You DO NOT need a $200K video production — you don't even need a $25K one to be successful on YouTube. With existing assets, a bit of editing, and the right structure, you can build a winning ad and many iterations to A/B/C/X test.
MasterClass adjusted their YouTube videos to feel more like a livestream, paired them with custom intent audiences, and saw a 140% increase in clicks to their website and a 70% increase in course sign-ups.
UGC videos are the most basic, yet most effective. You can NOT fake these — consumers are gonna know. Find someone who genuinely loves the product, give them a rough outline, and let 90% come unscripted.
People underestimate how easy it is to shoot footage on your iPhone. Most of the ads I used to run were all shot on iPhone and then edited by a professional. For 90% of your video needs, you could get started with just your phone.
Make the way your ad copy sits on mobile look good. Either use one full line or two full lines — don't do one line with one word dangling on the second. You shouldn't have to click 'See More' to get the punch line.
When you're buying a Rolls Royce, you're not buying it because it gets you from A to B. Focus on selling the reason someone wants this product in their life. Find your WHY in ad comments, inbound DMs, customer service emails, or random tweets.
When selling Hint water, we'd focus on 'Hint got rid of my addiction to diet Coke' instead of 'Hint is an all-naturally flavored water.' Focus on outcomes, not value props.
Value Props (what brands think is cool) → The Customer (the judge) → Outcomes (what consumers think are cool). Too often, ads focus on benefits when they need to focus on how the product helps someone live a better life.
A good DTC team tests new creative every couple of weeks at minimum. You need to be pushing new messages, testing new benefits, and getting more creative constantly.
92% of mobile users watch video with sound off. The 20 minutes you spend adding subtitles could give you the highest ROI you've ever seen on a 20-minute task.
The top performing brands refresh their ad creative every 10-12 days on average. Most brands do it every 35-40 days because it's resource intensive.
The image with the text overlay is what people see first in a Facebook ad, so there's a chance someone scrolling a mile a minute will never even read the headline at all. Test different images, not different headlines.
If a TV video wasn't optimized for sound off, it won't work on social. If it didn't have overlays to hit the punchlines — it won't work. If it wasn't formatted for your iPhone screen — it won't work. It's the same reason you would never put a TikTok on a billboard.
The best Performance PR articles share 3 traits: they tell a story with an editorial 'I tried this and...' angle, they aren't cluttered with pop-ups, and they really describe the product so you almost get a real feeling for what it is.
For Performance PR ad creative, you have 3 inputs: a headline that's catchy but not clickbait, ad text that describes the punchline, and an image that feels editorial or UGC-like. Don't overproduce the image — you won't get the click.
With good advertising you must be contextual in the feed you are showing up on. If you're running a billboard, give the punchline in a split second. If you're running a TikTok ad, it needs to feel the same as the best performing organic content — it can't be overproduced.
For a launch, you don't need an absurd amount of content. You just need enough to show the benefits, the vibe of the brand, what you sell, and why it's so great. Once you put out your first round of tests, you'll quickly learn what the market reacts to and can double down.
When we changed the messaging at Hint water from 'Sugar-free flavored water' to 'This water has gotten thousands of people off diet soda', all our numbers went up: flavors people tried, click-through rate, shares. An easy framework: how would someone explain to their friend why they have the product?
Running good TikTok videos as Facebook/Instagram ads does wonders. TikTok forces you to tell a story quickly. We saw 5-6% CTRs, which dramatically reduced the CPA.
It never has to be an either/or between beautiful branding and direct response. Starting with a good story gives you the ability to get a more direct response later. It's why influencers can sell stuff — their audience is captivated and bought in.
The iMessage ad format crushed it for Jolie — it's like you're snooping on another conversation, and we all love to eavesdrop. It hit pain points naturally. The CTR was around 4%, roughly 4x the average of 0.9%.
People want ads that are entertaining first, not the equivalent of digital billboards.
