For campaign fit, it suggests access to a team and a testing lab, while the creative direction still rests on Bowen.

Mickey Bowen describes LinkedIn commentary on Anthropic and Claude Super Bowl video ads, calls the campaign brilliant, and shares Aikido Security's parody.

• In the original ad, a man asks about connecting with his mother and gets a soulless AI therapist that suggests a cougar finder dating site.
• In Aikido's version, the therapist spouts cybersecurity industry jargon at a developer who wants a simple security answer.
• They rate the parody 10/10.

For brands planning a campaign

This shows Bowen tracking cultural ad moments and using parody to expose a category problem: security buyers want simple answers, not jargon. For a cybersecurity or B2B SaaS campaign, consider message testing that contrasts simple language with category jargon.

Mickey Bowen lists their top 10 highlights from CyberMarketingCon 2025 in Austin.

• They shared the stage with Silvio Perez on Reddit Ads for CyberSecurity Marketers, met team member Goncalo Prates in person for the first time, met clients including Maria, Ricardo, and Gianna, and introduced possible additions to the creative team.
• Other highlights include attending Tom Orbach's AI Creativity talk, building Legos with the Influ2 team, participating in a first Cyber CTF with Josh Mason, and helping AdConversion take home the 2025 Paid Ads Agency of the Year award.

For brands planning a campaign

Shows Mickey Bowen's work in cybersecurity marketing events and client relationships. Useful for brands considering community-integrated campaigns or Reddit Ads in the security category.

Create builds an audience of people who may need the product later, before they are shopping.

• Capture reminds engaged prospects of the problem and positions the product as the path to resolution.
• The remaining motions cover deal acceleration, revival, and expansion.
• Their point is that each motion needs a different kind of creative, and a campaign's goals tell a creative team which motion it is feeding.

The system is framed against Eugene Schwartz's awareness stages (unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, ready to buy), with the argument that B2B journeys are not linear and buyers are often months or years from switching tools.

Unlike the Schwartz model, the Mona Lisa system continues past the point of sale with Revive and Expand motions, which Bowen treats as distinct creative jobs.

For brands planning a campaign

A B2B SaaS brand can ask Bowen to map an ad campaign to a specific stage of the buyer journey and explain what the creative should do at that stage, rather than treating every ad as a bottom-funnel push.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The proposed five fields are motion, audience, story, offer, and success metrics.

• The audience field asks what the buyer believes right now, not just their demographics.
• The story field advises making the prospect the hero and the product the object that gives them power.
• The offer field names the exact action the ad drives and suggests repackaging demos as discovery calls, expert chats, or diagnostics to lower friction.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can bring a rough campaign idea and get it built into a brief a creative team can execute, including the offer structure and measure of success.

Examples: Source 1

Prospects who do not yet know they have a problem get Create ads that connect the dots and introduce the possibility of doing things another way.

• Content ads such as blogs, white papers, and industry reports are used to prove expertise.
• Prospects who already know the problem get Capture ads that remind them they are not alone and show a product path to transformation.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can use this split to choose content formats and messaging by awareness level instead of producing one campaign for every audience.

Examples: Source 1

The comparison is to griots and artisans whose words and images carried meaning across a culture. They say B2B buyers are influenced over time by conscious and subconscious signals, not by a single ad, putting a heavy responsibility on creative teams.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand should expect creative direction that treats a campaign as a series of signals building over time, with message and visual treated as one system rather than separate deliverables.

Examples: Source 1

They also say they are not ready for full autopilot and that no amount of training makes the assistant a substitute for the person.

The post rejects full automation, describing Claude as a tool and the creator as responsible for staying focused on craft.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can evaluate how AI-assisted production compresses the research-to-draft cycle for ads and landing pages while final creative judgment stays with the person directing the work.

Examples: Source 1

They describe sharing a stage with Silvio Perez on Reddit Ads for cybersecurity marketers at CyberMarketingCon 2025 in Austin, meeting clients and colleagues, and helping AdConversion win Paid Ads Agency of the Year for 2025.

• AdConversion's public activity includes a free B2B marketing academy and a SaaS tool called Sami.
• They also shared a security-company parody of a Super Bowl AI ad with approval.

For brands planning a campaign

A cybersecurity or security-adjacent B2B SaaS brand can evaluate Bowen for work tied to that community's events, formats, and platform-specific ad knowledge. Ask whether the opportunity is with Bowen personally or at the agency level: the academy, awards, and software are agency-level context, not a personal sponsorship offer.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

Later posts read as teaching material for other B2B marketers as much as announcements about the agency.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can expect a collaborator who has turned campaign practice into shared frameworks, useful when a client wants the thinking, not only the finished assets.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

They say they have been building the agency since 2023, designing ad creative and landing pages with an internal team of 30-plus people, and helping run a free academy that now serves more than 10,000 B2B marketers.

