Reinventing Creative Strategy with AI: Alex Cooper

0:00Even if it's really annoying to play with, it's still a really good use of your time or your team's time to get good at prompting in a tour like this because it's just a very defensible skill set.

0:20we're back with another episode of ddc diaries um back with alex cooper who how do we first meet it was a long long time ago wasn't it it was actually an agency event i think it was an agency 2019 i think it was we were both like two young fresh-faced kids um yeah we were both at that event we got on really well and then i don't think we saw each other or heard from each other for probably what three years until we were just cooking in the background and then i just i remember just seeing you pop up on twitter and i was just like i recognize this yeah that's the same thing i had i was like there's no is that the same guy from the agency event i was like no way yeah yeah and you dm me didn't you and i was like no um but yeah thank you for joining us today um we are really excited to get into to all things creative strategy if you don't know alex he's probably one of the most prolific um i would is guru the right words operator in the space in terms of ai and creative strategy um but maybe just for viewers who don't know who you are give a little bit of a um give a bit of the origin story and we'll we'll get into some stuff yeah so my name is alex cooper and i run a performance creative agency called ad create and i basically describe myself as you know living in the intersection between ai and creative strategy uh i'm a very curious uh you know tangentially ai forward and ai skeptical person uh and uh my agency uh as you guys do runs creative for uh e-commerce brands um so yeah that's been my life for the last couple years i feel like you've really taken over that that intersection like the main influencer sounds like the right word ai ai influencer in the creative game yeah i mean i don't know i'm just curious uh i love ai like i genuinely am like such an ai nerd i have like almost 100 custom gpt's uh uh and like you know just i'm just i just know it out about many hours with the robot way too many um it won't be long until i have an ai girlfriend do you see that there was a picture went viral of that guy on the train talking to one in London.

2:34Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. I actually saw a Gary Vee, um, video where, and this is good. This is absolutely not related. It's always supposed to be talking about Gary Vee video about, um, uh, about, you know, how he thinks that all of our grandkids can have girlfriends. And like, I think he might be right, but like, when that, when you can plug in these elements into a physical robot who looks like your, your favorite influencer, your favorite, uh, yeah, it's going to be, terrible for society but i can already feel the our attention chart dropping as i'm talking about this uh because people didn't come over this so i should probably talk about career strategy yes no we love it that's what the audience love to hear it's a good clip um but yeah i think we load of stuff we want to get into today obviously want to touch on i think a lot of brands that listen to this podcast that are trying to build creative teams internally i think you've done an incredible job at that how you nurture your strategists um is a great is amazing to see we can definitely get into that but i think what i'd love to just start with is what are you seeing working right now in terms of ads on on meta and tiktok yeah i mean there's a lot um that we could go for there's more like tactical like formats we can go through and then kind of less trendy uh more timeless principles that i'm seeing working ad accounts if i think about like what formats um that i'm liking i'm seeing at the top ad accounts at the moment i've heard you guys talking about the like wall of text videos where you just have like some b-roll of someone i don't know drinking a coffee or like working on their laptop and then just a big paragraph of text uh over the top of those and i i love those because you can test messaging so quickly and like sometimes we run those with like 10 15 variations and they are they absolutely murder for digital products i didn't think they'd be as effective for e-commerce brands but we've actually had quite a few winners uh in e-com accounts uh using those wall of text videos started as like a tiktok trend that didn't it really started with like just people on tiktok doing it it's a good example of where you can take something that's worked organically and just pull it into performance yeah i always just think it's like taking existing people try and reinvent the world too often i think that's actually one of the things i see strategists do more than not if they come into like our business they they think they have to come with these big crazy big swing creative ideas all the time but like a lot of the time it is literally just taking messaging that's working and applying it to a different format i think that's a great example of it like taking literally a script that has worked well obviously a condensed version and putting it with the wall of text on the screen and you guys know better than anyone like how many times have you taken something that's worked in one account for one brand and then taking it to a completely different industry recreated it and same uh same results and this is why like i really encourage strategists uh like today like if there's one thing you can do today like become an absolute hoarder of top performing ads like collect as many reference points into your foreplay board uh as possible because especially with the way that AI is going I'm sure we can get into that as well like the value over the next 12 24 months is not going to be in like the skill of creating ads itself but in knowing what to create and I just think the more the more you can absorb to top performing ads from different industries from different types of audiences the more like the better position you're in when you're on a new account or you work with a new brand to go oh i remember this consulting call that i did three years ago or i remember this other account that was actually a different industry but like i can see how i could take that uh message instruction i could apply it to this account so 100 yeah like so bullish on that and just just context engineering isn't it like how pulling those best performers you know putting them into google air studios building it into a framework and putting it in a database um and it's just yeah not something that people are leaning into enough yeah um so the wall of text videos i'm liking uh actually vo hooks uh we're seeing doing very well right now we've done a couple of full vo videos uh and it's too late to to uh set the performance maybe you guys have done more and have more insight but like for the most part i'm seeing the value add of vo to be uh creating in the same way to image gen i think intentionally unrealistic yeah it was hooks um so you know work with a socks brand it's like uh you know they i they put their uh like they put a foot in like an ice bucket or just like they put like we had another one was like a knee like it was joint pain and the knee was on fire like things that you wouldn't be able to shoot uh it's just so easy to prompt inside of vo now and you get like a three four second clip i've seen a lot of those hooks at the top of our accounts but yeah videos are another topic that i'm sure we can get into but uh yeah i'm i'm liking a lot of those at the moment as well yeah i think that's interesting i think yeah like as you say it's how can you like take a hook and apply almost a visual crazy obscure metaphor yeah um on top of that taking it from like a five out of ten to a ten out of ten in terms of visual like dynamic how dynamic the hook is sure yeah so just why why we're on the topic vo3 videos as a whole because we were speaking a bit about this before um and we're kind of seeing the same like early days obviously but still nowhere near close to competing um with you know low prod or even high prod um videos what what what's your hypothesis around that right now as to why that maybe isn't quite hitting hitting where it needs to uh because we're still so early like usually i mean typically in ai means i say typically there's not really too much precedent but like video seems to follow whatever developments happen in image by about 12 to 18 months so like when image gen came out early this year i think to myself like the equivalent video gen is probably We're not going to be here till 2026, midway through 2026.

8:32I was caught off guard. Like, I mean, like many of the releases in AI this year, I didn't think something like this would be here this early. So we're still incredibly early. My take on this though, is that like, I mean, again, I am very AI bullish, but I do believe that most, if not all creative will be done in a tool like VO within 24 months. So even if you don't think the tool is there yet today, which is not, even if it takes a lot of time even if it's tedious even if it's really annoying to play with it's still a really good use of your time or your team's time to get good at prompting in a tool like this because it's just a very defensible skill set uh well if anything is a defensible skill set and ai uh but like you know i think this is how creative is going to be made in the future so even if it's a little annoying to work with right now right now we are trying to pour into our editors and pour into our strategists to get comfortable prompting uh in a tool like this because it might not be vo but something like this is how i think the vast majority of ad create will be made in the not so distant future i'm bullish on vo i'm bullish on google for anything video i just feel like they've got the context window right to win they've got the the pockets and they've got youtube yeah yeah those two things in itself like cash and youtube is like just the ultimate context like the whole of youtube oh yeah even the uh the video that you posted on on twitter the vo video you posted on twitter not too long ago like i mean some of the examples are just absolutely wild to say that imagine showing that to someone at the start of this year you're saying like this is going to be possible by june i know it's fucking crazy i've Did you see that Sidney Sweeney American Eagle ad?