Every piece of ad creative should answer three questions for a customer: What is this? How will it help me better my life? Why should I trust you?
On TikTok, anything overproduced gets a bad look. You want videos that feel like they were shot in real-time on your iPhone, edited in less than 15 minutes, and posted. Just look at the comments on overproduced brand videos.
A UGC-style ad I made for Immi in the TikTok app became one of their best ads with a 2.5x ROAS. UGC feels native to social platforms and tells a story without the 'As Seen on TV' feeling.
When testing static ad creative, I like to test: black & white vs color imagery, studio vs lifestyle, older vs younger models, text overlay vs plain.
Instead of a 'Shop Now' CTA, use contextual copy like 'Get Snoozing →' for a pillow. Instead of product imagery on a bed, show it in action with someone underneath it. Make people imagine themselves in the lifestyle.
When I first started running Facebook ads in 2014, you could find a winning creative and run it for months. Today, creative maybe lasts a few weeks, and you need the infrastructure to crank out new creative to test constantly.
Sometimes we get so engrossed in new landing pages, offers, and angles that we forget the product actually solves a real problem. A customer told us: 'I've tried so many solutions, and this is the only one that works.' So we just made content saying exactly that.
UGC-style creative and influencer-style ads are getting played out in the way of trying to trick consumers. UGC can still work — it's some of the most effective creative — but people are pretty good at detecting fake BS.
When we launched Poo~Pourri's bidet, the leading copy was 'Meet the new lean, mean, booty-cleaning machine by Poo~Pourri.' You want something people will remember, that's uniquely tied to your launch.
If you're using a quote from an editorial site for social proof, look for a quote from a publication that matches the demographic of the customer you're going after.
For food and beverage, the hardest thing is convincing someone the taste is worth it. Use a genuine blind taste-test video or bring customer-submitted UGC to the forefront. Amplify the face someone makes when they try and love your product.
The best content is stuff that either gets screenshotted and texted to a friend, or gets brought up at the dinner table. Make that type of content as a brand.
The brands that can focus on pretty ads are brands that have been around for decades and spend millions in customer education in other ways — think Kate Spade, Apple. Don't take a simple graphic from a brand like that as a sign that it will work for you.
It's getting much harder to acquire customers, and just running a playbook with ads isn't enough today. Brands in LA emphasize content a lot more, especially content that lives in the middle of the funnel — between awareness and purchase.
Before the Apple update, you could focus on targeted lower funnel ad creative. Now you can't. Today, every piece of creative should answer: What problem are you solving? What is the brand and product? Why do I need this? How can I trust you? How do I get it right now?
This is why UGC does so well for customer acquisition — a satisfied customer naturally addresses all those questions, and the content itself is peer-to-peer social proof.
The best ads don't feel like ads at all. Make your ads come off friendly, helpful, aspirational, or educational.
On TikTok, look for how often brands turn off comments in their ads — it's because they get called out by users for having horrible ads and ruining the experience. The content needs to survive the ruthless nature of TikTok users.
In a lot of cases, brands doing less than $10M run paid ads because they suck at creating good original content that doesn't have to be a forced watch.
Create content that people find genuinely interesting, which caters to vanity, vice, or ego. The goal is for each person to then drive a handful of users to your site — the viral factor.
Cadence sells capsule containers. You could sell it as just a container product, or you can come up with hooks: 'The perfect way to travel with your existing routine.' 'The easiest way to sleepover at your partner's apartment.' 'The only leak-proof capsules that exist in the market.' Same product, different angles for different audiences.
When I joined Hint Water, the ads said 'Zero sugar, zero calories, flavored water!' and I thought — that's not why I like the product. I love it because it's 'The dessert that mom never gets mad about' or 'The addiction that moms can get behind.' Good copywriting makes the difference between a 2% conversion rate and a 9% conversion rate.
Make sure the ad creative you're launching has matching creative on the landing page. Just by not having a matching visual from the ad to the site, you're going to increase bounce rate right away. Consumers don't think like marketers.
