Novoads AI Video & Image Ad Skill Pack (agent-skills)

AI video and image ads for marketers, built in Claude Code or Cursor and priced by a live estimate first.

Every image and video in this README was generated by the skills in this repo, through the API, with the asks shown beside them.

Make AI video ads and static image ads from Claude Code or Cursor, against your own Novoads account. The agent does the mechanical part — upload, price, generate, poll, download — and the skills carry the part that decides whether the render is any good: the prompt.

In Claude Code or Cursor, open a new empty folder and paste:

https://github.com/novoads/agent-skills help me set this up

The agent clones this repo, runs ./scripts/setup.sh, and stops at the one step only you can do: pasting your Novoads API key.

Need an account? The entry offer is a $1 trial — not a free tier, and it can generate through the API like any other live plan: novoads.ai

See what it makes · Get started · What you can make · Models · Costs · Security · Support · License

Twelve skills, plus the shared steps they call, make the ad and the things around it. The generated creative runs on nine models, six for video and three for stills: UGC video, static Meta creatives, Pixar and claymation storyboards, and YouTube thumbnails. The narrator voice-over, a replacement voice for an ad already made, a music bed, burned-in captions, a competitor swipe file and a paused Meta ad come from their own endpoints and APIs instead.

Two rules run through the whole pack, and they are the reason it is safe to point an agent at a billing API:

• No price is ever quoted from memory. Every credit number comes from a live POST /v1/estimates call in the session that is about to spend, shown to you and approved first. That call is free, and there is no rate table anywhere in this repo to fall back on.
• The spoken line is approved on its own, before the cost gate. Seedance renders the dialogue and the lip-sync in the same call, so the sentence in the prompt is the sentence in the finished ad. Approving a concept is not approving a sentence, and approving a sentence is not approving a spend.

Two more things worth knowing before your first render. The prompt formulas build on the model vendors' own published guides from ByteDance, Google DeepMind, Google Cloud and OpenAI, scoped to what this API actually exposes (vendor prompting guides). And every Meta ad this pack publishes is created PAUSED, so nothing goes live without you (security).

Claude and Claude Code are products of Anthropic. This is an independent skill pack built by Novoads for Claude Code; it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.

Get started (5 minutes)

You need a POSIX shell (macOS or Linux; WSL2 or Git Bash on Windows), plus curl, jq and a Novoads API key. Everything else is per-workflow.

A Novoads API key, and a shell. The key is not optional and nothing in this repo substitutes for it: every skill here runs one executable path, curl against https://api.novoads.ai/v1 with NOVOADS_API_KEY from .env. Create one at novoads.ai/dashboard/settings?tab=api.

Beyond the key, the core workflow (upload a photo, price it, generate a video or an image, poll, download) is plain HTTP driven by your agent. curl and jq are enough, and both are already on most machines. Your first ad needs nothing from the optional table.

Captions, transcripts and music are generated server-side and need no local tools: POST /v1/captions burns captions in (30 presets), POST /v1/transcripts returns text, word timings and an SRT, and POST /v1/music generates the soundtrack. Only laying that soundtrack under a finished cut is local, and that is the music-mix step in the ffmpeg row above.

Optional, per workflow. Each skill tells you when it needs one; nothing here blocks your first ad:

Linux: apt install curl jq ffmpeg python3. Windows: WSL2 or Git Bash; the skills here are shell scripts and curl calls, so they need a POSIX shell. No shell at all? See Environments that cannot run this repo at the bottom.

Fastest path: in Claude Code or Cursor, open a new empty folder and paste this, and the agent clones the repo, runs setup, and stops at your API key.

https://github.com/novoads/agent-skills help me set this up

Prefer the terminal? The same setup the pasted prompt above runs, by hand:

1. Clone

git clone https://github.com/novoads/agent-skills.git
cd agent-skills

2. Run setup

./scripts/setup.sh

It creates .env (chmod 600), asks for your API key, and validates the key against GET /v1/models before writing it to disk — a key that has never been probed is the most expensive thing to debug later. It then copies MASTER_CONTEXT.template.md to your personal MASTER_CONTEXT.md, syncs the skills, and runs the connectivity check.

Your key looks like novo_ followed by 64 hex characters. Create one at novoads.ai/dashboard/settings?tab=api — it is shown once, at creation, and cannot be retrieved afterwards.

Setup never hangs an agent: with no TTY (or with --non-interactive) it prompts for nothing, prepares the workspace, prints the one step left for a human, and exits 0.