10:21Is that one of your topics? Yeah. No, but she, I actually didn't validate this, but they said the car driving way at the end of that was AI because of the way that it transitioned when she was in it. They said it wasn't real. You can't prove it. Seamless. Yeah, it might have been real. But it made sense. But I think you'll see, I've seen loads of people recreating like Ikea ads and things on Twitter. I think I will start to see a lot more into mainstream TV as well soon. Yeah, there's a good follow-on to PJ Ace. He's really good. He's really good. He sells it as a service, like VR videos. And he recently was hired by Popeyes.

11:02I don't know if you saw this. McDonald's were beefing with Popeyes over something. I can't remember what it was. But basically, they hired. So Popeyes go to PJ and they say, we want you to make an ad for us. It was an NRP for Popeyes against McDonald's. And he made a rap battle, like Popeyes rap, McDonald's rap, made a rap battle against McDonald's, like a one minute ad inside a VO where it was just like, you know, Popeyes employees doing a rap battle against McDonald's and then run on McDonald's. It was just crazy. Like this is where we're at now. That's wild. Yeah, I see it changing, even just when it comes to like these very top of funnel tvc style ads like that's what he does really well yeah i almost see you know how that previously you know in that in that world and you would you would pitch a brief and then they would pick up one of the briefs and commission it to be made and then that the director and writer who pitched would would then make that yeah i feel like it's going to get to the point where you are literally creating the ad and then pitching the ad and then they they they buy the ad uh the rights to the ad and then then launch it because there was another great example where these guys i forgot their names i'll find it but in our vo3 video we we show it but they would they were just like we really wanted to do an ad for liquid death they weren't responding so we just went and did it anyway and it is so good wow that's awesome uh but like ugly is gonna follow like look at like mid-journey at the start it was all professional all super clean and now you've got like a haggles field where it's easy to generate like real looking like actual iphone shot images so you know at some point i mean it's crazy thing like you know right now there's kind of this uh cat and mouse race between ai and like human content creators and the human content creators are trying to prove then ai and ai is trying to prove it's a human content creator uh but like what happens when it gets to the point where a vo or another tool can make ads that genuinely look like ugly ads genuinely look like someone holding the phone and walking around and like the inflections and like the emotions that a real human would use i feel like there's got to be a regulatory change at some point but not in the us probably will fucking get hit by it just just feel like there's a negative there's a lot of negatives to when you can literally create infinite human-like videos reviewing products that people have never purchased before there's a lot of negative outcomes to that situation but we we were saying though like we were talking about this and there is almost no difference to that creating a fake person talking about the benefits of a product to paying a ugc creator with a script yeah i think i think there's an issue with that in itself but no one's even changed the regulation around if you if you want to play by the by the law yeah like we should all be putting disclaimers on our ugc videos yeah so you know so yeah it's like will will it force like a proper real change in that like that's never been seen before but possibly will there be ai that detects when it's made by ai yeah probably likely will you have to put watermarks on videos that are more review focused yeah or will the platforms do that automatically yeah it says this this ad was made with ai you got it yeah you meant to do that right especially in some categories in america you're meant to definitely meant to do it in like beauty and cosmetics meant to put a really big disclaimer but no one does yeah well anyway when that happens wait till the uh dropshops get a hold of it yeah that's why you're dropping that that's recently on my instagram feed so yeah they're insane so what um yeah back to back to this then what what else are you seeing working right now um so uh i've actually seen i didn't ad account review yesterday in prep for this uh i've seen quite a few like you know the tiktok response bubbles yeah i've seen quite a lot of them specifically price objections uh when someone's calling out saying like you know these socks are way too expensive like i'm never paying you know 80 for a pair of jeans uh and just like comment objection videos uh specifically when you're actually addressing the comment directly rather than just like tacking it on in post yeah to a piece of b-roll and it's like not a direct like directly but like someone who's saying um yeah so that's what i thought like i thought these were expensive initially but we've got a couple of examples of that where we've done it with the founder deodorant brand we work with where we've taken with the it's a common reply if you know who i mean um and the founders are responding to it a podcast setting with that overlay and i think that's that's definitely working well yeah um i'm seeing a lot of those i know you guys talk a lot about the kind of uh i've seen your like post-it note on the back or like message on the back of with someone walking i just think any way that you can creatively write messages on things that is visually relevant to your audience like for example we do some consulting with a um uh like a fightwear brand um in in the uk and like they wrote a message like they had a pair of gloves on the canvas and they wrote a message on the canvas with uh image gen um or we had a a dandruff shampoo where we uh were in the bathroom and we like put condensation we made condensation on the window and we wrote a message in the window like how can we visually telegraph to our audience uh that this is something for them or this is something about our product so that before i even open my mouth the creator or like whatever the message is i know that if i'm in this audience this subconsciously feels like a piece of content that's meant for me.

16:44Yeah, I saw a really good one of those with a guy where it was a fat loss supplement who just had it written all over a guy's stomach. There was one with a woman in the face as well about collagen as well. Yeah, yeah. Both of them, yeah, generated. We had a, our best performance of that is we had a, we have a neuropathy, or neuropathy. I don't know why I said that. A neuropathy supplement, and you could see why this was doing. It was someone with their foot out, and the writing was on the foot. nice um with with image gen and the product was next to it like absolutely inside the ad account yeah just any creative way to write and actually if you can like if you can get through uh the policies like image gen writing on skin uh does tend to do pretty well yeah yeah i think as well like people think because some of these concepts we're talking about like it's the whole concept is is that where everything within the ad all the whole script is written on multiple notepads or multiple whiteboards and that that is holistically the whole thing whereas i'm also seeing it work really well when you actually just because again with a creative you're re-hooking you need to re-hook the audience like every five six seconds so not necessarily having that throughout the whole creative but like when you're bringing in the benefits then we put we're putting them on paper or then we're putting it on a notepad just to almost disrupt uh the feed again and disrupt that individual from you know and increase that hold rate yeah absolutely and the cool thing is again like i'm an ai nerd so i basically outsource my entire uh life to ai uh so i would just go and like find a couple of the examples that we've been talking about on if you put them on screen or whatever um and you can just feed me to chat gbt and say my brand is this yeah i'm looking for some creative use cases to for image gen or for creative writing, give me some really creative ideas that will be visually relevant to my audience for my products.

18:39And I bet if it gives you 20 ideas, at least one or two of them will be somewhat useful. Yeah. I think VO3, when it can properly write text on a whiteboard and things like that, that will be big. I just think as soon as you can upload context, like you can on ChatGPT manually to VO3 for your own brand, it's going to just be a complete game changer. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be very interesting. So I've seen a lot of that. And then besides that, just principles that aren't as trendy and just timeless. One thing that I'm seeing in a lot of accounts this year, I don't know if you guys have seen the same, is longer ads tend to perform better.

