I’m not the best person to review Intellijend.
If you’re someone who is currently going, “Great but what the heck is Intellijend?” then here’s some quick context:
Intellijend is a platform to help artists more easily run Meta ads for music streams.
It’s just like the 306 other automated platforms that purport to do this in that it promises to take care of the annoying manual bits in Meta Ads Manager. But it’s unlike the other 306 platforms in that it automates these annoying things using Jend’s approach, specifically: front-loading budget on the early days of a release, trying a bunch of ad sets and turning the bad ones off, etc.
I am a bad person to review this tool because Jend’s approach works best when you regularly release high quality songs in the same genre: when you put out one down-the-middle EDM song per month for life, basically. By contrast, I very irregularly release mediocre songs in a few different genres. I’ve only ever front-loaded my budget per Jend’s instructions once, and it went very poorly, probably because I screwed it up.
All of this is to say that you can probably rate my opinion on Intellijend to the same level I’d rate Stephen A. Smith’s opinion on Aaron Rodgers’ throwing mechanics: He’s paid to have opinions about the topic, but he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
But if you’re still reading: I recently spent $150 to try Intellijend. Here are my thoughts.
First, the interface looks slick.
Dark mode is the best mode, baby.
I’ve tried a bunch of these platforms at this point (see my recent review of SymphonyOS, for example, here). Some of them look okay, but most of them look more like semi-formatted Excel spreadsheets than production-level software. I’ve been around the block enough to know that a good paint job has very little bearing on how functional the machinery actually is – but still, it’s nice to have a good first impression.
Second, there’s a clear focus on showing data that’s useful to music marketers (especially those who follow Jend’s philosophy of marketing).
There are a bunch of charts like this on the platform’s dashboard page, all showing some Spotify stat (in this case monthly listeners) on the same graph as Meta ad spend.
The point is to give a visual representation of the relationship between your ad spend and your Spotify results. It’s a basic idea and one with debatable significance (I’ll die on Correlation-Is-Not-Causation Hill), but it’s pretty compelling.
Per my conversations with Jend and his team, these sorts of visualizations were actually the genesis of the entire software. They wanted a way to more easily visualize how ad spend impacted Spotify’s popularity index; from there, everything else followed.
Third, I like the platform’s focus on ad creative.
One of the natural weak points in any automated ad platform is the ad creative itself: the actual videos and text that are used in whatever ads the platform spins up.
Take Hypeddit, for example. I love the tool, but the stock ad creative they’ve used in their automated campaigns forever (which is just your song’s cover art plus some texture) kind of sucks, and it puts a ceiling on how well your campaigns perform. Sure, you can upload your own creative, but the default is easier, which means most people use it, which means most of the results people get are kind of lame.
To be fair, this is a natural weak point in automated software. Creating good ads is a science and art that isn’t easily automated. This may change soon thanks to AI; I’m keeping tabs on Omari’s software, which recently released lip-sync generation as a feature. But for reasons I won’t get into here, I’m skeptical.
But back to Intellijend. The platform doesn’t really even attempt to automate your ad creative; instead, it recommends good starting points for you to create your own. They have an entire section called the Leaderboard that a) shows the artists who are growing the most with ads, and b) invites you to find their ads in the Meta Ads Library as a source of inspiration for your own.
Also, if you pay for a yearly subscription to Intelllijend (which, in transparency, I did not), you get access to Ad Packs: monthly drops of stock footage, shot specifically for use in music ads.
All of this in no way guarantees that you will create a good ad. But it shows that Intellijend’s head is in the right place.
And now on to the stuff you probably are most interested in:
I spent $150 on an Intellijend ad campaign, and the results were okay.
The platform spins up ads in two ways: 1) via Jend’s front-loaded budget approach, best for new releases, or 2) via a steady-state budget approach, where your ad spend is the same every day.
Being someone who releases music once every three years or so, I had no new or upcoming songs to pick from, so I chose the “Steady Campaign” option. (Again, I am a bad person for reviewing this platform.)
The wizard was relatively simple to set up. Intellijend does require that you run ads in your own ad account, so you need to have enough technical wherewithal to hook the systems together, but past that they take care of everything other than creating the videos.
Here’s how my campaign did:
In case you don’t feel like parsing the data in those screenshots, I’ll give you a few of the highlights in bullet-point form:
- It drove an $0.82 cost per result, which is pretty darn expensive. But things were on a promising trajectory; the CPR had declined to $0.34 by the end of the campaign.
- The song got 491 saves during the month the campaign was live, although given that there were only 186 conversions, it’s certain that many of those saves were from sources other than Intellijend.
- The song got a slight Discover Weekly bump on the final week of the campaign. (You can see it on the point I highlighted on the screenshot above.)
It’s worth noting that the song I tested did get a decent chunk of traffic from sources other than ads.
I can’t see the song’s source of streams data from the Intellijend period anymore, but as of this month, it gets about 15% of its streams from other listener’s playlists and 46% from algorithmic playlists. I’d guess those sources were driving similar numbers when the Intellijend campaign was live.
So, where’s all of this leave you and me?
I’m glad you asked. I’ve got three takeaways:
- Intellijend is currently my favorite automated ads platform. I say this not because of the results it drove, but because it seems to me to be thoughtfully designed specifically for music streaming ads in a way that no other platform has so far matched.
- I still think the key to a good ad campaign is a good ad. For this reason, I still think the power to create a good campaign is ultimately in your hands and not in the black box of some platform. Intellijend doesn’t automate ad creation, but it does point you in the right direction.
- I am a bad person to write a review of Intellijend. Sorry to beat a dead horse. This software is made for people who regularly release and pay to promote songs – ideally songs in the same mainstream-ish genre. Despite my best intentions, I’m not that sort of person.
But if you are that sort of person and you want to try Jend’s advertising approach, this is probably the automated ads software for you.
Here’s my affiliate link to try it out. If you buy through there, it’ll give me a small commission and you a 10% discount.
Otherwise, you can go ahead and move on with your life.
Either way, I hope you keep making music.