Re-check connectivity any time with ./scripts/check-novoads-env.sh. It tells you which failure you have: a 401 is a bad or revoked key, a 403 with plan_required is a good key on an account without API access. Different problems, different fixes.

Steps 3 and 4 are the same whichever way you installed, pasted prompt or terminal.

3. Open in your editor

Claude Code: open the folder. A SessionStart hook syncs the skills and prints a banner — which skills are installed, whether .env and MASTER_CONTEXT.md are set up, and the reminder that prices come from /v1/estimates.

Cursor: open the folder. The same skills are exposed at .cursor/skills/.

4. Ask for something

Drop a product photo into references/products/ and say what you want. The agent picks the route, reads the matching prompt formula, prices it, confirms the dialogue, and generates. The first time you ask for an ad it asks what your product is and saves the answer to MASTER_CONTEXT.md, so no later session asks again — setup itself never asks; the only thing setup needs from you is the key.

See what it makes

Everything below was made by this pack in one run on 2026-08-11/12, through the same skills a customer installs. Each item shows the exact ask typed to the agent and the prompt the skill wrote from it. The prompt panels are wrapped for width, and the long ones stop after their opening blocks and name their full length.

Demonstration creative for a real product; not commissioned by or affiliated with the brand.

Five templates from the 40-template library, plus a thumbnail, on one sheet: scratch ticket, desk-kit flatlay, 9:16 story hero, sticky-note flatlay, before/after split, and a reaction thumbnail from generate-youtube-thumbnail.

The pair demonstrates the edit endpoint: the same image sent back with sourceAssetId, one new headline, and nothing else moved.

The pack prices before it spends: POST /v1/estimates first, the number shown, the render only after that number is approved. This is what one of those moments looks like, captured on 2026-08-11 before the UGC row's 720p render. A dated capture, not a rate table.

{
  "capturedAt": "2026-08-11",
  "endpoint": "POST https://api.novoads.ai/v1/estimates",
  "apiSpecVersion": "2.19.0",
  "httpStatus": 200,
  "request": {
    "kind": "video",
    "model": "seedance-2.0",
    "durationSeconds": 15,
    "resolution": "720p",
    "language": "en",
    "prompt": "15 seconds UGC style honest review video, filmed on smartphone, grey morning light through the kitchen window blinds, casual handheld selfie angle. … (2,646 characters)"
  },
  "response": {
    "credits": 7,
    "balance": 243.2,
    "sufficient": true
  },
  "responseHeaders": {
    "x-request-id": "f8f1379240ff64680b8263fa8d5559b3"
  }
}

credits and balance are display credits, the same unit POST /v1/videos reports back as creditsCharged. The prompt is abridged here for width; the call carried it in full.

What you can make

🎬 Seedance 2.0 video — the flagship

Any integer duration from 4 to 15 seconds, six aspect ratios, native audio and lip-sync rendered in the same call. Start from one photo (startImageAssetId animates it as the first frame) or composite up to nine reference images (referenceAssetIds, addressed in the prompt as @Image1…@ImageN). Those are two separate modes — a request carrying both is rejected.

Five prompt formulas ship, each with a worked example that has been priced live:

"Make a 12-second Seedance UGC video — woman in a kitchen holding the product, says she stopped buying the drugstore version"

The platform guide — grids, the two reference modes, prompt length by shot count, the mini-draft tier — is seedance-2.md.

Draft on Mini first. seedance-2.0-mini takes the same grid and the same formulas at half the price and comes back in 2–3 minutes. Upload once, draft on Mini, re-price naming the final tier, render once. The agent asks which tier you want before the first Seedance call of a workflow.

🎬 Seedance 2.5 — the long one

Any integer duration from 4 to 30 seconds, which makes it the only model here that renders past 15 in a single call. Everything else is 2.0's shape: the same six aspect ratios, the same nine referenceAssetIds, the same audioEnabled toggle, the same 4,000-character prompt ceiling — so the five Seedance formulas apply unchanged.

Two differences worth knowing before you pick it. It renders 480p and 720p only — no 1080p, no 4k, on either provider — so a resolution carried over from a 2.0 workflow is a rejected request rather than a downgrade. And it is the dearest model on the API at the same length; thirty seconds of it is the most expensive single call this API takes. Price it, like everything else, at POST /v1/estimates.

"Make a 30-second Seedance 2.5 ad — the founder walks through the workshop and explains why they built it"

A longer clip wants more beats, not slower delivery. If the script only fills 15 seconds, render 15 seconds on seedance-2.0, which is cheaper at that length.