19:19Either just longer VSL style single person podcast or double person podcast, or even what we've done many times this year is just taking uh winners and and stitching them together i remember seeing you say this and i literally sent it straight into our team chat because it's just such a simple iteration isn't it we we took like three of our winners for this popcorn brand stitching together turning it's like a five minute ad and like that has been topped the ad account for the last three months uh and it's not like when i say that people think i just we literally just uh you know put them back to back which in some cases you can but like you don't really want it to go like uh problem solution cta problem solution yeah so like obviously you have to rearrange the clips a little bit to make the story make sense like you're not really doing anything else besides that and you can create these really long engaging ads i mean we always say in time there's no such thing as an ad that's too long just an ad that's too boring um so if you can if you've got multiple winners that have proven to sell uh your products and get attention to your target audience like stack them together it's really easy um high confidence bet that you can make and they don't work every time like they've had a pretty decent success rate internally yeah i think um one thing i see you're really bullish on and we we're really bullish on internally is just really extending the setup of the problem or the education talk a bit about that because it used to be we used to be in a world where like i would hammer to our team you have to introduce the solution within five seconds or yeah we're going to get drop off yeah we actually have a couple of clients that still like insist on that really annoying like it's like we need our product i mean they're bigger brands they're like we need our product mentioned the first five seconds i'm like guys guys like i i think of it like uh i could just for the when you do it right like you're like pulling back the the crossbar it's like can we pull it back further and further and further really make people feel that pain point and the caveat to this is that some people might be watching this okay great i'm gonna do this there are certain products that you just can't do that for you've got to it's got to be a product that you can sit in the problem and make it relevant to that person fashion being an example where it's hard yeah as a category it's like so much more visual it's the usps aren't as great unless it's got a story behind the brand unless you're like a i don't know like there's a few brands i can think of but where you can really tell a story about the product the brand itself i think it's harder in that category yeah absolutely i'd like the way that i'd put it is if like if you have a product that's more visual or if you have like what we call the money shot if you have a money shot where i can see instantly like what this product is and how it benefits me then like we i mean for example we worked with a couple years ago a like a like a kitchenware brand where it it was like a collapsible uh like mug or collapsible like um bottle and like collapsible kitchenware and like just that visual of just the thing collapsing i can see in half a second uh exactly what it does and how it benefits me as a consumer same thing with fashion like if i see a guy looking great in a pair of jeans i'm like oh i can see why i would go and buy that uh so that's when i would think about bringing the product in earlier but like if you can sit in that pain point and really pull back that bow make people feel that problem um we've as at work i mean i'm sure you guys are the same like literally not introducing the product for one two three minutes in i mean look at some of the like old school vsl they don't bring the products until 30 minutes yeah um so yeah i think brands that haven't kind of cottoned on to that are the ones that are struggling to get incremental reach whenever i look in ad accounts whenever i'm auditing media buying data it's like the ones that are still stuck in that like formulaic approach to videos short 30 40 seconds yeah ada yeah and the ones where their frequency is going up the cpms are going up and it's like they're just not getting in front of new people yeah that's a great point a great reason to to make these kind of ads to hit the uh unaware problem where people yeah i think yeah it's something i see just like solution aware down for like all of the creative and i think one of probably the reasons is because it is harder to go top of funnel and keep people engaged it's like storytelling is much harder than direct response oh yeah 100 i mean i mean i'm sure you guys have the same like we've got ad accounts where we do make those kind of ads and then like another agency or like the internal team we're just gonna make bottom of funnel statics or like discount statics and then they will take up all this phone in the ad account it's like guys we need better ads from ad crates like no like can't weigh everything equally who's bringing in new eyeballs into the funnel who's hitting the people that you know weren't already you know close to buying anyway um so that's another reason for for longer ads i've seen a lot of them do on ad accounts this year massively i've seen a lot of them take a lot of spend for a long time as well i feel like they have a lot of lifespan in comparison to genuinely say right now like and this is complete just finger in the air anecdotal but like a lot of i'd say most of our big accounts like 60 70 of their top spenders right now are problem where unaware ads yeah yeah I think that's the whole I think that's how you grow meaningfully on Facebook right now if you can't unlock that for your brand it's really hard to spend consistently without your cat going up you've got to obsess about that or like partnership ads being another way you can do it quite effectively how do you guys approach it when there's not that poignant of a pain point to sit in yeah it's a really good point I think the way that I look at it is like what is the market sophistication of a product um so if you've got a skincare product that is supposed to help acne it's high market sophistication because people know there's loads of it's very saturated market there's loads of people that have that problem and therefore the way we approach that through the messaging is going to be very different to a filtered shower head which actually is solving the same problem you know hard water on the skin is really bad for but we need to educate more so around the problem rather than on the skincare side, you're more leaning into human desires and agitating around failed solutions.

25:35So I look at it in that way. But then as you say, if something doesn't have a very direct problem, it's difficult. And I think the way that you can then do it is by bringing in like really relatable stories in some form that, you know, even if it's like a funny story or something that, you know, is people can relate to on a day-to-day basis that it's like that example where someone's in a coffee shop going on a day and there it's an engaging story. So you're hooked and there's that opened curiosity loop, but it isn't necessarily going into a problem. I think, yeah, I think if you've, I think fashion, let's take fashion as an example i think yeah like i would firstly as a business if you in that i'd look introspectively at the company like have you got a founder have you got narrative that you could tell across the employees have you got unique setup like a massive warehouse that you could leverage for creative that's unique to you like what's your unique thing within the business not just product that you could maybe do storytelling around and then i think also another one is just satire I think it's always possible to tell funny stories about our products.

26:47True Classic Tea has been a really good example. That's something that's like a fucking t-shirt at the end of the day. But they've made it funny. And those ads drove the majority of their top of funnel growth for the first two years of the business. I think you could do that on Facebook now if you did it right. Yeah, absolutely.