Test different hooks in each video and look at engagement to see where people spend more time watching — that section should become the new hook.
Go through the most common pre-purchase customer service questions and answer those in your video ads.
Without an angle: 'The best low-calorie rice cakes on the market!' With an angle: 'The only pre-workout snack that gives you a satisfying crunch!' or 'An after-school snack that moms actually approve of!' The angle changes everything.
All copy should be written at a 5th-grade reading level. No big words. Anything worth noting should be bolded, underlined, or have a heading style attached. It should be hard to miss.
The APOB copywriting framework: Audience, Problems, Objections, Benefits. Pre-APOB: 'Shop Cadence's capsules to upgrade how you transport your routine.' Post-APOB: 'Shop Cadence's leakproof & TSA-friendly capsules to transport your skincare routine without a mess.'
Value Prop: 'These pans are non-stick.' Benefit: 'Cook with less oil on these pans.' Always convert value props into benefits.
If you're creating an ad, what's the immediate punchline? If you're creating a label, what's the enticing hook? If you're creating a landing page, how can you quickly explain what's in it for the person on the other side of the screen? One sentence should articulate what you do.
Does Nike's content and ads lead with the fact that their shoes are made with rubber soles and nylon laces? Of course not. Instead, they use their content and ads to paint a picture of what a consumer's life will be like once they own more Nike gear. Because their ads are all about athletic performance — not materials or features — you envision yourself as an 'athlete' by purchasing their gear.
What does someone say when they unbox or try the product for the first time? And what do they say after experiencing the change in their life the product gave them? Those are two completely different testimonial angles — capture both.
Having a full-time content creator on staff means: you can ride algorithm waves to tons of impressions, quickly crank out videos when something is working in the ad account, and rapidly create content around current events and trends related to your brand.
Unless you're Nike, I strongly encourage you to NOT run abstract motivational videos with no offers that are just about lifestyle. Unlike paid social ads, concise storytelling is more valuable on TV than abrupt jolts and quick cuts.
For creative around promotions, we typically produce 3–15 variants per offer to test and learn. Our media buyers double down on top performers after the first few hours of data. Video tends to convert best, but static image CPMs are much less expensive — great for retargeting.
Not every piece of creative needs to have a sales objective, but you need to know what buckets your posts are falling in. The best content is edutainment — it's teaching someone something new, but also is good enough to get shared in a group chat.
Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels should be where you test creative. If it outperforms the baseline of views/engagement you normally get, immediately ship it to paid. This style of content sometimes achieves 4-6% CTR.
I check out the ads library of other brands that I aspire to be similar to, NOT my competitors. If you just find inspiration from your competitors, you'll always be behind.
I check Reddit to understand what questions people have about the product I'm selling, and use those as hooks for content inspiration. Reddit search is underrated for finding out what people don't know about a product you sell.
Content is the asphalt that creates the awareness, so your car (the ads) can drive on top, efficiently. If you run paid ads with no focus on content or awareness, you're swimming upstream.
For all the brands I've worked with, there is a direct correlation between the amount of content a brand creates and the revenue they can generate. Brands that have no real content engine are overpaying for their customers in other places.
In a perfect world, you should be able to have content turned around from a brief within 24 hours, whether that's internal or external creators.
If you believe a piece of content has potential but didn't perform out the gate, update the hook and put it out again. We've tried this multiple times on TikTok and it worked. Same goes for videos that do well — keep the existing hook and test a different CTA.
Create ads that YOU would personally screenshot or share. If it won't perform well organically, don't make it into an ad. Content that won't get shared into the group chat isn't content worth putting out.
Let the data help you decide what's 'on brand.' There is nothing worse than a CMO saying 'That's not on brand' and then having their 'on brand' creative perform 10 times worse. Until you're doing $50M in topline revenue, your brand is built by getting products into the hands of consumers.
