Use Claude + Apify + Reddit to generate tons of new ad ideas

Episode three of Let's cook is about where ad ideas come from. Instead of brainstorming angles in a doc, we plug Claude into the places where customers already explain themselves: Reddit threads, X, G2 reviews, YouTube comments, App Store ratings. Then we let Claude mine them. The whole setup is one connector and one API key.

The result, up front

We open the video with the finished thing, because it makes the case better than any setup could. We ask Claude, now connected to live social data, for a report on how people talk about a brand across X and Reddit. What comes back is specific: what people actually say about the brand, what community members praise and complain about, where competitors are weak, and a list of concrete ad angles.

"In a few seconds, I asked for a report on the vibe around my brand on X and Reddit, with strengths, weaknesses and ad ideas. And at the end, nine ad angles I can start using immediately for our paid campaigns."

Getting those nine grounded angles took less time than reading this paragraph does. The rest of the video shows how to set the whole thing up from zero.

Chapters

Why listen instead of guess

A big source of advertising ideas is just what people are saying on social media, and not only about you. There are three layers to it: what people like about your product, what they're wary of (those are the objections your ads should answer head-on), and what they say about your competitors and the market as a whole. All three are sitting in public threads, written in the customer's own words. That language is the raw material for hooks, and it's the same scouting work our campaign strategy agent does when it grounds a media plan in Reddit threads and review sites instead of assumptions.

Our guinea pig for the episode is RealRoots, an app that helps women make friends. Full disclosure, as I say in the video: I'm a personal investor, and they're very good. The goal is to query social media straight from Claude and generate new ad ideas for them, using a service called Apify. This isn't a sponsored video; they didn't ask for it and they aren't paying us. Apify is just one of many tools we use, and it happens to be excellent for prototyping.

The tools (Reddit Answers and Apify)

The first tool is the one most people haven't heard of: Reddit Answers. We stumbled on it while prepping the episode, and the reaction on camera says it all.

"I was blown away when I discovered there's an LLM connected to Reddit already. It's called Reddit Answers. There's no API for it, unfortunately. That's why Apify comes in super handy: there's a scraper for Reddit Answers."

You can ask Reddit Answers anything. Ask it what people are saying about RealRoots, tell it to focus on the positive and give you ten ad ideas for paid campaigns, and it looks across the relevant subreddits and comes back with the positive experiences Redditors highlight, the areas of improvement, and the ideas. That alone is a research tool you can use today with zero setup. The catch is the missing API: you can't query it from Claude directly, and X has the same problem.

Apify is the bridge between them: a marketplace of scrapers. Some of them wrap services that already expose APIs, like X search, but the real value is the long tail of services that don't, Reddit Answers included. Search the Apify store for "Reddit Answers" and there's a scraper waiting for you.

We've been on Apify for about six months, so the pros and cons here come from real bills. On the plus side, you're productive in seconds, the catalog is vast, and time to market is immediate whether you're prototyping in Claude Code or going through the MCP. The downside is cost. Some scrapers are priced higher than others, and we've been surprised by a bill more than once. Nothing against Apify, the pricing has its reasons, but check the actor you pick, and at high volume consider building your own scrapers on the platform instead of paying per use for someone else's. That's our own next step to bring our bill down.

Connecting everything to Claude

If you watched the earlier episodes, where we connected Shopify and Canva to Claude, this is the same move. In Claude, go to Connectors, browse, search for Apify, and click install. It asks for an API key, so sign up on Apify's site, add a card, copy your token and paste it in. That's the whole connection, with no config files and no code.

There's one Apify-specific habit to learn. With most MCPs you just describe what you want and the model figures out which tool to call. Apify exposes thousands of actors, so you have to help it by naming the scraper in your prompt. Ours is the Lexis Solutions Reddit Answers Scraper, so the prompt reads, in full: "With the Apify MCP and this scraper, tell me what people are saying about RealRoots, focus on the positive, and give me ten ad ideas for our paid campaign." Claude searches the available tools, finds the actor in Apify's catalog, and calls it.

One underrated detail: when you do this kind of scraping from Claude Code, you normally have to inspect the returned data and write parsing for it. The MCP skips that step because it hands Claude the actor's documentation up front, so Claude knows what shape the data will take before it ever makes the call.

Generating ad ideas live

The prompt runs, and rich structured data comes back: what people are saying about RealRoots, the positives pulled from real threads, and ten ad ideas ready to use, all inside the Claude conversation. From there the same pattern extends to almost any source on Apify:

• G2 is my favorite. It's essentially a TripAdvisor for SaaS, so the reviews are dense with insight about your product and your competitors'. Competitor reviews are a goldmine for angles, because every recurring complaint about them is a claim you can make.
• YouTube comments scale further than you'd expect. A trick from a previous job: search for every video about a product, feed the 100 video URLs to the comments scraper, get every comment back, and have Opus write a report on the overall vibe across all of them.
• App Store reviews have multiple actors for the same job, because different developers build competing versions. Filter by popularity; the actors with the most users and the best star ratings are the legit ones. The same logic applies to Google Maps or anything else.
• TikTok was the closing challenge: name a platform on the spot and see if Apify covers it. It had a profile scraper, a comments scraper, a hashtag scraper and a video scraper, all ready to go.

In a few minutes, Claude is connected to Reddit, X, G2, effectively anything, and turning what it finds into ad ideas.

From scraped threads to shipped ads

What the episode produces is angles, and angles are hypotheses you still have to test. The way we run it: each scraped insight ("women say the scariest part is showing up alone") becomes an angle, each angle becomes a hook for the first three seconds, and hooks go into a structured creative test where the account data decides what scales. Because the research step now takes seconds instead of an afternoon, you can refill the top of that pipeline weekly, and re-run the same prompts on competitors whenever you need fresh market intelligence.

And if wiring scrapers together isn't your idea of a good time, this whole loop (competitor monitoring, review mining, angle generation) is already built into Adside. Either way, we'll keep showing what we build.

Links from the episode

• Open-source ad-ops skills library: github.com/AgenticAdvertising/ad-ops-skills
• Apify MCP: mcp.apify.com
• Reddit Answers: reddit.com/answers
• Our Apify Meta ad library scraper: apify.com/adside
• Episode 1, Claude Skills for marketing: watch on YouTube
• Adside: try it free
• Watch this episode on YouTube: Use Claude + Apify + Reddit to generate tons of new ad ideas

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