27:07So sometimes I do consulting calls and I do get this question a lot. What format should we test and what's working right now? and like the i need to know tweet about this but like the massive massive caveat is that you guys shouldn't really be listening to us uh at the end of the day like something that i'm learning more and more it feels like even more this year but maybe it's just because i'm looking at more ad accounts um every single business is different and like there really are no best practices in advertising we work with a uh a beauty brand and they spend like they spend like 100k a day uh on um that's a huge um and their top performer like we made we did a shoot a high prod shoot um a few months ago and we made their top performer their current performer and their top performer is a a video where it's like a three minute uh tutorial and it starts off by the the lady saying hey my name's sarah and i'm a makeup artist and like if you showed me that hook or that script before we were shooting and said do you think this will work uh like objectively i don't think that's a good hook because i don't care who you are sarah like if i'm scrolling through the feed i don't i don't know about you i don't know about your products i don't know about your brand and you haven't made it immediately relevant to me and how it's going to benefit me so like i would have thought that was a bad hook but like that's a that's an ad that's spent over 400 000 dollars yeah so it's like true there are so many nuances and and like if that's it for a beauty brand we might have another another account where we've seen that single person podcasts do well and if we're a supplement brand we might find that like you know longer education like vsl style scripts tend to work well like people can post stuff online and say oh this format is working like you should try this but like ultimately you shouldn't really listen to any of us because take it as like an inspo but there are so many things that are just relevant to your brand you just have to test because uh there are really no best practices sometimes it's just the curve balls are just thrown in and something that literally goes against every rule just works yeah sometimes you can't even hypothesize why that is i think that will work because it's authority yeah that one makes a lot i think i think there's some things that are like that i think every ad account should be doing though like i think authority figures like if you do it well every time at the moment working this year as well uh like not just you just you critics and like i'm a makeup artist like hiring actual people who could actually speak authentically there's just another level of differentiation right yeah when someone can tell like oh this is actually someone who like knows what they're talking about and they can riff uh and make it sound like you know they actually know what they're talking about because they do not do know what they're talking about i think it's also something to be said that like again we are just trying to recreate the kind of content that our target audience would be watching organically and i think actually for that you know for a beauty audience they watch get ready with me's they watch people doing makeup tutorials so it's actually not crazy to do like non-hooky hooks where you're not like if you're 50 over 50 you need to try this skincare routine it's like they don't normally consume that yeah yeah so like you know it would just be like a get ready with me of just applying makeup and just talking casually exactly so it goes by Tori Center like you know visually telegraphing um before they even open their mouth and you know the fact that she's in a makeup studio and she's got a mirror with like pretty lights on it behind her like before before she's even open her mouth someone who's interested in that kind of content goes oh this might be something that's for me yeah yeah 100 percent um anything else before we move on to what's not working I mean I think we could want to add one more go on lo-fi statics like low just like lo-fi statics like stories like in post-it notes not so much anymore but like the new it's they're just crushing when done well and they're so low impact so low effort do you mean like lo-fi statics with like the instagram story editing yeah yeah like then frames edited over it like using native text that you could make in platform yeah like super simple again similar to the one you mentioned at the start about the tiktok just anything if that format that's crushing right now we've just done a load of iterations where we've literally taken like best performing ugc scripts and made it sound like a whatsapp voice note and just putting like the soundbar over the video um so you know like when you're listening to a whatsapp um uh voice note it's you press play and it goes across over the video or instead of the video over the video with like the video still in the background yeah or just as in mash up a b-roll of the product is the video in the background like like is is it blurred or is it you can still you can still you can still watch the video it's not the same it's not the same video it's literally just b-roll of the product and like other creators holding it interesting i haven't tried that um yeah so i'll keep you posted on that one um cool well again this kind of feeds into what you were just saying like there's no some things that we might say aren't working anymore might still be crushing for others so we're going to take this at you know don't take this at face value but what what would you say right now like you're advising your team not to be leaning into so much that maybe previously you were you were quite bullish on i was actually thinking about this recently you know i haven't seen it at top of an ad account in a while a street interview i agree i haven't actually know i see a lot more of them organically yeah which is interesting because you'd think that that would then translate to people in ad accounts but maybe it's we've into it we've done a lot of like actual in-person shoots this year so we've made a lot of street interviews i haven't seen like now i think about like barely any of them like at the top of our accounts or performing um so like you know i mean i don't know i generally have the opinion i'm generally of the opinion like all the formats work if they're done well uh but like that's just one that i thought about the other day i was like i haven't seen that one that i saw that was really interesting that we we're going to test for for one of our brands is essentially it's like a more stylized street interview so it's like a script narrative but each line of the script jumps to like a new location so it's still the same one shot of the street interviewer with the same subject but then they're in different locations so obviously it's set up and stylized but it was just really dynamic and it was like it felt really engaging because you obviously have the motion of all the people but then you're just switching the location frequently yeah yeah we've done a little bit of that again i still haven't i still i'm not massively bullish on street interviews but that's if you're going to do that i think that's a smart play yeah i think really formulaic ugc rarely rarely works anymore i think it can i think the hit rate on it's significantly lower yeah i think like ugc in terms of traditional ugc is you know you're not going to get away with it anymore uh It might take a bit of spend, converts and people who are already in funnel, but I think it just doesn't, it's not worth the investment in the content a lot of the time today.

