Creative Strategy for Meta Ads | How a Top Creative Strategist Actually Works in 2026

0:00This is my hot take is AI has created the best moment in history to become a creative strategist or a marketer because it's handling that execution which frees up our time.

0:14We are back with another episode of DTC Diaries. Feels like we've not been in this room for a while. Got a very special guest on today. A very special guest. We've got Chris who is one of our senior creative strategists at the SOAR group and I think the reason we wanted to get you on today we'll let you do a little intro in a moment is because we get asked a lot from brand owners, from creative strategists that are outside the company, you know, what makes a great creative strategist? What are some of the operational rhythms that you need to build into the business to be able to, you know, execute really well as a creative strategist and drive better performance?

0:55And I think you are a great example of someone who came into a role with limited experience directly in creative strategy but due to you know your mindset um and the way that you've worked you just have grown so quickly in experience to being you know one of one of the most skilled strats that that I've personally worked with so yeah Chris thank you for coming on today thank you for having me uh obviously long time fan of the show I've been watching for the last year. I actually remember starting watching you about a year ago in prep for my interview and it was just literally just a way to like learn as much about you as I could before jumping on the call with you.

1:39But yeah, I think that introduction was great. Obviously, senior being the key part of that senior creative strategist as of only last week. Yeah, congrats on the promotion. Thank you. to go that like from in less than a year as well by the way like to to not have really been in the role to you know being promoted to a senior in that time is is pretty mad yeah it happened it happened fast I think in this kind of environment though it's made for that and like you you learn fast because you you fail fast as well you come in if you make a mistake like you have a limited amount of time to learn from it and I think that was definitely one of the key things just throwing myself in there as like quickly as possible.

2:19I mean, you both mentioned this before, but curiosity is probably my biggest, biggest quality. I came in just super curious about the role. And there was some overlap with the copywriting experience, obviously, mainly through like research and obviously scripting and things like that. But there was obviously a brand new element to me, which was like all the visuals and like thinking of visual hooks and things like that was like completely brand new at the time. Is influencer marketing the most unpredictable line item in your budget. Big month, dead month, big month, dead month. You feel like you never know what's actually coming.

2:52The brands winning at this have stopped doing one-off influencer campaigns. They've built a system instead, seeding new influencers, converting the best ones to affiliates and retaining the top performers. This way your pipeline never stops and revenue gets predictable. To build that system, you need a platform. That's Saral. Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship all in one place without all of that chaos 200 plus brands including grunts soul wave space goods and many more are running their influencer programs on saril if that sounds like what you've been looking for go to get saril.com slash demo and book a demo with their team tell them we sent you and you'll get your 500 discount and white glove onboarding i'm really excited to dive into this because um i was doing some some research into like for our own marketing and looking at sort of sales analysis and like some of the problems that people are identifying when they start when they first have calls with myself or the sales team and a point that keeps coming up is like people having significant resource or people having an existing process with multiple people in it but but not being clear on on how to actually build a creative strategy whether that's themselves as a founder and operator or whether that's them reflecting on the work that their team is doing on a day-to-day basis, where they're spending the time, what sources of research they're using, what rhythm of operation they're built into the business.

4:20I think I'm excited to dive into your way of working and hopefully that can shape both brand owners' understanding of what a great creative strategist looks like because I think there's levels to the game, which we're hopefully going to come into. Yeah, massively. and also for those that may be looking to get into the space hopefully this can provide like a really strong starting point of maybe what this should be focused on in terms of skill development both soft and hard skills or even those that are like our creative strategists and use this as an opportunity to see what they are doing well and maybe areas they can continue to evolve to become better at what they do exactly that exactly that yeah i mean there definitely is levels um i'm still a student of the game year in dedicated motivated but still very much within that first year point i would say for those starting um like the barrier to entry for creative strategy is probably the lowest it's ever been due to ai and that taking on a lot of execution i think like you said like a big big portion of people are looking for the soft skills now because it's like how do you fit in and how do you graft and how obsessed are you with this role um but at the same time like it's my hot take is ai has created the best moment in history to become a creative strategist or a marketer because it's handling that execution which frees up our time you know depending where you are in in your seniority to take on that heavy research which is where i think is the highest the highest use of our time is to is to spend time in the trenches and researching and when i look back on like copywriters and like i aspire to be like like joseph sugarman and some of the greats um gary bensvenga like they spend all their time in that research and like there's days and there's no set time on on how long that that research would take to produce obviously now we have assistance in that with ai but like i'm still a really firm believer in taking that time to to spend in that deep research and like examples of that are obviously customer calls even in um Matt Lerner, Growth Leavers even in that first chapter he said one of his biggest unlocks for PayPal came from that research with the customer calls and speaking to churned customers and like you can't get that by prompting AI, like you just need to spend that time with customers or in research or with the product and discovering those unique mechanisms so I guess for people entering is like focus on the soft skills and for people in there I'm still discovering this myself but like ways of just being really focused and ingrained in that research process what I think is so important and I think as as you say AI begins to commoditize execution more and more I think it becomes very easy just to let AI do the work especially with like research or reporting or whatever it might be and as a result you know we aren't extracting the right insights um that that really kind of helps flesh out that creative strategy.