🎬 Omni Flash — fast vertical clips

"Give me a fast 8-second vertical clip of the product on a kitchen counter, no dialogue"

omni-flash carries a 20,000-character prompt ceiling, the roomiest of any video model here against 4,000 everywhere else, which is what makes long structured briefs possible. Its grids are narrower than Seedance's — durations 4/6/8/10, aspect ratios 9:16 or 16:9 only — and it takes no reference images. Prompt craft in shared/skills/gemini-omni-flash/prompting/guide.md, which is Google DeepMind's own guide with the parts this API cannot reach marked as such.

🖼️ Stills — people, products, characters

POST /v1/images is synchronous: the finished images come back in the response body, so there is nothing to poll. Up to 4 images per call; reference images are capped per model — 4 on gpt-image-2, 14 on nano-banana-pro, 8 on reve-2.1.

• gpt-image-2 — heavy typography and mimicked UI.
• nano-banana-pro — photoreal people and products in a scene; holds a character's identity tightest across a reference batch.
• reve-2.1 — a different look on the same still, or a second opinion.

"Create a new AI influencer — 22-year-old with freckles, golden-hour kitchen lighting" · "UGC selfie of Sofia holding the product in her bedroom" · "Recreate this influencer's look from this photo"

Character sheets, influencer recreation, UGC product selfies and product-showcase stills live in skills/novoads-api/prompting/prompt-library/. The standard flow is still-first: generate the still, get it approved, then animate the approved frame on Seedance. Stills are cheap to iterate; video is not.

Every returned image gets a QA look — hands, fingers, faces, merged objects, garbled text. A defect is regenerated with a corrected prompt, capped at 2 retries, and the extra credits are reported at the end.

📸 Static Meta image ads (40-template library)

"Make me an Apple Notes-style ad for my product" · "Generate a Forbes editorial ad" · "Clone this comparison-table ad as a template"

A three-skill family over a shared library of 40 validated prompt templates — Apple Notes lists, editorial hero, fake Google search, comparison tables, sticky-note flatlays, Slack threads, ChatGPT-conversation ads, iMessage screenshots, magazine covers, billboards, museum exhibits, weather UI, scratch-off tickets, founder letters, dating-app cards, and more.

• chatgpt-image-ad — typography / UI mimicry, on gpt-image-2
• nano-banana-image-ad — photoreal / lifestyle / multi-reference, on nano-banana-pro
• clone-image-ad — reverse-engineer an existing ad into a new library entry; asks which backend to validate against at Phase 1 (gpt-image-2, nano-banana-pro or reve-2.1) and can cross-validate against another at Phase 8

Read shared/skills/image-ad-prompting/OVERVIEW.md first — it holds the decision tree, the per-backend aspect-ratio matrix, and the standard generate / clone workflows. Output is image files; publishing is the separate meta-ad-builder skill.

🎞️ Multi-step animated pipelines

🔄 Reverse-engineer existing creative

"Reverse-engineer this video into a reusable Seedance template" · "Clone this video ad for our product" · "Pull the ads our competitor is running into a swipe file"

• spy-competitor-ads sweeps a competitor's live ads out of the Meta Ad Library and puts the actual MP4s and JPEGs in a local swipe folder, one sweep per competitor, priced by a live estimate before anything is charged. Media is pulled the moment the response lands, because the CDN links expire; the permanent Ad Library URL is what it quotes. What comes back is ranked on what the Ad Library actually publishes, how long a creative has run and how many audiences it runs against, and the delivery closes with the three most established and why. It finds, ranks and files ads; it does not rebuild them. Turning a static you found into your own ads, or into a reusable template, is clone-image-ad. A sweep that finds nothing is a result, not an apology.
• analyze-video — pulls frames with ffmpeg and the transcript with Whisper locally, reads out the beat structure, and writes a new parameterized formula into the prompt library. Nothing is charged until an optional test render.
• clone-video-ad — the same local analysis, but the output is a rendered clip, so both gates apply. There is no video-to-video on this API: a source longer than the chosen model's ceiling becomes a series of clips held together by passing the same reference images to each one — though seedance-2.5 reaches 30s in one call, so some sources that used to need two clips now need one.

📤 Publish as a paused Meta ad

"Publish this approved creative as a paused Meta ad"

meta-ad-builder takes a finished file and uploads it through the Meta Marketing API. Every ad is created PAUSED — you launch it yourself in Ads Manager. It can also pull your top-spending ads and competitor ads to inform copy. Auth via the META_* r