• AdConversion serves over 30 clients and manages $3M+ in monthly ad spend.
• Ask for named client examples.

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Bowen lists it among the team's achievements and says they designed its landing pages alongside client work. The tool belongs to their employer; their posts describe the work, not a personal stake in the business.

View example

A separate post comments on Anthropic's Super Bowl advertising. No sponsorship, affiliate arrangement, or paid partnership is stated.

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Bowen's posts describe attending, speaking on Reddit ads for cybersecurity marketers, meeting clients in person, and helping the team collect the award.

View example

Both turn agency practice into teachable frameworks for B2B marketers: Bowen explains full-funnel creative jobs and briefs, while Prates explains the performance advisor’s role and why ABM programs fail without sales alignment.

Prates focuses on performance strategy, ABM, sales alignment, and the design of the performance role; Bowen focuses on creative direction, briefs, and message-and-visual craft for B2B SaaS ads.

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His DTC case post asks whether a brand has creatives for unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, and ready-to-buy audiences—close to Bowen’s argument that each stage of the buyer journey needs a different creative job.

Wasim’s examples and audience target freelancers and DTC or ecommerce brands, with positioning and client acquisition as recurring themes. Bowen’s examples center on B2B SaaS campaigns inside an agency, emphasizing briefs, full-funnel motions, and copy-and-design collaboration.

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The posts offer an account-side view: reviewing account patterns, asking whether target companies are actually in a buying conversation in the next three to six months, checking whether sales and marketing agree on timing, and defining what a senior performance marketer should do — understand the client's economics, plan and run paid media across channels, connect platform decisions to CRM data, and explain the situation to stakeholders.

• A B2B SaaS company that keeps running ABM by the book while its target accounts show almost no impressions, or wants the performance side of the same agency system, should ask for Prates.
• This is the right substitution within the same campaign decision — full-funnel paid media for B2B SaaS — when the diagnosis starts with account performance and sales alignment.

The posts focus on running and diagnosing ad accounts, not writing briefs or building message-and-visual systems.

• Brands seeking creative direction, concept-testing plans, or copy-and-design collaboration will find less of that here.
• Prates and Bowen also appear in the same AdConversion posts, including the agency's award coverage.
• Switching between them changes who leads the work and how the engagement is framed; it does not test an outside agency.
• Two posts (June and September 2026) do not mention pricing, scope, deliverables, or client creative work, so confirm terms directly before treating this as an available alternative.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The case is concrete: a hair care brand saw declining ROAS as spend increased, while most creatives spoke to existing customers and warm audiences and only about 25% were built for new buyers.

• Wasim reframed the issue as a missing creative funnel by awareness level — unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, ready to buy — and took on the work as creative strategist.
• For a brand struggling to produce enough distinct creative for cold and retargeting audiences, that framing is more directly usable than Bowen's B2B campaign concepts and messaging.
• Wasim's other post covers positioning for first clients: choose one niche, make the offer understandable in one line, treat the profile as a sales page, and show proof of thinking rather than only results.

The worked example is DTC ecommerce on Meta, not B2B SaaS with a buying committee and months-long consideration.

• The posts do not show enterprise pipeline, sales alignment, ABM, or an agency team and client roster behind the work.
• Some of the visible output is client-acquisition advice for freelance marketers, so brands should distinguish practitioner examples from audience-building content.
• Both approaches use awareness stages, but the sector, cycle length, and channel mix differ: choose Wasim for consumer performance and Bowen for B2B full-funnel creative direction.
• Two posts (July and September 2026).

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The posts show a specific method: define the audience by characteristics, find those people's posts, comment with depth when a post invites it, avoid agreeing just to be visible, and use the niche as a test.

• They also report first-hand results: attention from founders and hiring managers, and two designers getting jobs from comments alone.
• The second post walks through a phishing attempt via a booking link and hacked connections, with device-level steps to take after a click.
• For a cybersecurity audience, that first-hand security-awareness story is directly relevant; for a brand seeking a build-in-public voice that drives inbound, the commenting method is a complete, testable loop.

This is a different task, not a cheaper version of the same one.

• The posts do not mention ad account work, media buying, campaign structure, or full-funnel creative direction, and the client-acquisition post points to Christopher's paid program.
• A B2B SaaS company that needs paid campaign concepts should not treat this as a substitute for Bowen or an agency engagement.
• Choose Christopher for organic reach, comment-led lead generation, or a security-awareness narrative; keep paid campaign concepts with someone whose posts cover ads.
• Two posts (December 2025 and May 2026).

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2