7:20I think you're a great example of someone who really understands the importance of that manual research and that you can't ever replace that with AI. Talk a bit maybe about some of the types of manual research that you have found really important or maybe unlocked insights that you just wouldn't have been able to find through AI. You mentioned obviously one with the customer calls, maybe go a bit deeper into that and then a few others yeah there's quite a few different ways um something i just picked up on even at the start of that with with ai handling execution that's why there's an opportunity here is like there will be a large portion of creative strategists who just rely on that and like for any creative strategist watching i would say like use it and leverage it but also like take time to doing like these following things like customer calls and like the reason i'm so bullish on customer calls is like if i'm like dealing in a demographic which i'm not super familiar with that like you'll be like this was the first time I did a customer call was because I had to speak to mums um a lot of them were mums and you know you have to be empathetic and understand the problems if you're touching on pain points or if you're touching on any emotive kind of messaging and like the best way to do that is to speak to them and like I remember like feeling on that call I could feel their problems and like there's there's one thing reading it but then when you're talking to someone in person or over the phone and like they're telling you how their life changed using the product you now suddenly can advocate for it a bit more you can understand it a bit bit more and you can speak of it from a place of like authenticity.

8:48How are you approaching questioning on those calls? Like how did you approach the point before jumping on a call with those mums and asking them questions? Because I think it's, you know, one thing just having a conversation, asking questions, but I think you have to be like super intentional, don't you, with the types of questions that you ask? Yeah, for sure. It's all, I mean, it depends on the products and the industry. I'm thinking back to like a particular example, but it was mainly about like the before state the after state the process during it asking about certain features of the product or service that made it easier for them depending on what it is so I guess you can think of it through the lens of like an ad script I mean like your really traditional d2d ad scripts of like problem agitation solution unique mechanism social proof like you can literally walk them through like a question this like that takes you through that script almost as if you're trying to create a script from what they're saying and like a lot of the times i'd have these customer calls and um definitely record them by the way i made the mistake of not recording my customer calls and i remember like finishing it thinking i'd made notes but i remember thinking i wish i had this recorded like for an ad um but yeah i'd say just just plan it through that way as if you're you're creating like an ad script and also just leave with a place of authenticity like genuinely be curious about the person like this is a real person it's not just about me and my ad script.

10:09It's actually about finding out about them and if it made an actual difference and how they actually felt using it. I reckon you could turn the video of one of those into an ad if you could get the permission to actually use the assets. Voice note ads and things like that, aren't they? Like on WhatsApp or whatever. I remember Brez running that customer call ad where they're filming them and the Humantra's ran one as well. Yeah, it's good. Beyond, I guess for Brando to look into to implement that? Where were you, did you think about, what was the process of like finding the customers to speak to?

10:43Were you going through any, did you select them for any specific filter or do you get a good cross section? Yeah, this is interesting. I think obviously we're from in-house, we're in an agency setting. So I'm reaching out to our client to source these customers for us. A lot of the time they'll look to their like, their best customer, someone who's purchased maybe more than three or four times, they'll filter through that or a VIP customer, however they identify that. I had the idea though, like, I want to speak to a churned customer. I really want to speak to the other way because I'm like, these great customers who love you, they're always going to say great things and like they do provide insights.

11:23But I'm like, why do people churn? I want to speak to them as well. Like, not just the people who have just had a great experience with the brand, but also the other way, because I think there'll be some interesting insights. Yeah, I think that's really smart. I think the fact that we've started this podcast talking about research sort of says a lot about the role, right? And we've talked in many other episodes around the concepts and I always say that for every one minute you spend in production, you should spend five in research. So you mentioned customer calls as one method, but where else are you going to as key sources right now?

11:58Maybe how has that changed as well over maybe the last 12 months? um yeah that's a good question i a lot of it is like the social research it's like the process we have in in-house like describes that perfectly it's like split out into like three different branches so like compared to research um social research and audience research a lot of those places you look to your typical social platforms um ai is doing like great scraping now and like that's where i will say it is useful to do that and it can build out like these huge documents with like so much information like verbatim quotes that they're finding online which can save time outside of that like i'm old school i like those old school copy methods like even like when they go to the product warehouse and spend time looking at the products i don't always do this i'd love to but um depending on depending on the brand you work with like being able to go and see how the product's made and like spending time um with with even the people who created it is like the founder speaking to the founder is a great way to get insight like um if you're starting with a brand like being able to sit down with a founder for an hour could be some of the best research you could do outside of like your typical social research so like I do try and think of like niche ways that you can get insights and I just think conversation in general I'm really really like just love having chats about it like I remember when I had like when I wanted to improve performance greatly on a brand one of the first things i did was go to the cs hub which is um an internal channel in our in our agency where it has like 20 creative strategists in there and i literally just asked this question i said this is the problem this is the solution i'm looking for does anyone have any thoughts and like that's not your typical research but like i can remember so many like useful conversations and people messaging me with with thoughts and ideas um which just helps tremendously talk about that then like just while we're on it like maybe a bit around some of the operational rhythms that we run within our creative strategy department that you think have been valuable because i think there's lots of collaborative things that happen there and it's become way more collaborative as well over the last 12 months and i think a lot of teams some realistic that they're probably going to have creative strategy teams as big as ours but it doesn't necessarily need to just be uh you know siloed to creative strategists um what what are some of maybe the the actionable takeaways there yeah there's quite a few i mean we do a lot of things um i mean obviously the cs hub is like the centralized place where like messages has dropped in daily people sharing inspo people sharing problems people sharing um you know wins and things like that but like i say outside of that we do like the brainstorm on fridays that um Aaron and Saskia have been leading, have been really fantastic.