34:12I mean, I was going to say actual UGC, but what is actual UGC? Just, I mean, ugly ads, really. Ugly ads as UGC, I'm still seeing it on top of ad accounts. It's funny, you see all these guys come on Twitter and say UGC doesn't work, UGC doesn't work. and like like these guys with like massive brands and then you go inside their ad account it's just a traditional ugc it's like v2 ugc yeah we're in this new era um but yeah no the traditional ugc it's like oh this gives me so much more energy i feel so much better now it's like no one's gonna believe that anymore well what are you more bullish on high like in terms of i feel like there's the pendulum just always swings in terms like people saying high prod we got to be doing more high prod and then others low prod and obviously it's very dependent on the brand um and the value prop but what would you say for with your agency right now that you're more bullish on um we are definitely doing a lot more high prod this year than we've done uh previously um i mean again the massive caveat this is so account dependent like we've tried high high prod for some brands and some industries is like we get don't get anywhere and then we try like high product for the beauty brand and like it's only really high product that we can get to work we try high product for the uh the anti-diamish of shampoo and like that absolutely murders so you know i i guess the way that i would advise you would depend on the size of your brand if i was a brand that was only you know spending 50k a month 40k a month like i don't know if it's worth investing in a high product shoot or necessary agency who's going to make high because it is more expensive to make than like you're going for volume with with low production creative but we're definitely doing a lot more high protest inside the accounts uh there are just certain industries that lend itself better to certain formats good move for a brand is like if you recreate a high prod podcast on vo3 and if you see any signs of success that's where maybe you might want to start investing also into it i don't know because like it still does struggle to get emotions and I feel like that I mean it depends if it's a scripted single person podcast then I think you can get away with it but like if it's two people riffing then I don't think you're going to get that from VO or arc ads or anything at the moment I think most of the beauty in the podcast is in the scripts and the quality of the scripts as well like sometimes you can do like three you can do three podcast shoots they don't hit and then you just find the right angle scripts format and it just rips I think it depends on the type of podcast I actually think that like we try and do it depends if it's a supplement you obviously want something very scripted but if for some brands we try and get people to riff with talking points and like I actually think that like this whole podcast but in general like model selection really is an underrated part of the creative process because everyone just like thinks UGC creators or actors or whoever you hire like just these talking heads and like they're all equal but like there is such a difference between someone who can speak and sound authentic about a product versus someone who can't to the point where like you're talking about an ad that absolutely crashes versus an ad that tanks it's like it's arguably as important as the quality of the script in my eyes because like we've had ridiculously strong scripts and then reviewed the content it's like this is completely ruined like just the way that it's been delivered that it's just not authentic you can also just pick people who come across as an authority like they give that energy and aura we've got a few at the moment i can think of examples where we've just got this guy in a suit and he looks like a doctor he's like he's not and you know we're not saying he is yeah but it gives that vibe because he's actually an ex-policeman so that's probably why he's got that look of authority i wanted i wanted to talk about we before we move on past like what's not working i think i you two are way more in the weeds of create the creative execution than me where i spend most of my time is like speaking to brands on like forecast ad accounts pacing of growth new customer and i feel like what's the commonality of brands that are like struggling to grow but maybe making a lot of creative is like not revisiting strategy enough and like what you said what we were just talking about in terms of where should a brand go next where should what creative formats could they make i think there needs to be a much greater emphasis around like obsessing over research like spending more time than you even like if you're spending loads of time on research maybe spend 50 more time than you are right now and i still think you'd make better decisions like analyzing the market doing a gap analysis of your ad account like what formats are we just not looking at what personas what age groups like we did that one the other day where we found a massive opportunity within like 20 minutes looking in the account by just kind of thinking a bit more thinking differently about the data yeah just think brands skip to execution or just stuck in this flywheel of just making more making more making more without going back to the start enough yeah 100 we also say internally like you know 95 of your credit problems can be tied back to not doing enough research yeah i think it's like it's it's a it's an area and i get it like if you're a strategist working a brand you're you're you're kpi'd against putting out 10 ads a week or like you're an agency and you work across six clients you feel like you don't have the time for research but it genuinely is like you gotta you gotta like that's where you gotta start you gotta carve that time out on your calendar and spend time and like also on that point i think there's a like an obsession on like formats and styles as if that's more important than the actual messaging yeah like it's it's not sexy to sit down and and do a like a an analysis of all the different messages or angles that you could run but like that for me is way higher impact than thinking about oh do you want to do a three reasons why I do want to do a uh a tiktok trend um finding that new pocket of audience like a new angle pairing it with a persona angle mix and then then you think about how to package it up and I think like there's so many brands I've spoken to over the start of this year that have been making 400 500 ads a month and their new customer revenue is flat and the cack is going up and like that to me is like that is what at its core creative strategist really is yeah like a creative strategist is someone who's seven pages deep on a reddit thread that had 15 likes and sees that oh wait this uh this anti-dandruff shampoo people aren't using it for the hair people using it for their beard as well yeah and this is a completely new pocket model that i haven't touched so i'm gonna actually try that and add and then you try it and you realize this is whole new audience that you can access and like that actually happened for us and it ended up becoming one of the top performers so like that to me at its core is what a creative strategy really is there's no better feeling is there when like a new angle reaches the top spenders oh you're just like a kid in the caddy i'm like oh my goodness there's there's there's so many things that we can do now and then you go format and then you go everything then it's just like you kind of just rinse it as much as you can from there right yeah but like that's not the that's not the fun thing to do like to sit down and think about different it's hard it's hard to go through reddit it's hard to go through customer reviews hard to go through ad comments like all these things but like that's where the real golden nuggets are i also think it's i think a lot of like brand owners and founders and operators would actually learn loads more about the products if they went through that process load learn loads more we've went we whenever we present our research phase back we did it to a really big brand in the uk recently and they got all of the c-suite on the call because they were like this drinks brand really well known can't say the name but um and it was just like these are so many things we've never even thought about about how our customer engages with our products yeah all from that research yeah process i'd be curious to get your guys take on this but like i had a brand come to me recently and they're a very small brand um and they wanted to work with us and i really like the product uh so we think about like stretching something even though they're below our minimum but like if you're spending you know i mean our criteria is minimum 100k spend a month to work with us but like you know they were spending i think it was 20k a month and i really don't think at that stage it's a bad idea to actually learn how to sell your product before you start thinking about outsourcing it to an agency or a freelancer like yes like we're all business owners we have 50 000 things and like your natural instinct is if it's not the highest revenue generated task can i think about hand over to someone else but like learning how to sell your product uh even if it takes a lot of time to learn creative strategy is one of the most important skills you can learn yeah we ran i've also i just ran the research process for creative strategy on our own business as well on because i'm starting to shoot loads of ads for saw and it was like i was just making we were just making vsl scripts and i ran the and it just was again really interesting just to see like for even for our own like service how people speak about it differently to how maybe you think about it and just uncovered loads of things which is interesting yeah i agree i think it's arguably the highest leverage thing you could do initially um because especially as you you know brands that i know that are just absolutely killing it they're not only working with external agencies but they have an incredible creative machine internally and that's how they're able to to scale creative so effectively cool so what i wanted to just move on to now because i think a lot of people listening to this are brand owners um it's quite a nice segue from where we just were but like what is what are your recommendations and what are some of the learnings from building an incredible creative strategy team that brands can apply internally um yeah that's an interesting question um i'd go back to what we were saying earlier like i would encourage we can get to training in a second but like i would encourage every single strategy so every single person who's involved in making ads in your team to just be relentless in collecting top performing ads i just need you to be a sponge like if you have to go and i'll pay for consulting calls for you i'll like get you on the phone to agency owners like or go and do ad account swaps like whatever you have to do to get access to ad accounts and start building up your internal board of uh top performers with different you know different types of audiences and different types of industries and different types of products and i just think like over time by osmosis you will soak up like the nuances uh of how to go and make top performing creative and you just have more reference points in your head when it comes to sitting down and coming up the ideas again like oh i did this call with like this agency about like six months ago but i told this tweet like yeah uh 12 months ago we um we always see like you guys have done a lot of hiring for creative strategies not easy to find good creative strategies but what i will say is the strategists who have come on ad crate and done the best have been the ones who before they applied they were already kind of in the industry in the sense that they already you know watch podcasts like this they already subscribe to motions newsletter they already follow people on dc twitter like they were already like consumed by the industry and they were a consumer of content not necessarily that makes them a better strategist but just they're the kind of person that just lives and breathes creative strategy i think that's that curious curiosity right like they're naturally curious i think when you i think it's even more important if you hire an inner brand to look for people who are like level 10 curious because in an agency you kind of you you have the benefit of context you have the benefit of a team and network of other people to learn from if you're the only creative strategist in a brand i think you have to like engineer that and you have to go and really build be intentional about building that environment around yourself which is harder yeah i think that's like you've got a vet for that like aggressively in the interview stage i think self-learners there's some there's some really interesting we've just been invited into one but like create you know really talented creative strategists from different brands and different industries all coming together in whatsapp chats and just doing like a monthly call where they just will like share insights so again i think another idea is just actively seeking that if you are i guess siloed internally and don't necessarily have that that you know those people that you can sponge it from yeah yeah um so i'd say definitely someone who's curious uh i mean maybe this is less applicable so a brand but we do every week we have our like performance review calls uh or like creative brainstorms we get everyone on the creative team together and we just go okay like guys like if you know budget was no limit and creativity was no limit like what's some of the craziest ideas that we come up with uh so sometimes we'll brainstorm sometimes we'll look at existing ads and see how we can iterate on them and like that's been good to to get ideas from people who aren't directly in the week that sometimes i'll come with ideas sometimes our performance team ideas sometimes our editors come up with ad ideas that we've gone and run um and uh and have done uh very well inside the ad account nice i love that yes i think this it's underrated isn't it just the old-fashioned brainstorming session like i just don't think it's it's it's utilized enough in many ways yeah and if i was to add one more thing and this arguably is the most important well maybe not more important being curious but like just becoming a student of the organic feed like you just have to become a dude scroller i agree and one thing i saw you tweet about that i'm just like just consistently hammering down our team's throat it's just tiktok shop oh yeah an inspiration tool yeah yeah i don't understand why more people don't study this because like these tiktok shop creators are literally paid based on their ability to get your attention sell your product like they're not put on retainers like they are commissioned to find the most creative ways to get your attention and talk about a problem and you know use the right lighting and sound authentic and speak like an authority uh on the products and sell you on it um so i just like to absorb like we save uh like we obviously have our four pay boards where we save a lot of ad inspiration down but like most of our inspiration comes from the organic feed and we have a bank of like a hundred different fig thought shop creators that i get our team to frequent um and just study like how they approach uh creative like how are they holding their phone are they setting it up on a tripod or are they holding it like pov in the mirror like what does the movement look like what does the lighting look like like all these little nuances uh that they've perfected over thousands and thousands of reps that are going to be different for every audience and every industry i just think there's so much you can pick up from uh tiktok shop creators that can then be applied in in paid it's just crazy like it's like the modern day gray hat marketer isn't it like in many ways they just know how to get attention yeah it's a sales team like it's a it's a modern day sales team yeah you know but their method of sale or selling is content right it's like i think that that's when thinking about hiring a creative strategist for a brand as well incentives is is really i think you can do a lot there to to to really drive output and impact if you structure it correctly yeah how do you guys think of that i mean maybe this isn't as relevant to be watching on like if we're talking about agency side because i think it's a little bit more complex to incentivize if you're on agency side but like if you're a brand like strategists and editors if you say hey by the way like for however you want to do it with this percentile like for every ad that you make that spends this arbitrary amount i'll give you an extra 250 500 like suddenly i'm really incentivized to go and do all these things to be in the communities to look at people on twitter no brainer and uh and want to make more top performing ads which obviously benefits everyone absolute no brainer especially for editors editors first because they're offshore and like the incentive doesn't need to be that significant to significantly alter the behavior alter the outcome that you get from from that those individuals i think and then creative strategies think the same like obviously a a little bit different in terms of structure but incentivizing on winning yeah inherently changes behaviors yeah i think that the the process that we think about like the three things that you'd want to do if it's edited structure forever uh access educate incentivize access to the data i can see what's working and what's not educate tell me how to make more top-forming ads by doing the brainstorm calls by sharing content from people online incentivize i know that if i am going to uh make something that works i'll be rewarded for it and like if you just build that feedback loop you get i mean for the right type of person if you do all those three things and they're still not you know motivated to go and make more top performers then like maybe they're not the right fit for the company but like if you do that like that's a really i mean incentivizing uh approach for someone especially who's offshore yeah 100 i know what my answer would be to this but i'm just more interested what yours would be and how you combat that what would you say is the hardest thing to train your creative strategist on or i guess maybe the most most consistent thing that people come in with an inability to do copywriting yeah storytelling copyright yeah um and it's not you've got it or you don't because you can learn it it just like of all the skills you can learn at the strategist i think that's the one that takes the longest to train i think that's the thing like i i think i understand creative strategy like what it is formats i think i understand messaging i couldn't write scripts because i'm just not gonna uh not a good copywriter to the level that you need to be and and like that's why you know we always think about hiring like what's the like screen for what's the hardest skill to train for whether it be you know strategy editors or or uh or media buyers if copyright is the hardest skills train for like we've had people who've come in who have been extremely raw like and not had much creative strategy knowledge but like i can see they've got raw copyright and ability and they've come in like i'd much rather have that than someone who knows all the different formats but but doesn't know copyright yeah we've done the same yeah exactly it's uh back it down to the single hardest fundamental yeah skill sets of train which like it shows we still have a distance to go with with ai right because like you would think on paper we it should become much easier now but actually there's still so many nuances with messaging that you can't just ask you know Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to just create a script for you and doing it perfectly.