Build a 'creative reference bank.' Every time you see an eye-catching ad from another brand or creator, screenshot it or save the link. Use these references to spark ideas — a color, font, hook, or angle you liked.
With video ads, the first 1-2 seconds are really what matters most. Test more hooks than anything else.
Once you've tested multiple concepts, double down on your top 5 highest performing ads. Make 5-10 new variations of each — different opening shot, different music, capital letters instead of lowercase, different overlays. Follow the data and keep tweaking your winners.
If a drunk person, or your grandma, can't understand your ad copywriting, it's too complicated.
Low-fi ads work. You don't need a fancy camera or high-production value. Some of the highest performing ads I've ever seen were shot on an iPhone, selfie style. Don't overthink it — just shoot, add text in Figma, and publish.
A 'founder story' ad worked incredibly well for Native and Hint. People like people, not brands. They want to hear from and trust the person they're buying from. Starting with the founder explaining why they started the company crushed for us at Hint for years.
Have a pre-established holiday content calendar and proactively make promo creative early. Not taking full advantage of every major holiday with custom ad creative is always a big miss, especially for high CTR opportunities.
Ryan Babenzien would rather have quality content from someone who cares about the product distributed to a smaller audience than bad content pushed to a large following. Good storytelling always wins.
Our content was almost entirely shot as UGC — whether from real customers or interns shooting in that style. It let us test new concepts quickly without briefs, editors, directors, or stylists. If a customer sent in a drunk video reviewing the product, we'd get permission and run it as an ad.
Before putting videos into ads, we'd test them as organic Instagram posts and stories. If a post got saves and shares, it was worth testing as paid. When you're bootstrapped, organic engagement is your free focus group.
People scroll 1–2 miles per day on their phones. Your ad needs to make someone stop. Don't get left in the dust.
Speak to the benefits, not just value props. No one cares that you're zero calorie — they want to know you're the mom's favorite choice.
Take your best-performing hooks from creative analytics, then retry underperforming ads with those winning hooks. Remix your winners constantly.
UGC ads are becoming saturated. Consumers are calling out brands in comments when they see 'organic' content that's clearly sponsored. They're getting better at sniffing out the BS.
Founder story ads consistently outperform on TikTok. If the founder has a verified account to run the ads from, that's how you maximize the return.
If you want to succeed on Snap, you need a creative on your team living inside Snap to see what trends are working. Same goes for TikTok, YouTube, and Connected TV. You have to make contextually relevant, on-trend creative for each platform.
Yes, you can reuse your Meta creatives on TikTok, but most of the time, they won't be your top-performing ads. You have to make contextually relevant, on-trend creative that makes sense for each platform.
I like running static ads because CPMs are typically about 2/3 cheaper than video. Get a designer to create Figma templates, swap out details, and test. Static ads are evergreen bread and butter for paid social.
You should have 5-20 good static ad templates in Figma that you can leverage anytime for messaging tests, promotions, or new offers. Test dozens of static concepts every quarter.
Your CPC drops 50% and CPM drops too when you feature a celebrity face in your ad, because engagement goes up. Low CPMs give you more shots on goal.
High production value videos for lower AOV items rarely makes sense anymore. The megatrend toward unfiltered, story-driven content is only accelerating. Raw, iPhone-style creative is converting very well.
The only place lo-fi creative doesn't work is high-AOV luxury. Anything $500-1000+ AOV is selling brand perception as much as the product. Luxury creative for luxury brands still wins.
Advertorials work best for products with long consideration periods (high AOV, cookware, mattresses), long onboarding (personalized dog food, skincare), or obvious problem/solution. For low AOV, skip advertorials — focus on affiliates instead.
When I wrote advertorials, I'd check Facebook pages of BuzzFeed, Well & Good, and Insider Picks to see which product article headlines did well, then mimic the format. Same principle for viral TikTok Shop videos.