14:45And it'll be like, we do loads of different things in those meetings. Like one of the most recent ones we did was just like scroll time. It was literally like, we gave ourselves like a 30 minute timer and just went and scrolled. And like, I think like a lot of creative strategies might be able to relate to this. Like you scroll online or like you're scrolling in the evening, you find inspo and you forget about it or you park it or you send it to someone. We have an Instagram group chat as well. We collate stuff. and it was actually just the case of like going back and sending in that session and like talking we did like a bit of a show and tell of like each ad that's been great and then brainstorms for particular clients I think we'll cycle in every week and put in a different brand if anyone's having challenges with a brand like put that brand forward and everyone will discuss and contribute ideas but I think even like with brands we work with now like we've become a lot more collaborative over the last like maybe six months or so of like we've been doing creative brainstorms with with different brands I've been doing that with some of mine um encouraging them to come to the new office uh which has been a great new workspace and also doing sessions with with the client as well which has been really useful what um on the brainstorming side because I think it's done in like a really interactive way I think it's done like share screen through Miro which is um I don't even know how you describe it it's it's where you can build flow charts and things like that and people can all jump in from different laptops and add things into like a big kind of almost digital whiteboard digital whiteboard digital moveboard whatever yeah um talk maybe a bit about how those are usually approached because i think traditionally you'd think as a brainstorm as we just sit around a table and just try and come up with ideas and it usually doesn't spark much interest but yeah everything's tracked and like it's done in a way so you can go back and look at it.

16:33That's probably the most actionable takeaway from it. We've tried a new method outside of the Miro board, which I quite like it. It's done through a presentation, and then you add your own slide, and then you can add the ad inspo directly in. But Miro board's kind of similar. It's like we all have our own section in the Miro board. We'll populate it with the ads or inspo, for example, if we're doing the scrolling session that we did last week. And then we even do a little voting system. I think Aaron introduced this and sorry if I got it wrong if someone else introduced it literally putting like a little dot over the ad that you like the most for example what is like a little voting system which is cool but yeah you're very interactive and just easy to call back to I think yeah I think obviously we've got the benefit of the volume of minds and people to bring into that environment but like you were saying I think what those are great examples of is setting time aside intentionally with a format that brings multiple people into the room to inject new creative ideas into the process.

17:36I think if brand owners are watching, I think you could literally apply that across the whole team. I also think it might be interesting to bring people who are further away from the process into the room. Like you said, the founder, we probably don't have that luxury versus an in-house team where you could even bring people from customer service, people from production like you mentioned i imagine that could be a really productive internal session in their context yeah as well i think like it's interesting because a great idea can come from anyone yeah and like it can literally be anyone like sometimes it's like the ignorance that brings the great idea because otherwise you're so deep in the problem that you don't see it yeah 100 % like just new eyes on it and like it's the strategist job to steer the overall strategy and the testing and like align it to let's say you're in a you're in a testing phase where you're testing a specific persona it's like if someone comes with an idea then how does that fit into your strategy and like that's where you know you have to own the role as a creative strategist but like the idea can come from anyone and I think that's something as well like in terms of talking about improvement for creative strategies I no one in our department has this but like put your ego aside like be willing to accept like an idea can come from anywhere and like you might not always have the best idea for the ad.