52:48There's way more layers and nuances than that. Well, yeah. I mean, we also have another saying and finally where we are. I've never seen someone... The only people that I've seen make good ads with AI are people who make good ads without AI. Yeah, literally. And it's just like, it is true. If you don't know... If you're the one who's reviewing the copy and GBT, you can build the best clawed product or custom gpt it's still probably going to come up with some bad ideas if it gives you 10 headlines they're not all going to be hits and you need to know it's a creative strategies which of these are actually good headlines that i can run inside an account exactly you're a filter uh in many ways like there's there's so much shit that's coming through and you've got to sieve out what is good and what is bad and then optimize it further and that's where i think the value will be created i do think that you know a lot of execution will be taken over about AI in the next 12 to 24 months but like the value to value to be created uh by a strategist is in the direction and like the QC effectively you'll taste I was gonna say it's like layers there's layers of an asset isn't there there's like the script but then pairing it with the right like format then pairing it with the right like persona delivery it's like the ones that can kind of put those building blocks together even if they're all even if AI is kind of helping with them individually yeah I think the AI is just a bit stiff from a copyright in perspective still.

54:10That's how I'd always say. I mean, it'll get better skills, it'll get better at ingesting context, it'll get better at learning, because Claude or GPT are inherently not good copywriters, or at least they're not good creative strategists. So you have to pummel with a bunch of context about how to write those scripts, and even then it's not that good because they're not trained on how to count data. But they'll get better, but still. There's still going to be a gap between the best and the rest in who's giving the best direction. And there's a difference between you know lucas giving qc uh versus a strategist starting tomorrow giving qc to claude or gpt yeah so what what advice do you have for someone who um is either looking to train their team to become better script writers or are looking to improve that skill themselves um what advice to become a better copywriter

55:05uh i don't know real old books uh i'd i'd i'd go i mean yeah i actually know that's probably a better answer than i had it like it it is reps and like being in again like absorbing a lot of top performing ads and just seeing like just getting like by osmosis the the flow of like what a top performing ad looks like um and like pairing that with the theory of you know reading reading cash advertising and reading the different like there are hundreds of books on copyright but like the combination of the theory and then just doing like a you know I didn't actually do much copyright in theory I just wrote probably at this point hundreds if not thousands of scripts yeah I'd read I'd go back and read a lot of long form sales letters from like the 50s 60s 70s like Amex Bentley Rolls Royce where they were selling millions of dollars of product through long form direct mail and like that's where like Joseph Sugarman might have got his first name wrong that's where like a lot of the principles and cashvertising and these like modern takes on that they were formed there Sam Parr and Sean Peory both have really good copywriting courses where a lot of that is literally you are rewriting the letter, you literally you're reading it you're studying it and you're rewriting it word for word in terms of like getting that we put our strategies through that course and they really liked it also I don't know if you guys have seen have you seen Harry Dry I've heard of him he's a really good copywriter and he's got a course coming out in the start of August I think it's the first ever course and like he's very well followed a very good traditional copywriter so we can put our team through that as well nice nice that's cool yeah I think that's that longer form content it's just so strong.