Every FAQ section, landing page, pre-purchase welcome flow, and ad creative must answer these 6 questions: 1. What is the product? 2. How does it benefit me? 3. Why should I trust the brand? 4. How does it compare to other options? 5. If I order today, when does it arrive? 6. What happens if I don't like the product?
In your briefs for content-focused creators making ad content, brief multiple angles and hooks. Your goal should be to turn one shoot into at least 10 videos by mixing different hooks, explanation parts, and calls to action.
When I was at Hint, I found success with a founder story advertorial. When we launched TV, we filmed a founding story, and it worked just as well. Until today, MVMT Watches is still running their founder story ad. If an angle works on one channel, leverage it on new ones — it's like the control of your experiment.
Make some ad creative exclusively about the sale — loud, bold, chunky text highlighting the % off with your product image. Then make some creative merging your best performing prospecting ads with sale messaging layered on top.
The secret to finding the best ads: Make an Instagram DM group with 5-10 other marketers or teammates, and everyone shares their favorite ads they see. That's the only way to find the best ads, quickly.
I like to see how affiliates market differently. They're usually focused on driving conversion, they have a built-in audience, so their content feels more native. Look at what TikTok Shop affiliates are doing — that's the energy your ads should have.
Download customer reviews from your website or Amazon and use AI to identify key messaging angles. Then have AI rewrite it in different styles, like 'Apple power words.' Your customers literally tell you what to say in ads.
Most copywriting is focused on features — things that feel right in internal brand meetings. But customers want to know how their life will improve. Reposition your copy around outcomes, not ingredients.
Quality over quantity with content, but avoid over-polishing. Raw still performs best. On platforms like TikTok, 'good enough' that feels authentic beats 'perfect' that feels produced.
In 2017, I ran an ad where a YouTuber stabbed into an unboxing with a large knife, and my CMO said we had to turn it off — it's killing the brand. That ad was bringing us the lowest CPA at the time. Your creative opinions about what looks good are totally subjective. Follow performance data.
Don't sleep on low-production creative. Some of the best ad performances come from creatives that feel 'cheap' or low-budget. They feel more authentic, relatable, and contextually native to the feed. Unless you are a luxury brand, test more lo-fi creative — iPhone-shot videos, UGC reviews, iMessage screenshots.
The best ads include social proof — either as a direct testimonial or with validation like 'Join 5,000+ Happy Customers' or 'Over 250,000 bottles sold.' Pushing how many reviews you have is the holy grail, but emphasize a large number, even if that just means units sold.
Facebook Ads Library, TikTok Ads Library, Google Ads Library, and Adbeat all exist as free resources. TikTok's ads library lets you view ads based on what performs best for sales. Go find what the best ads look like and start ideating based on patterns you see work.
Most paid UGC is garbage. If you open Reels or TikTok, you'll realize how good the average For You Page content is — that's what you're competing against. You cannot pay a random 'UGC creator' $50 for a video where they pretend to love your product. Consumers know a fake endorsement from a mile away.
Less than 25% of the creative you make will ever find scale. It's a numbers game. The more you test, the more you increase your surface area of luck.
Most ad accounts I come across have 1-5 creatives that drive the majority of the entire ad account's spend. That's usually a sign there's a lack of creative testing.
Media buyers should get comfortable in Figma — take a static ad design, plug the winning copy into ChatGPT, come up with 25 other headline options, put it into the Figma file, export all 25 versions and get them uploaded into ads manager within 20 minutes.
It's the brands that are really small (under $15M/year) or really big (over $150M/year) that struggle with creative. The mid-size brands ($25M to $250M/year) tend to move quickly on creative decisions and test and learn fast, which is why they grow.
If you've ever heard from a customer that your product is the only one to ever work because of X reason, take that reason, make content on it, and run it. The best ads are demonstrable. Sometimes it's just about getting back to the main problem.
Hooks, hooks, hooks. The 5th second of the content won't matter if there's no good hook. Don't let 'Branded content' be an excuse for a lame hook.