18:52Yeah, the meta algorithm is humbling. I always say that. Like joining the company, I said it to Slaski the other day, I was like, I was humbled. Like I came in, like quite immediately humbled, but like that's the best way to learn. You can spend ages on this perfect concept and you can make like this two minute note and it's like, that'll take all the spend. There's an example of that, even with like, I won't say which brand, but like there was a D2C Diaries. if you're a founder come on this show because you're not just getting you're not just getting the the the the content you're getting a free ad you know if you're if you're part of the if your brand works with us like i clicked that ad and that was the best performer in the account for like i think it still is i think that's happened multiple times so like yeah yeah the other the other type of you talk about like intentional brainstorming the other type that i'm a really big fan of is and i think again like we spoke a bit about this in the car like creative strategists um sometimes suffer with like complexity bias because i think it is a very complex thing and it can it's very easy to overthink it whereas you know really the great creative strategist simplify something down to its core identify a clear constraint and then reverse engineer the steps steps to solve that that the biggest constraint that's going to drive the most impact and i think the one thing that i've started doing more which is super valuable is what is the biggest constraint from like a data standpoint that we need to solve right now within the ad account and just as an example let's use um hit rate on a type of creative so let's say it was ugc if we've identified that as the biggest priority constraint that we want to solve actually intentionally setting up sessions around brainstorming for that one thing and asking questions in advance of that session for people to think about and I'm really I really like directional questions before you go into team meetings because it actually means that people have an opportunity to think through um or do some prep work around that that that area of focus before coming into the call whereas I think a lot of the time you come into those calls whether it's a team meeting for your brand or a brainstorming session and you know no one's really done any prep and as a result it's not as valuable as it can be but if you that really kind of helps align the team to like what that ultimate constraint that we're looking to solve at that point is and that focused attention like really compounds yeah I love that I think some of my best sessions have come from like when I speak to people it's like prefacing what the problem is before going into the conversation um so I would definitely I would definitely do that more I think we can even do that a bit more moving forward now that I'm thinking about it but like I always say don't ask me to be creative on the spot because like it's just so difficult when like you have to be creative without inspo and like or even thinking about what the problem is so yeah I'm definitely a big fan of like having that time to prep I think that's that's a really interesting point again from doing this this recent analysis of the conversations we're having with new clients so many of them are finding it hard to understand what that constraint is so it's even even spending time to really go a little bit deeper into the process not looking at the creative output as a as like a aggregate like bucketing out your creative into formats looking at different stages of the funnel from unaware to most aware figuring out what what needs to change and where that where that where the process is falling down i think that's the biggest problem that that we're encountering is brands that aren't able to connect like volume of output to the right strategy to create the impacts say the biggest like sub-factor of that is just that like upper funnel creative like too much focus on lower funnel needing to move up the funnel towards problem aware i feel like that's been one of the big like shifts over the last sort of 18 months how have you kind of approached that from a strategy perspective because i think that'll really that's a problem that a lot of people watching i think are facing i always say that is that is the hardest part of this role 100 is like every brand now like when you look at what they want it is that incremental reach is unknocking that new audience um and he always always easier said than done that's that's always the biggest challenge because like there's this idea that creative can just like instantly unlock a new audience i think that's just not it's not accurate because like you have to look at the brand and the full funnel as well like you know if your brand that looks really female orientated but then you want me to go and target men it's just not feasible so like for my job it is to like also look at the entire brand and like get a real understanding of like not just like where the biggest market audience is like that's what people love to say is like get me data on like where the biggest segment is and who we can target it's like well who would fit your brand the most and like who does who does your brand really speak to it's like what variables are available for me what levers are available for me to pull based on the product proposition in the brand because exactly that like you say you can't force something towards an audience that's just not going to buy the product yeah and i think a lot of brands try and brute force their way into into a new audience which just doesn't always work and like it is my job to reduce that risk and and make sure we're targeting like i know you like saying the lowest hanging fruit essentially but it is like targeting the audience that i think will you know land rather than targeting someone like that just is the biggest market segment and the way to do that there's no easy answer it's just really heavy deep research which is where i'm going to mention probably for the first time this podcast the book i've mentioned this to you so many times deep work cal newport massive fad um i think like if you could apply that level of like deep work that's probably the best way to unlock and that's more of a soft skill than like an intentional thing you can just go and set but like it's locking yourself away and like doing research so deep that until something just clicks we're like this is this is the audience and this angle makes the most sense to to like match the uh the product to the to the person so yeah like reducing distractions and not jumping between 10 different tasks at once so yeah that cow newport is the the debug is very much like every everything that isn't distraction free work is a distraction and can pull from your your mental load so like if you tap to a slack message that's going to take a little bit out of you or like you lose focus so like the idea is to like set almost like a timer and like he says in the book you can only get four hours of uninterrupted deep work a day like that's what we're capable of as a human so like that shows you like the power of it even if you can do an hour of that two hours of that it's like really pushing your cognitive abilities to like like max levels and that's where i find the best work is done which is why in the office i lock myself away all the time yeah it just disappears yeah i think people have a really big misconception of how much of that type of work they do it's like when you sat i tested this for myself i've been watching alex on mosey video where he starts a timer every time he starts a task and then when he gets pulled away from the task he'll stop it and track how much time he actually allocates to to completing something in full and it was it was like a quarter of what you actually yes relative to the time that you actually spend really hard to get that time it's actually also in the book it does say there are a few exceptions and founders are actually one of them so i don't know if it's surprised to you guys but it did say like there is a few exceptions to that rule you can just operate through those messages i'm not one of them i know i can't i've like a message throws me off so i'm like i need to like just hose it or like not look or set time away where I can like no I'm not going to be interrupted or nothing's like coming up on the schedule I think the the point you make on deep work again like shows that balance of like leveraging AI to generate context to pull to pull like data together but you still need to spend that time to interpret that data consume it and then you obviously pull out like direct insights but when i've gone through this process you also start to form like nuanced understanding of like the broader context which those insights sit within so an example would be like prioritization how that like how the data just by reading through it can allow you to form an understanding of like which personas should be the priority like what's showing up more than than what which type of person which pain point which objection is showing up the most and then you can layer that into strategy and i think that's a really important point um that that i think many strategists are missing is like just trying to automate that process yeah i think it comes back to like why i i think ai is just like the biggest opportunity to become a great creative strategist because there will be such a large portion of people who just accept the output as as what it is or gloss over it and like if you can integrate that that level of deep work alongside the ai output that's like i think what will drive the best results and that's a really good example and i do look for things like that when i'm looking through reports or like things that ai generates like it's those things that are factual that it reports on like the percentage of your ads in the top um the top eight ads in the last 30 days that target this one persona like that's factual and that's something you can now create as an insight and build off of versus something like i don't know i've had some weird outputs from ai where i'm like that's not right is influencer marketing the most unpredictable line item in your budget big month dead month big month dead month you feel like you never know what's actually coming the brands winning at this have stopped doing one-off influencer campaigns they've built a system instead seeding new influencers converting the best ones to affiliates and retaining the top performers.

28:54This way, your pipeline never stops and revenue gets predictable. To build that system, you need a platform. That's Saral. Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship all in one place without all of that chaos. 200 plus brands, including Grunz, SoulWave, SpaceGoods, and many more are running their influencer programs on Saral. If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to getsaral.com slash demo and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you and you'll get your$500 discount and white glove onboarding. I think it's an interesting point and I think you've got a great example, case study of where you've done this really, really well from kind of refreshing that research and resetting the strategy when maybe it wasn't going in the right direction.

29:41And I think we saw for one of your brands like a dip in, you know, incremental reach and also hit rate had quite heavily declined. And I think this case study was that, I think you, was it doubled or tripled the hit rate in like 30 days? The definition got changed, but we had a really great month where it was like eight times what it previously was. And I think most people, let's say that that was the case, they would probably think two things. There's not enough volume and we just need to throw more at the wall, which isn't like that is invalid. Sometimes that is the case, but wasn't necessarily the case here um or that it from a hit rate standpoint oh we need to do loads of big elaborate big swings because uh it's the vehicle that isn't working whereas actually what was super interesting was your the the approach of going into the psychology of the messaging which was a big part of it talk a bit through you know when you identified that problem the steps that you took to get that back on track yeah yeah i remember it so well um i remember the first thing I did like immediately after like once I had that realization was message the CS hub it was like a straight message in there to get to get thoughts and then after that I just sat down and had like a really I guess you could call it deep work session just like a really like thorough thought out process and like it's like you said clarity and like there's comfort and clarity and like I didn't want to change a huge amount of things one because like it's hard to be intentional when you change loads of different things.