56:59Also VSL writers, I think VSLs, long form VSLs are also like, they start with perfect copy. So if you can find some VSLs that have driven a huge amount of revenue, the principles in the delivery will be really solid. Yeah. And again, it's so tempting to go on Twitter and see everyone building the NAN and Gumblip workflows. If you're a strategy starting out, you go, oh, I need to learn this before I learn copywriting. but like copywriting is the boring like unsexy stuff that like you know you i would put way before learning anything ai um because if you're not a good crazy trash if you're not a good copywriter it doesn't matter how good your workflow is it doesn't matter how good your prompt is how good your custom gpt is uh you're not going to know what a good output is one other like you know small thing i'll say this isn't necessarily related to this uh but like whenever i am trying to learn a new topic if it is copywriting for example um what i always do is like i take a bunch of like you know books or uh podcasts or whatever put them through either claude or poppy and then tell it to write a summary for me to put into have you used um notebook lm uh by google yeah um it's just basically like a if you like enter in a subject it just turns it into a podcast like actually a very realistic sounding podcast uh so i i listen to podcasts all the time um and i would just get gbt claude or poppy to write a summary about whatever i'm trying to learn copywriting like and then i'd plug that into an open lm and then when i'm out when i'm traveling or whatever i'll just listen to like the podcast on like the specific thing that i want learn that's a cool idea so i just do that for anything i did that for a chess opening the other day uh just into a podcast for 30 minutes on chess opening and it was like these on the specific openings so that's what i found in podcasts like you listen to a 60 minute podcast for a 10 minute segment yeah but like you can get a whole podcast generated on like a specific it's actually a new app i've seen recently that is literally that like it's just it's it's just um self-help books that are condensed down into like 10 minutes yeah i've seen i've heard what i've seen i've been advertised as well i've seen that yeah i yeah i i used another like app like that a few years ago and i remember seeing it around this is a i was going to ask you this towards the end yeah but i'm gonna ask because it was a nice segue you've just run through one like what are your like top two or three like personal ai ai tools taking away the business like that you use individually in your day-to-day honestly like i am a massive user of custom gpts even them yeah like maybe two or three of those like i build custom gpts for everything uh so i i live in cape town um but like when it's just so funny your eyes just lit up i get so jazzed talking about custom gbts you can make the whole podcast about this um so i live in cape town and like there's not really many good brands that you can buy from in south africa so what i do i come back to the uk twice a year and when i come back here i i like i do like a big like i reran my wardrobe buy a lot of clothes um and i came back a couple weeks ago uh to london and i was like right uh i need to revamp my wardrobe so i was like how do i want to dress so i did some research online uh and i was like okay i want to dress in like this certain style like a don drape style like nice you know smart uh professional uh so i build a custom gpt that's like you know you are my uh you are my high-end uh stylist stylist uh i am going to uh tell you what i want you're going to tell me which pieces i can buy which brands i can buy from that align with my style and i've given it you know inspiration images like every time i want to buy a brand new pair of shoes like what can i get put in there give me suggestions of like which brands and why they would fit with like what i've currently got and uh like what this the aesthetic i'm trying to create is but one for that i've got one for uh relationships in which that like you know if i'm going through this is actually a really good one i suggest everyone to have like if you've got like a partner or like a family member that you're having conflict with you can just like have one if you've got a girlfriend for example i this is really nerdy create a notion document with like just everything that you know about your girlfriend uh and like how she like deals with conflict and uh like um just things about her like little quirks and things upload that into a custom gpt and then i just i use that so if you're ever in a conflict you can say like give me a little bit of like if you're in a like emotional you want to be you just like lash out her i go like help me understand her perspective and it almost acts as like a relationship therapist not in the way like oh here's what to say back but just like oh help me understand uh that and generally i've used that a few times and like it's actually helped resolve conflicts so there's tons of ones like that i've got i've built one for my cleaner in south africa where she can scan a uh like she can take a picture of the tag and tells how to wash the clothes properly so she doesn't do anything with the delicates like just anything that you can think of i've got a voice memo summarizer where i type in a like i give a screenshot this is i shouldn't like if you voice note me i'm really sorry for this but like i don't want to listen to like a 10 minute voice note so like i screenshot the transcripts i put it into this custom gpt and it just summarized it for me and tells me the action steps so just like stupid things like that anytime i want to like automate something i just build a custom gpt for it i love that yeah i think that that relationship one is interesting um i think even in a work setting that's one i do where every every person that i manage i'll have like a custom gpt for them so like transcript for every quarterly review monthly review any like feedback updates yeah and it would just have the full context of that person i've just spun up one for i've been trying to do a big thing on like internal comms and culture and i just documented i did this massive mirror board on like culture what we're trying to achieve from this reset we're doing like all the culture pillars goals measurement initiatives and then i did a notion doc on poured a couple of notion docs in and uploaded that as context and then just use using that to like support with with creating all hand huddle decks and like really really really valuable i read that high agency yeah put that in and was like how do we based on our culture pillars the industry is sitting and the goals we have for the rest of this year build me a plan for all hands based on this theory of high agency but using our translate it into our culture yeah and how that can layer up to better impacts for our team and clients it just built me this amazing structure for a talk i love that and i saw taylor holiday recently tweet about how at ctc they're starting to integrate like you know kind of ai as like they're in their 360 reviews um where ai does the first path first pass of the review for you um as a team member i also have a like a gbt that knows everything about ad crate and like it's just basically a business advisor for us so like put your pnl in there put your org structure in there like everything you want to know and we had a we had a like a big decision one of the bigger decisions we had to make for the company recently about where to best allocate bonds.

1:04:16And just basically said, you are the world's best agency consultant. You've been trained by all of the best agency owners who've had exits of 20 plus million dollars. And your advice is knowing everything you know about me, give me the best advice for my business and the problem I'm dealing with and just lay it all out and give me some really solid advice. So even just putting your own P &L org structure and just acting as a first part of a business advisor. I even asked it like who on intro can I speak to to deal with a specific problem and it told me like these are the first five people that you can speak to on intro yeah I think buying a house and I've just just created the mortgage bot so yeah I think this came from my first million as well but they said a statement on there that I think it was the Microsoft CEO said that like in business a lot of your temptation is to think with your team like have meetings to think through a problem whereas what you should do is think with AI and then take the first pass to the team once you've kind of gone through that process of brainstorming.

1:05:19Do you guys use Whisperflow? No, not actively but I've seen it. I saw you tweet about it saying it's the best tool you'd recommend. I mean, people think I'm on their sales team but genuinely Whisperflow, have you used it Lucas? No, I haven't. Explain what it is quickly. Okay, so Whisperflow is a voice dictation tool where you can hold down as a keyboard shortcut hold down control option on my mac and i can just start voice dictating uh into it and it removes all your filler words if you say something wrong you say actually no like this instead it just doesn't include the bit that you said wrong so like it's actual good voice dictation and i don't use it so much for slack and email but when you're talking to uh models unbelievable like you can because sometimes I have a really like really long prompt I want to write out and instead of or a context doc um instead of me spending two minutes like writing out the perfect prompt I can just riff hold my keyboard down hold my uh my keyboard shortcut down riff into it and I can like get down like a a prompt that would have taken me two minutes in about 20 seconds and like going back and forth with AI is so so much quicker every genuinely every person I put onto it has been like wow I don't know how to survive like before this that's cool I love that have you forgot the name of it now we we were we were in the lake district with joe and jordan last week and um plaud ai is it i think it might be called plaud pl a ud joe had a little bracelet on which looked just like a a whoop and it literally just records everything and goes straight into goes straight into uh a gpt at the end of the day and just gives him like a breakdown and you can select like you can preset prompts uh preset prompts to take like to filter through so you might might enter you might have a problem that pre-cleans it and then you can see he said it was really valuable for like masterminds yeah yeah straight through and send to his team like a kind of um scrappy version that you can do of that we did an in-person day with our team at we work last week and like i'm just trying to get people if they don't have something like that into the habit of like if you're if i'm sitting down with you on a session uh send up my laptop on a google meet and just press and record like just trying to um log as much of our interactions as possible to get the transcript so that we can put the transcript through chat gpt yeah i agree like you speak a lot about this as well but it's just context engineering people talk a lot about prompt engineering but not enough about context engineering so it's it's like just become obsessed with context about everything you do yeah i mean that's that's one that i mean besides copywriting like one of the highest leverage skills that you can learn today again again something i think is a very defensible skill set because ai won't know what is the right context uh to put into a workflow that builds uh static ad headlines it doesn't know if it's going to put in like a youtube video that i made or a blog post that some you know brand market made nine years ago um so the ability to understand what context needs to be injected into ai which again comes from being a good creative strategist is uh something that we spend a lot of time pouring into so what what do you think creative strategy and i know that's very broad but what do you think creative strategy as a whole is going to look like in 12 to 24 months um i think that we start to see ai agents on the org chart and i think that we start to see like a creative strategist actually like i'm not like moving into away from the actual execution of making the ads and towards becoming like a creative director of an army of ai agents you have a research agent who's tasked with going and scraping reddit uh and tiktok and um and customer reviews and add comments and then come back to the daily report saying hey i scraped 100 uh comments i scraped 10 red threads here's what i found and then you go in and say okay great go and make scripts for these three ideas and that goes hand over to the script writing agent where that goes in terms of scripts you've got uh you've got an uh a creator agent that works with like a tool like a video you've got editing agents like the whole process is just going to be eventually i think an army of agents that's managed by this kind of creative producer i actually see like a lot of the roles in creative strategy merging into this role and just that you're able to focus on higher leverage tasks so i get to spend more time doing actual creative strategy like thinking about okay what products uh do we want to push how do we want to go about uh advertising this like what messaging do i think feels best um for for our brand and just directing this army of agents which won't happen overnight but like i think that's the world in which we're eventually heading to and again like we were saying earlier i think the value to be created is still going to be there i just think that it's going to raise the floor without necessarily raising the ceiling i think the ceiling will be raised in so much that ai will be able to do so much volume that the ceiling will be raised but like i think the floor is like the ability to make good ads is easier but there's still going to be a difference in who knows best what to create rather than like actually how to go about creating the specific ad yeah agreed just on that point then do you think there's ever a world where there's an either or in terms of AI creative versus, you know, real made creative?