One shoot day with a content creator equals 15 touchpoints across your funnel — website, email, SMS, signage, organic social, and more.
Less than 10% of your ads will make it to a point of scaling. Your only opportunity to find winners is to test aggressively. Launch 20-30 creative variations per week. Stop overthinking perfect production — sometimes the best ads are filmed in less than a minute.
Headlines with odd numbers like 7, 11, or 23 tend to outperform headlines with even numbers. Classic BuzzFeed trick.
Write copy at a 5th-grade reading level. Keep it short, conversational, active voice. If it can be deleted, delete it. Fewer is better in writing.
Optimize for scanners: bold text, bullet points, short paragraphs. Think about someone on a slow internet connection, using a small iPhone screen, pressed for time. Optimize for that person.
If you're spending $150K-$2M/month on ads, you're in the sweet spot for heavy creative testing. Below that, take bigger swings. Above that, you likely have a few creatives driving majority of spend.
You're not selling rice cakes — you're selling a pre-workout snack or an after-school snack that moms love. Start with value props, think about what it does for the consumer, extract the benefits felt, and write to that.
The first 2 seconds of your video ads should EARN you the attention for the next 5 seconds. You can't expect people to watch your videos — it's on you to earn that.
If you're running meaningful Meta spend (over $150k/month), you should have a rigorous creative-testing program rotating new creative weekly. If just 1-2 pieces consume most of your budget, you're in a very risky spot.
Take your best email subject lines and test them as ad headlines on Meta and Google. Do the opposite too — take the best ad headlines and run them as email subject lines.
Use renders when you can — it's not necessary to spend a ton on photography. Renders let you easily make responsive banners, motion-graphics videos, or add overlays to backgrounds.
Copy is 80% of selling. Don't be chunky — get punchy, savvy, and focus on benefits, not just value props. Copy bridges the gap between what your consumer cares about and what you can solve.
Good photography and video can make a templated Shopify site feel like a $100M brand from the get-go. Check out Cadence's website to see how good content makes a website feel like a billion dollars.
When creators see real user behavior data — heatmaps, session recordings, A/B test results — it's like a lightbulb moment every time. They start designing with those learnings in mind, which means each version gets better. It shortens the feedback loop dramatically.
Avoid overly polished, AI-enhanced product imagery. Raw, human-feeling creative performs better. Products positioned as analog alternatives to digital tools should use creative that emphasizes tactile experience, craftsmanship, and intentional friction.
If you commit to trying 28 founder videos, I promise you will find a repeatable, scaling format. The founder knows the product best, can talk about it for hours with no script, and will always be the best salesperson.
Every week, I send my assistant 50-100 different ads I find on Instagram, TikTok, and Snap that I think are great ads. We build a swipe file, and whenever we have a brand that wants to test a new channel, we can open and see what is 'good' for that platform.
50% of a good photoshoot happens in prep: identifying shots from other brands to create a mood board, breaking it down into individual shot mood boards, and defining additional pieces. With AI models, you can even create a rough example of the shot you're going for.
MasterClass adjusted their YouTube videos to feel more like a livestream and paired them with custom intent audiences. Result: 140% increase in clicks to their website and 70% increase in course sign-ups.
On YouTube desktop, there's a sliding banner from the bottom-left above the scrub bar and the skip button on the bottom right. Design your creative to distract users away from the skip button — it's a commonly overlooked aspect of the creative process.
There are 6 types of video ads you should crank out immediately: studio shot videos, UGC videos, creator/influencer videos, NowThis/Cheddar-style explainer videos, promo-focused videos for retargeting, and unboxing videos. Each serves a different part of the funnel.
When writing ad copy, every sentence needs to entice someone to read the next sentence — I learned this from Sam Parr at The Hustle. Similarly, every second and frame of a video ad needs to earn someone's trust to keep watching the next second. There's no room for lazy moments in a 30-second ad.