31:16And then also, if I'm communicating this to a client, I think there's nothing worse than someone coming and throwing like 10 different ideas at you to try and improve a strategy. So I focused on two really key things in terms of what I changed for this. And one was the micro personas, which at the time was like really fresh on my mind with that piece and training we did internally. And the other was the psychology messaging, which I first got onto through Sarah Levenger. and that whole article. And it was interesting because you talk about frameworks, everyone wants to change the frameworks. I feel like frameworks, you see what works in an account and usually those frameworks don't change too much.

31:55And you can have big swings outside of that. But in my experience, you know what frameworks work and just changing the framework isn't necessarily going to work. And the most interesting part to me on that was we changed the micro persona targeting, we changed the messaging and then I created like a tracking system to try and track all of those those those mentioned changes and talk just so if people aren't aware like talk about quickly what what is a micro persona what is the psychological messaging piece yeah um god where to start for ages on these um I guess micro persona like you've probably described the best way it's like a subcategory of um like a macro persona so like you use the example of you and Ollie being maybe being falling under the same bucket but like being two different people with two different interests so yeah one another example of micro personas is the two different mums that are buying protein cereal for their kids could be that they the child's having too much sugar and they it's almost their biggest fear is their child being unhealthy whereas for another parent their biggest fear isn't necessarily their child being unhealthy but it might be other what what other mums might think of them and their parenting technique so you're tapping into two different types of fears with the same type of person yeah i think i mean for me and like if any creative strategist is watching i would say like just really focus on like try and picture a real person you know is like the easiest way i would describe to do it because i think it's like you said just just for the purpose of clarity like you can get really deep in these micro personas and start listing out desires what they watch and like just picture someone you know and then speak to them like that for me is like the clarity piece that that helps with micro personas um and like the example that of one that did really well was like so niche it's like a squash player um and like the pain point was like need um and that just resonated so it's like you're it's like you can trust meta you can trust meta to deliver the right creative to the right person now like that's that's the level it's at i think that creative was an incredible example of persona driven creative and the importance of that because um when maxim the creative strategist at meta came on the show he said about you know andromeda is the smartest uh librarian they uh they they know what every book in the library what's on every page and every word of every page and that's andromeda and i think if you are too broad with your messaging and not specific enough then meta aren't going to have the triggers to be able to know or the signals to be able to know where to put that whereas what i thought when i looked through those that creative is you not only set your micro persona splits and really truly understood what they were but it was so obvious within the creative and one of them was just a static wasn't it but you knew in that static from the quote i think it was one of the story ads wasn't it you knew how old he was that he loved playing squash and you know it but it was done in a very authentic way like he was talking himself but that was like a really genius way of like giving meta the signal so it knew where to send that creative yeah and and i guess if you look in that account as well like statics traditionally are also bottom of funnel there so that when you get an ad like that that tells a story in a static format and reaches a new audience it's super exciting because it's like we didn't rely on an offer we didn't rely on like really bottom of funnel static creators we created a story spoke to a specific person and we saw like an incremental gain through targeting a new persona so that's like probably the most rewarding part of uh of creative strategy is like it's the hardest part but like when you find that that new persona it's like yeah you feel over the moon um and then i guess the second piece was was the messaging and again where do you start with that like i i would say the most i guess to give a top-down view of like the the messaging the most interesting one to me was like just valences and to like put it as simply as possible high valence messaging is like super positive versus low valence messaging, which can be like negative.

36:12And then you have like middle grounds between them. Then you have like language intensity, which is like something I'm really interested in and like have been using it as a way to like unify production and like design and edit. So low intensity language is like, you have high intensity language, which is like super direct response, more salesy. And then you have low intensity language, which is like the complete opposite almost like almost to the point of unscripted and like like those yapper ads yeah and like if i if i put low intensity language in the concept i let the production team know like let them rift a little bit let them go off off topic and like um have a discussion with this versus like if it's super high intensity language then likely we have like a more direct response sales script that we want them to hit key points on and it's like crucial they follow um but generally speaking the higher the funnel you go so if you're trying to unlock that new that new level of growth you've got to be comfortable with letting your creators rift a bit more and almost look like just look like something that's in their feed and like that builds what what Sarah Levenger called trust equity so you really want that all that kind of stuff top of funnel um and like the most interesting change I saw was actually with the valences uh and I think we're seeing a shift in this like over all ads at the moment like I guess it's like a pendulum like things swing and go back one way uh positive aspirational messaging just works better and like i think coming when i joined the agency was very much like this direct response style of like problem agitation quite like more towards the negative side and then i think we're just at a point where people are scrolling at night and they don't want to see something super negative like they want to see depending on your demographic and audience they want to see something that like is positive and can have a positive impact on their life and is more aspirational and that shift in messaging for a specific persona was also like a great lift in performance and we had quite a few winners just for changing from a negative to a positive message so like really like sometimes like yeah i guess that clarity piece it's not about reworking and changing everything it's about simple shift yeah and i think the um you you can do this with your own ad account like if you connect the meta api to claude you can actually do like a valence gap analysis.

