Get started with Claude Skills for marketing

This is the first episode of Let's cook. We're building Adside in the open, and we're filming the agentic ad-ops stack as we figure it out. Episode one covers the foundation: what a Claude Skill actually is, how to wire Claude to a real Meta Ads account, and how to load a skill that turns Claude into a performance marketer.

Why we're filming this

We're starting a new company and decided to share what we learn while building it. The product is Adside, but everything we show in the series (skills, MCPs, agentic workflows) works just as well for running your own accounts, your agency, or your company's ads, with or without us.

"What the hell? That's crazy. Three hours of work turned into a minute."

That's me in the cold open. The episode opens with our fatigue-detector skill running on a live ad account. It does a full performance review in about a minute, which is work that normally takes three hours by hand. The rest of the video shows how to set it up from zero.

Chapters

What Claude Skills actually are

The easiest way to understand skills is to look at Claude's own number one skill: the skill creator. Type / in Claude and you'll see it. It's a skill whose job is to write other skills. In the episode I ask it to create a joke-telling skill, it asks a few clarifying questions, and out comes a long, structured prompt file. Run that skill later and Claude follows those instructions.

So that's all a skill is, really:

"A skill is a pre-saved prompt for your Claude account. Long-form instructions that you can run again and again and again."

There's no fine-tuning or code involved; the intelligence lives in the instructions. That's why this matters for ad ops. A senior media buyer's checklist (what to look at, in what order, with what thresholds) fits naturally into that format. You write the checklist once and the model runs it on demand. The same concept exists inside Adside and most serious AI products, but we demonstrate it in Claude because anyone can follow along with a free account.

The ad-ops skills worth having

The skills we actually reach for are the recurring work of any performance marketer:

• Am I on track? Pacing against budget and targets mid-month.
• What's running? A structured inventory of the account.
• Budget shifter, which moves spend toward what's earning it.
• Bleeders & winners, which surfaces the ads draining budget and the ones to scale.
• Fatigue detector, the one from the cold open. It flags ads where frequency is climbing and engagement is decaying. (The thresholds it encodes are the same ones we wrote up in the ad-fatigue playbook.)
• Copy rotation, which proposes and queues fresh variants.
• Pre-launch QA, a pre-flight checklist before a campaign goes live. UTMs are the classic example: launch a Meta campaign without them and you're cooked after the fact, so the skill checks first.
• Asset renaming, which fixes uploads that don't follow the account's naming convention.

We're giving each of these its own episode, including how the skill is written and why. The library is open source (link at the bottom), so you can read the actual instruction files rather than take our word for it.

Connecting Meta Ads to Claude via MCP

A skill on its own is just instructions. For Claude to act on a real ad account, it connects through an MCP server, which is a wrapper around the platform API that exposes it to AI tools. When we recorded this, Meta had no official MCP, so you had to use a third party: Adside's, Pipeboard's, or one of the many others (search "Meta Ads MCP" and compare). Since we recorded, Meta has shipped an official one, linked below.

Here's the setup, shown in the episode with Adside's MCP:

1. Get your MCP snippet. In Adside it's under Integrations → API key. You get a short JSON block with the command and the MCP server URL, and every MCP uses the same general format.
2. Open Claude's config under Claude → Settings → Developer → Edit config. This opens claude_desktop_config.json in your text editor.
3. Paste the snippet into that file and save. If JSON brackets scare you, paste the snippet into Claude itself and ask it to merge the config for you.
4. Restart Claude by quitting fully and relaunching. If something's off, you'll see an error right away.
5. Verify the connection by clicking + → Connectors, where you should see Meta Ads with a blue toggle. If there's no error dialog, you're ready to cook.

That connection alone, before you load any skills, is already a real upgrade: you can ask plain-language questions against your live account data. One caveat we're upfront about in the episode: MCPs that fetch and cache real account data cost money to run, which is why most providers (ours included) sit behind a trial-then-paid plan.

Importing your first skill

Skills travel as plain files, either .skill or .md. From our open-source repo, or anywhere else you find one:

1. Download the file from GitHub, or copy the text into any editor and save it with a .skill extension.
2. In Claude, go to Customize → Skills → + → Create skill → Upload, then drag the file in.
3. Run it like any other skill. It shows up right alongside Claude's built-ins.

In the episode we load the fatigue detector and open it up. All the detection logic is written out in plain language inside the file: which metrics to pull, what thresholds mean trouble, and how to rank what to refresh first. I like that the skill is readable. You can audit it, disagree with it, and edit line 40 if your account behaves differently.

Links from the episode

• Open-source ad-ops skills library: github.com/AgenticAdvertising/ad-ops-skills
• Meta's official MCP, released after we recorded: setup guide
• Adside and our Meta MCP: try it free
• Watch on YouTube: Get started with Claude Skills for marketing

Quotes are lightly edited from the episode's transcript for readability.