Go to your product reviews and tally everything customers talk about. Those tallied outcomes become your ad creative angles. For Caraway, it's not 'ceramic cookware' — it's 'I need less oil,' 'so easy to clean with just water,' 'the colored set sits beautifully on my counter.'
Make your ad copy formatting look good on mobile. Either use one full line or two full lines — don't leave one word dangling on a second line. And the punch line should be visible without clicking 'See More.' These tiny presentation details affect thumb-stopping rates.
You lose about 80% of your video ad viewership by the 15-second mark. That's why the first 3 seconds need to earn the stop, seconds 4-7 need to deliver the punch line, and everything after is deepening the why. Front-load ruthlessly.
With your Facebook Ads library competitive research: when you see a creative being run at high volume with different copy variants, there's a good chance it's crushing it for them. Take note — it tells you what's actually working at scale.
When running performance PR ads, your 3 inputs are: a headline (catchy, not clickbait, but curiosity-inducing), ad text (describe the punchline of the story with a quote or excerpt), and an image that feels editorial, not like an ad.
A TV campaign creative that's great for TV will bomb on paid social if you just blast it across. If it's not optimized for sound off, doesn't have text overlays hitting punchlines, and isn't formatted for iPhone screens, it won't work on social — same content, different context.
For a launch, plan to create 25-30 video assets to test various messaging on paid social. The first batch should include: product-specific explainers, animations of product imagery for comparison ads, UGC-style ads with premium feel, and NowThis/Cheddar-style videos with stock footage and captions overlaid.
Your ad creative needs to answer a 4th question most people miss: 'How will I defend this purchase to my friends?' If people can't justify it socially, they won't buy.
Instead of product imagery of your blanket on a bed, show it in action — someone underneath it. The best apparel and alcohol brands don't just show studio shots; they make you imagine you're on that yacht or going out in Soho. Immerse someone into what it's like using the product, not just what it looks like photographed.
Connor from Ridge Wallet was asked 'What's absolutely necessary to win in DTC nowadays?' at an eCommerce dinner. His answer: in-house content creation as a core skill. Whether that's managing external creators or hiring a small team, you have to do it.
LA CPG founders emphasize mid-funnel content way more than most venture-backed brands. It's never a question of 'are we doing enough on paid to handle that middle space.' The thinking is simply, 'We need to be creating a lot more content to get people excited to try us.' That's a creator-first mindset, not a media-buyer mindset.
Digital advertising has gotten so competitive that consumers ignore ads like banner ads or highway billboards. When CTRs drop, most people's instinct is 'We need another platform with better CPMs.' Wrong answer. The real fix is making ads that feel like entertainment first — bring value before you sell the click.
14 content sources you're not tapping: in-house creation, formal shoots with BTS capture, internal content creator hire, ambassadors, influencers, organic creators already posting about your product, PR screenshots formatted in Figma, branded content with publishers, publisher social channels, and repurposing across owned and paid.
Start with raw product facts first, then craft the story second. List out: calories, protein, ingredients, certifications. Then go from value props to benefits to angles. The data-first approach grounds your marketing in substance before spinning the narrative.
The bootstrapped ad creative flywheel: 1) Research hooks and angles, 2) Identify who can create content, 3) Brief and shoot, 4) Test on organic social, 5) Take the winners and fuel them with paid media. Organic is your free testing ground before you spend a dollar on ads.
Look at TikTok videos with the orange product icon above the caption — click it to see how many sales that product generated. If a video has high engagement AND high sales, that's a proven hook worth testing for your own brand.
Brands that have no real content engine are overpaying for their customers in other places. Bad content consistently doesn't work in your favor either — you need content that people on the other side actually enjoy watching.
For a brand launch, do 1 studio shoot and 1 outdoor/lifestyle shoot, then send product to 10-20 creators to make 6 types of videos: unboxing, product in use, before/after, benefits walkthrough, competitive comparison, and day-in-the-life. Test 10-15 angles and hooks. This alone gets you to $1-3K/day in revenue through ads.