38:33So you can see, I mean, it's super interesting, isn't it? You just see where the gaps are in those valence zones. And I think if you're not tapping into a certain zone, that's a real opportunity that you can speak to a different type of person. Or alternatively, hit the link below when we will complete a creative intelligence report. We will run the analysis for you. It was really good. I actually, that's where I built most of my insights from. And like, you can go into the account and look yourself and I mean an easy iteration if you've got a top performer that's that's super negative and you've got control over the creative and who made that ad just get them to film it again in a different tone and run it as an iteration and see if it performs I think a lot of people are hesitant to do that sort of depth of analysis because I think it's more complex but I do think it's where we're finding a lot of wins deep work yeah yeah I think it's easier to look at like person you're targeting way that how the creative looks it's a little bit more complex and more difficult to go into like how we're actually saying the message but I think it's providing a lot of those unlocks massively I really liked what you said as well about you know pick your variables because I think I see this a lot with brands where performance for a couple of weeks isn't how they want and they literally reset the whole strategy every part of that strategy and everything changes.

39:56And as a result, you don't really know what variables are impacting that change. But I think what was really interesting there and what I'm really bullish on as well is, you know, with that, you very much focused in on the persona and the messaging. But, you know, to heighten your chances of success, you actually use vehicles or frameworks in the account have already proven to work. So it's one heightening your, you know, the chance that it will work because you're not testing the framework, you're testing the messaging and the persona, but you're not then changing every variable because if you did the persona and the messaging and then just put a brand new big swing in there that you'd never tested before then if that didn't work you'd blame all three massively yeah it's complex and um that's why i'm like really really keen to always like systematically test things and give everything a fair chance and like not like never test too many things at the same time i'm really strict on that and like even if a great idea comes in i'm like does it fit into this this batch of strategy if not amazing idea let's park it and like find a place where we can fit it in otherwise you're ruining the testing and it's all about you don't want to spoil data like you you want your data to be as accurate as possible because that's driving your strategy always i think that shows us like a really high level of competency in an area um because i and you mentioned it earlier like i think you said the worst thing you can do for a client is to give them a lot like 10 things that they could do and I think that is the difference between like real high-level domain expertise is is that spending more time thinking about the problem understanding the problem selecting the right solution or the right things to test in the right order rather than just starting to throw things at a wall so yeah I would say like for those listening right yeah prioritization is just so so important like in its simplest form just get into the habit of creating uh just putting your priorities against an ICE framework, which is impact, confidence and ease and give them all a score out of five.

41:54Because at least then, you know, you're using some kind of framework that will help give direction on how to prioritise best. Yeah, that ICE framework, it's a good way to force yourself to think about it as well. Because like you're ranking it yourself. You have to be accountable for it. Yeah. I think the frameworks is just such a good example of it though. Like people just varying frameworks all the time. I know we've kind of gone into lots of different areas What I'd love to do is firstly just go rewind back a little bit and go back to, okay, what was your journey? Where were you before going into creative strategy?

42:30And then what I would really like to touch on is why you think you've been able to grow really quickly as a creative strategist and going into some of those soft skills that people need. If they're listening to this now and either struggling or want to get into it or they're listening on behalf of their team and they've got a strategist that works for them, they can get something out of that. Yeah, that's a big question. For my background, I was previously, I mean, if you run the clocks back a long time ago, I was actually in finance with an accounting degree and actually worked in that role for a little bit, which is really funny to look back now.

43:05but then I went into copywriting for a long period of time primarily on retention so it was very much on the back end but had always like had interest in full funnel and had some like involvement in ads or looking in ads previously with Oli actually about three years ago now and then coming into that the creative strategy role I mean I've been thinking about like what what drove that improvement over over the last year and I think you you said in your other one about the creative strategy is curiosity is number one I'd have to put it there like I came in just super curious and wanted to learn and was became a little bit obsessed and still have in some ways with the role and like I think you need that and then like I guess some extra ones that just just on the curiosity piece before we move on from that like if someone's listening and they're like, I don't feel like I'm naturally that curious, or I don't know where to look to be curious and absorb, because you are just like a sponge, you love absorbing information.

44:10You know, you go, you do lots of different things that really demonstrate that curiosity, as well as starting your own newsletter as a way to force reflection. And then by writing down what you learned from, you know, whatever it was that you were going through with your creative strategy, it kind of instills it into your brain so what where where can people go what can people do to maybe kind of train curiosity yeah that's hard i i would say i became a lot more curious once i was in the role so like that's hard obviously not the greatest advice for someone who's not in the role but like once you're in it like everything everything changed for me i was i need to like know this more i'm super competitive extremely competitive and like when your ads go live in an account if they're not doing well you're like fuck i just wanted to figure out like becoming obsessed with like why some work why things don't what variables are impacting that so if you can't i would say join communities as well like if you can't get get in the role start in a community there's there's loads online that you can find um i'm also willing to chat about creative strategy pretty much 24 7 so feel free to reach out i speak to a lot of people about creative strategy but curiosity you do have to there is like a part of it you just need to be naturally curious what about like where people can go to absorb like where do you learn I know you learn a lot in the role but are there things you absorb outside of the role that have helped you yeah there's quite a few people I mean D2C Diaries obviously I have to say but yeah there's loads of YouTube channels and like Dara Denny comes to mind Sarah Levinger like there's loads of people on LinkedIn I quite like the old school copywriters as well because I think there's so much you can take from that they didn't have access to all the tools and AI that we do now and looking at the way they used to get research done is such a good way to understand some things you can do outside of just using AI or googling things getting really stuck in through conversation so that's a bit more on the research point I think the community point you mentioned is really actionable I also think that's even more important if you're a creative strategist watching this and you're in a brand where you're not able to benefit from depth of context like you are in an agency setting.

