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Case study · Chef

A consumer app launch, run end to end by one practitioner and AI agents

Client: a consumer recipe app, invite-only beta · Engagement: full launch campaign · Period: May to July 2026, six-week launch window

The problem

The app product was live, in its first release. The founder needed a six-week, organic-first launch to test appetite with home cooks, with a small paid budget held in reserve as a surgical multiplier, never the engine. No agency, no marketing team. The campaign had to produce agency-grade strategy and assets without an agency timeline or an agency invoice.

What was produced

Big idea

The app knows your cookbooks and shows up where they live.

The cookbook already lives in three places the home cook visits: the bookshop counter where she buys it, the chef-author whose work she follows, and the recipe feed she scrolls on Sunday night. The campaign does not invent a new place to reach her. It shows up in all three, with permission from the curator she trusts at each one.

Retail
A branded bookmark inside every cookbook sold at partner bookshops. Every sale becomes an impression.
Cultural
Cooking-icon videos building recognition across six weeks of social media feed presence.
Network
Personal outreach to chef-authors. An asymmetric long tail of warm relationships.

Key message

"The app knows your cookbooks."

Every concept in this system must survive a 15-second radio read, roughly 40 voiced words. Not because the ad will air, but because 15 seconds is a brutal forcing function for message clarity. If the proposition cannot survive a constrained read-aloud, it is not tight enough to ship. This is the script that locked the campaign's message:

The 15-second radio ad

[voice: warm, Australian, mid-pace, slight conspiratorial smile]

"You've got great cookbooks. Twelve of them with loads of great recipes. By 5pm Tuesday, you don't know which one to open."

"The app knows your cookbooks. Photograph the cover, ask what's for dinner, get the recipe, from the books you already own."

"Where the cookbook lives."

Marketing plan

Four workstreams, one proposition. Each phase of the plan ships as finished assets, a selection of which are shown below.

1
Launch foundation
  • Public signup website live
  • Owned social channel opens
  • Cooking-icon social video begin the brand pulse
2
Bookstore retail
  • Print-ready bookmarks, three designs
  • Partnership kit pitched to bookshops
  • A bookmark in every cookbook sold
3
Chef outreach program
  • Personalised notes to chef-authors
  • Two waves, eleven drafts prepared
  • Warm network built one reply at a time
4
Demand and lifecycle
  • Display-ad test, six creatives, winners consolidated
  • Six-email onboarding and re-engagement system
  • Analytics wired before a dollar is spent

Key assets

Real assets from the campaign, exactly as they shipped. Seventeen planned; the four below show the range from print to pixels to lifecycle.

Square display ad, cream background, hand-drawn steaming pot, headline reading Chef knows your cookbooks, red Try Chef button Square display ad, cream background, headline reading From your shelf. Not the web, a hand-drawn bar chart of books with one highlighted in red, red Try Chef button

Display advertising library. 42 banner files across 6 creative concepts and 7 sizes, generated pixel-ready for Google and Meta with upload cookbooks for both. Shown: two of the six concepts at the same size, the key message and the from-your-shelf differentiator.

Print-ready bookmark artwork with crop and registration marks and a colour bar

Print-ready bookmarks. Three designs, six master PDFs: CMYK verified, 3mm bleed, crop and registration marks, colour bar, and machine-verified QR codes. No prepress required.

Mockup of the branded bookmark resting inside an open generic cookbook

The retail mechanic. A branded bookmark slipped into every cookbook sold at partner bookshops, so every sale becomes an impression.

The results

The numbers

1 day
Campaign open to approved Brief, selected Concept, and approved campaign plan
65+
Production files shipped over 13 days: 42 banners, 6 print-ready PDFs, 6 lifecycle emails, 11 outreach drafts
~$6
Total AI cost to date, roughly 950k tokens, metered

Every figure is pulled from campaign artifacts on disk; nothing invented. Market results (signups, scan rates, engagement) land when the six-week window closes, and this page gets refreshed with them.

The phases

Every Soundtrak campaign walks the same six phases. The client approves at every red gate; the system does the work between them.

1 Brief structured interview 2 Concepts three full directions 3 Plan assets, budget, timeline 4 Production AI produces, brand-checked, one gate per asset 5 Publish step-by-step cookbooks, no technical handoffs 6 Ongoing assets become templates, each cycle costs less = client approval gate. Nothing advances through a red diamond without sign-off.

On this campaign: Brief approved, Concept selected, and Plan locked on day one. Production then shipped asset by asset, each one brand-checked by the system and approved by the client before anything published. The durable surfaces (landing page, social channel, bookshop relationships, creative library, email infrastructure) all survive the campaign as permanent owned assets.

"Four agents. The CMO is still me."