Robert Herjavec on what makes a great Shark Tank pitch: 'We're filming for 10-12 hours, checking emails, hungry, need the bathroom. It's not our job to pay attention — it's their job to captivate us.' That's the exact same punchline for ad creative. It's never the viewer's job to care. It's your job to make them.
If you're selling a body lotion with sea moss, 'sea-moss infused lotion' won't stop the scroll. But 'No more itchy feet at night' will. The angle reframes your product around the customer's problem, not your ingredient list. Brands starting out have zero chance at market share without a great angle.
During BFCM 2023, standard quick-cut paid social video assets weren't what drove the majority of purchases — it was static ads with a clear offer and UGC assets that explained what the product does. People at home on their phones were drawn to content that felt entertaining, not just an ad.
Customer DMs right after receiving a product are a gold mine for ad creative. Customers find their OWN use cases that you never thought of — take the 5 most common applications and recreate those DMs visually as ads.
If a customer sent in a drunk video reviewing the product, we'd get permission and run that as an ad. The less polished and more authentic, the better it performed for us.
If you want to run ads on Snap, you need someone on your creative team living inside Snap to see what trends and creators are doing. Same for TikTok, YouTube, and CTV. You can't make contextually relevant ads for a platform you don't consume.
On Meta right now, 8 creative formats are working: enriched catalog ads, celebrity/influencer whitelisted content, bright bold statics with clear CTAs, advertorials and listicles, lo-fi iPhone selfie style, high-production for luxury/high-AOV, quick-cut videos with on-trend animation, and screenshot/wildcard creative.
Screenshots as ad creative — take a screenshot of a text conversation, a tweet, or a review mentioning your product and run it as an ad. It's a 'wildcard' format that stops the scroll because it looks nothing like a traditional ad.
Think of creative like dirty, mud-covered windows on your storefront. You might have great products inside, but if the consumer's first impression is that your brand looks terrible, they won't enter because they can't see the value inside. Creative is the face of your brand — no one sees your manufacturing, logistics, or supply chain.
The Following feed to For You feed shift changed everything. Consumers no longer choose what appears in their feed — every piece of content is basically served like an ad. This elevated the quality bar for ads, forced brands to build real brand equity, and made creative testing discipline non-negotiable.
Media buyers should get comfortable in Figma. Take a winning static ad design, plug the copy into ChatGPT, generate 25 headline variations, drop them into the Figma file, export all 25 versions, and get them into ads manager within 20 minutes.
Apple's 'Light. Years ahead.' copy for the MacBook Air is the gold standard — it shows multiple benefits with straightforward copy. They take 5th-grade-level writing and turn it into Shakespeare, personifying the product with the largest TAM due to simplicity of wording.
Use renders instead of expensive photography and shoots. Renders do a good enough job and allow you to make easily-responsive banners, motion-graphics videos, or add overlays to backgrounds — at a fraction of the cost.
Your next sale, product launch, or campaign assets can be generated entirely with AI. The secret is prompting — spend 6 hours diving into Google's Nano Banana model and @mobileeditingclub on Instagram, then find prompts on Reddit and X. The better you prompt, the more you can produce without $40k photoshoots.
Audit your creative analysis process — it should be an AI agent now, not a person doing it manually. How often do you look at creative performance? Does the current process work? Do you need more or fewer people in it?
Brand creative teams should rarely be involved in performance channel testing conversations. When I hear 'we tried it but our brand creative team briefed the assets to stay on brand and gave it to our agency to run,' I know that's exactly why it failed.
Sometimes net-new creative formats is HOW you get into new audience groups to even have the opportunity to try and sell your product. When someone argues it's not 'on brand,' I say get off your high horse — new formats open new doors.
With AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, there's no longer an excuse for bad photoshoots. Use multi-modal LLMs to help build proper shot lists and creative direction even if you don't have senior creative DNA on the team.