46:29I'd definitely encourage people to look at that. I think the point you mentioned on more traditional marketing channels, so direct mail, I'm assuming you mean direct mail, some of the long form, like you're looking at Rolls Royce, Rolex, copy. there's a lot of courses VSL courses I think they're really nice examples of how the role is like fundamentals as much as trend there's so much you can take from those long form sales letters like if you look at an ad like I mean first of all through storytelling like those direct response pieces are just the best at telling stories if you read just a few of them and then like when you look at ads there's so much translation between an old school direct response copy whether it's just like the format and like the structure of it is like repeated.

47:17It's like where we build a lot of our initial ad stuff from and things are changing through like, you know, more authentic top of funnel content, but like there's so many actionable things you can take from those. I loved in your interview where you were like, I've saved hundreds of emails just with great copy. Yeah. I just like go back on. You need a swipe. That was like the OG. I mean, we've got foreplay and lens that you can store on your ad inspo. I mean, I've got ad inspo all over the place. I need to collate it, I think. Because I go on Foreplay, but also you've got some in your Instagram group chats, you've got some in different channels.

47:56They're everywhere. Yeah, nice. So in terms of anything else there in terms of those soft skills, you mentioned obviously curiosity. Definitely. There's a few more. There's two more that really come to mind and empathy is definitely one of them. I think if you look across like the strategy, the creative strategy department now, you just have a group of really empathetic people. And essentially the important thing about that is that you understand emotion and you can really like when you're doing research and when you're targeting someone, you can really relate to a problem. And if you can't, customer call.

48:31You need to be able to like understand these problems. And I think that empathy piece has helped me do that. and the other one is definitely communication and I think the more senior you go in this role the more important communication is going to be I think if you're in an agency even if you're in house at a brand if you can't communicate your strategy why you want to test something you're just you can have the best idea ever it would just fall on flat ears and then now if you go even more senior and like you're a leader of a department you now have to unify not just your editors and designers and prod team you might have junior creative strategists or execs that are working with you who all need to be aligned under one strategy and if you can't communicate clearly and concisely the strategy would just be less effective because then at some point it's getting diluted as you're briefing it and then again spoiled data yeah nice so what someone listening now and they want to get into this job or they want to get into creative strategy where do they start well i think like i said this is the best time to become a creative strategist the barrier to entry in terms of like a junior role i'd imagine people are looking for those soft skills you've said it you've said it yourself like people who have curiosity people have grit people who are passionate um showcasing that is like a high a high like is a great like a great way to get into the role um any courses you can do any communities you can be part of um being as active as possible I think something like if I was to go back to day one and start again and have to get this role, I would like collate as much ad inspo as possible.

50:09And I would also start probably creating my own ads. You can go on Gemini, brief it in ad idea and it will create static ads for you. All right, you're not a designer, but you can get it to a place and you can bring that to any interview you're doing and say like, I've created you know 10 statics for this brand and like based off of the inspa I've seen and just like put pure passion and showcase that I love I love that idea and I think yeah the we spoke about this on the episode about you know how we train creative strategists um we'll put the link down below for that if you've not seen it but like that that thing of just doing the reps yeah you know I think theory is great and like you have to learn the theory but like we've got quite an in-depth training program when you join the role and i think everyone as they go through it is a little bit overwhelmed because of just how many different things there are but then as soon as it's like you know trust me as soon as you actually start doing it and then just getting the reps in it will become second nature and i think that is like a really good point i think now especially with things like ads library uh meta ads library which is obviously public and now you can actually sort by impressions um and i've i've tested this as well and like a lot of the highest impression ads that you see on the ads library usually the top performers at that point so like go to like your favorite brands sort by top impressions if you're not in a setting where you have access to any form of ad account and i would say like download all of the video download five videos per brand of the top five impressions and get 30 of them and then transcribe their scripts and firstly like study why those scripts have worked and reflect on maybe why they performed and then just like rewrite them and recreate scripts and i know it's a technique sam par uses doesn't he he uses it with the old letters so that's one of the ways to you can do that with the letters as well as like rewriting those reinterpreting them yeah exactly and i think that that piece of just doing doing reps and action is like a big way to it because um i remember I've been in my like third week at the company definitely struggling at the time and I remember you guys was it the pace so um pace I mean for me I did come from a completely different role um so it was a lot of new aspects and I think for me it was more so probably something I had to let go of as being a perfectionist which I know everyone says in there there is people like I really like hated the idea of messing up and you're just gonna like you're gonna again you how did I improve so quickly?

52:40I ate dirt. Like I messed up. Like I took those learnings though and then improved. But like I hated the idea of messing up and I think that was the hardest pill to swallow when I joined. And I remember you saying, just get the reps in, just get the reps in. And like, it's just funny to hear it now, a year later. It's true though, right? Yeah, that was the main thing. The speed of the feedback loop is one of the best parts of the role, I think. Like it's instant, almost instant feedback. that you can pick up and move forward with. In an agency, it's even faster. If you're in-house, you definitely get multiple accounts in an agency as well.

53:16So it's like you're getting multiple feedback loops from different places at the same time. Yeah, that was definitely a big part of that speed of improving. What are the three big mistakes you think junior strategists are making in the role? Yeah, very specific. I think when I look back to a year ago now, and what was I doing, which I'd probably face palm a little bit, they're not they're not terrible mistakes but it's like are you just being reactive are you is your whole batch like is your sprint just like a spread like if you if you zoomed out and looked at your campaign what what is the the ad data going to tell you and I think looking back and maybe for most juniors it won't tell you much and then when you go into the next sprint like if you haven't tested anything properly intentionally you might have some I think there was always a level of intention but it's how intentional and how unspoilt you can get that data and I think I was definitely guilty of like trying to target too many different things in one batch and then actually going forward into the next one without without any any real takeaways that were like as meaningful and that's definitely probably one of the biggest ones I'd say and then like again we spoke about this is like if you see like a big swing idea instead of just plopping it straight in it's like does that fit into my macro strategy for this like next three month sprint or like is there a hypothesis yeah is there a reasoning behind doing this or is it just a big swing like the yeah i would say definitely hypothesizing and like that macro strategy piece is like where i think juniors or even like when i look back a year ago where the developing needs i'd the third i think spending too much time in competitor art libraries just 10 % of your time rather than just you that's like something I hear a lot even from founders they're like I don't want to look at our competitors I think it's got a place but I think it's doing competitor research I'm going to do a video on this I think over the weekend it's doing it right it's not looking at isolated assets it's looking at patterns across a broad range of ads that then can inform elements of your strategy not inform one ad execution which I think brands are just doing wrong it's like they're just pulling a concept from one business and whapping it into their ad account I read something about that actually the other day I think you don't have to be the first to do something like you can if you can do it in a much better way like there's two types of like really I guess like if you're looking at like a high level creative strategist the one that does that deep research and discovers the brand new unique mechanism and the new angle and the new persona themselves and then there's the other one who's like nearly equally successful and they don't do that but they'll copy it and do it in a way which is better and still yield the same if not better results so like sometimes it's not about being the first to test something but like just doing it in the best way possible yeah it's still like an artist yeah exactly so where final question from me where do you see creative strategy in two years oh god i think about this a lot it's it's so hard like this i've never seen industry just move so quickly so like you you never really know i i think with obviously ai becoming like more prevalent in the role i think that that quote keeps coming to mind it's like stuck in my head forever if you gave me six hours to chop down a tree i spent four hours sharpening the axe and then two hours on the execution i think ai is obviously taking that execution um and it's getting better and better you know as the days go by so i see it more of like if you're i mean depends on what level of creative strategist you are if you're junior i see it being more stuck in in more of like the weeds of like honing that that execution from ai and and like maybe giving oversight on the ai execution but that high level strategist role i imagine is going to be spend doing deep work and that deep work will look like research really specific research and insights that can't be obtained by AI.

57:15And there's a few examples of that that I had in mind. And one was the Gary Ben-Savenger. He did a sales ad on olive oil. And he had this really unique take of he had this idea of when he went and saw the olive oil being created, it was freshly pressed. And he created a whole ad campaign around that specific unique mechanism and did an us versus them and it crushed it. The other example is maybe like, maybe that's not the best one um joseph sugarman's one where he went and spent like three days in the laboratory trying to sell a digital watch and then it wasn't until he asked the the creator of it why hasn't this been done before and his answer was they hadn't had the technology the laser technology to steal a digital watch without it leaking and then he created this whole ad around that laser patented technology and like that you that insight's so unique and that's that's to tie it back is what I see creative strategies doing is finding these really unique research pieces and discovering you know people who that would then relate to so much more like research driven at that top level and then maybe a bit more AI and and having oversight over that at a lower level yeah yeah completely agree and I also think you know we were speaking about this in the car as well but i think the lines are going to keep becoming more and more blurred between growth strategy and creative strategy like the best creative strategists understand the full growth ecosystem or pillars slash levers that you can pull it's not that you have to be an absolute expert in post-click or funnel or distribution um but you know being able to consult and strategically guide a brand through not only just being tunnel vision on pre-click and the creative itself but how that fits into the wider growth ecosystem i think is going to become more and more key yeah yeah massively and like i think that's where the copywriting background helps a little bit because like especially being in-house an e-commerce brand previously you are thinking of that funnel even if you're on retention you you're always thinking of like that customer journey and how everything aligns and the messaging between it.

59:32I can definitely see more of that coming in. Yeah, I enjoyed your growth strategy actually the other day. I need more of that. I definitely think that's going to be a more important part of it. I think we're seeing the fragmentation of the funnel. I think we've seen the fragmentation of ad creative across many personas and now we're going to start seeing that through the customer journey more and more. I think the top 1 % of brands are already doing it, but you only have two to three minutes and even in the longest top of funnel ads to get a message over. A lot of the time, I think it needs that step page and I just think the competency level around that area just is nowhere near as great as it is in creative but I think it's going to progress a lot over the next 12 months.

1:00:15Can you think of any, so this might put you on the spot. Brands that are doing it well. Yeah, a really good example. IM8 are doing it really well at the moment. Loop earplugs, pine patches. they're three, so we've actually got funnel breakdowns on them all. We'll put the links below. Yeah, loops nuts just in terms of the persona diversity. I need to have a look. And some, I really, I think you mentioned copywriting, but even when you look at the concept of an advertorial and sit that next to some of those long form letters, like they are very similar, right? It's like you're, you're, you're telling a story in a similar format, just a digital version, which I think is super interesting.

1:00:53I need to send one over to you. Baddy sent me one of the best advertorials I've seen it just read so well I need to send it over I'll have a look well yeah thanks do you want to do the outro? thanks for coming on Chris really appreciate the insights I'm sure that's been fascinating for brand owners, creative strategists alike, where can people find you, where can people download the newsletter? thank you for having me, this is really exciting especially because I came on I feel like I came on as a fan

1:01:31no it's been a lot of fun I'm on LinkedIn I don't even remember my handle which is awful put it in the description below I'll put it in the description and obviously my sub stack is copy Chris once every two weeks I try and drop a newsletter on anything creative strategy anything that's on my mind very unfiltered just probably tidy it up a little bit but yeah that's where you'll find me. I'm real, mate. Well, thank you so much. I think it's been super valuable getting your perspective. And yeah, if you'd like this episode, please give it a like, subscribe, and we'll see you on the next one.