1:11:07Or do you think that, because in my eyes, I think there's an, the ecosystem will, there will still be room for creative that is made by a customer or made by a creator or, you know, even down to high production to some degree with founder shoots and things like that. What's your view on that? I mean, I think it depends on how good, like can ai get to the point where it can genuinely recreate a a tiktok shot creator style video can it get to that point and like can it get to that point without being like legislation being put on it to for someone to know whether it's ai or not i think that's the key isn't it yeah if if it can and there's no legislation on it like genuinely tell me why you would do that versus using a human creator i think it's trying to trying to think back to like what's the constraint and fundamental that stops it from getting to that point what are the things that it's going to find hardest to generate context or understanding of i think it's like trend probably it's like kind of kind of yeah but i think it could get there like it's like yeah it's got still got trend context in platform there are also some types of uh motion yeah some types of pieces of content that i think will be difficult not impossible very difficult for ai to replicate for example we work with a couple of food brands and some of our top performers have been you know us three sitting around uh like a table eating some licorice and like you're trying it the first time and i get your authentic reaction and like you're interacting with the product you're like you're squishing it and showing how chewy it is you're you're biting the product and you're like doing that and we're just laughing and joking with each other i think it could get to that point like that's that's definitely a different like another level to just hey go and buy this licorice this licorice tastes really nice yeah all that founder content things like that that that is required to be authentic and a real person but i think i do think it's like that legislation thing that it comes down to at the end of the day because i do think the pendulum always swings and i never think it's gonna swing back to you know um away from ai necessarily but it's it's it's like it's it's the same as you know we were in this world during covid where everyone was working from home and it created this obsession and craving to to you know get back into the office or the same with digital and online and then this obsession for physical communities like run clubs and other things so i do see a world where they can they can live in harmony side by side not not 100 uh 50 50 but i could see them living there I see an end state where most of our like our agency just won't like it would be vastly different it's hard to even think about what it'll be because there's so many unknowns I think most of our enterprise value will be eradicated at some point 20-30 years down the future I think that's hard to argue with even when you look at founders yeah yeah you have to either shift either shift vehicles or yeah you have to think about it's kind of hard it's hard to even like plan for long time horizon.

1:14:21This is a different conversation. I don't think creative shops will be going on for the next two, three years. I think that there's things you can do to adapt and still be relevant and still add value but I don't think that what's currently working with five or six creative shops inside your account I don't think that will be how brands interact with agency partners. Just on the founders thing I even think that will if you can dump in four or five different previous shop founder shoots and upload that context like again avatars isn't it like even what um tiktok one have already doing you can create avatars yeah like you film you film your warehouse you film your office you upload a few previous shoots there's the context on the you know uh concept of like ai versus human again like it is just going to be a cat and mouse between ai and humans because every time ai advances like the human like tiktok shop creators will have to try and find ways to signal that they're human so that you as the as a viewer know that you're not watching an ai so i just think they'll just keep on chasing each other until eventually the ai catches up uh or until it doesn't and like there is still value to be created uh in human creators and then one thing i will say to your point lucas is like i actually think that you know at least in the short term uh the the amount of ai creative on the feed is going to possibly in the longer term like people crave something uglier people crave actual authentic uh content from from real people now when if it does get to the point where it can recreate up there's a different story but like you know we've really tried to lean into things this year that ai can't create like yeah like the behind the scenes like the kind of employee generated content like stuff in the warehouse like the concepts with multiple people we're all trying the product together like stuff that signals to people that this is real people creating real content we've tried to lean into pretty heavily like alongside making ai creative i've already seen some sentiment like that on organic videos it was one that that's the um earthquake that just happened in russia that yeah the tsunami warning there was a couple of videos on my feed that were like AI generated tsunamis across like Japan or something and the comments were just filled with like people who were fuming at just AI content in general they were like I'm sick of seeing AI shit on my feed nice try super diddy yeah like all of that which is interesting that that sentiment is already like sort of bubbling around you mentioned a minute ago that you think creative, the engagement of agencies creative shops are going to be vastly different what do you where do you think that's heading i think um creative agencies become almost ai consultancies um i don't think that growth creative as a service will die but i think the agencies that adapt will become almost growth engine operators rather than just we're a creative shop that you buy ads from i see brands and i'm curious to get your opinion on this i see brands working with a lot fewer maybe even one great growth creative agency who manages all growth creative uh ai and human rather than just tapping into a bunch of different ones offering that and then thinking about what other services you can offer like you know ai consulting like i mean i'm less bullish on this uh like ai workflow building um i don't think the tech is there currently because i wouldn't build on top of a gumball for an n4 creative but like there is a future where you could have uh other offers like ai consulting or ai workflow building um alongside being a growth creative engine yeah I would probably agree I think I think I think it facilitates separation of like best and rest even more I think that in the org chart I think that in an industry level I think that so I think that's true and yeah I think yeah I think you become more holistic yeah I think AI selling AI agents which are like selling AI implementation at an org chart level to brands because you've got greater context to be able to facilitate a better outcome than if they were to build it internally.

1:19:01I think that's quite an interesting thing to think about. I feel like agencies become just like data warehouses in many ways. That is the context because that's what I guess are unfair advantages as well of a brand right we've got context from 10 20 50 different brand accounts that can be applied to one another the difficulty with just that is that meta has even more com sex than us it's like do you ever think meta will get into the ad generation game they are but like in a way it's actually meaningful yeah you do 100 i mean i don't think i don't think it'll be as good as it depends what you find good as everything I've tried to do previously has not been good but like and I know Zuckbo said he doesn't really prioritize literally spends no time but like if you've got you've got tens of hours of footage of my brand and you have more data than anyone like why would you not yeah I don't they're the big company that I struggle to understand their AI strategy, where they're going directionally compared to others.

1:20:20They're also investing probably the most out of anyone right now in terms of doubling down on talent. But they've got so many directions they could go in. They could go consumer. They're obviously looking at wearables. They've got so many different... Despite what was always living off the ad platform. Do you think there's some... Yeah. I think that's where the data warehouse is irrelevant right if someone like meta was to give you access to that data at scale yeah definitely cool well we think sadly at time but yeah we are doing a podcast on both of our channels yeah um so we will make sure to speak about different things if that is possible I mean this probably could have been a four-hour podcast to be fair like we could have gone for a while and no issue doing that yeah but Alex I appreciate you coming on long time overdue where can people find you uh alex coff cooper um on twitter which is where i'm most active um i tweet almost daily uh and youtube i know i haven't really uploaded in a few months i'm sorry for that uh but back with a bang though soon oh yeah yeah yeah when this comes out i'm gonna i am gonna try and start uploading again on youtube so uh yeah you gotta search alex cooper ad creek because i'm not yet popular enough to be uh rank higher than the call her daddy oh cool oh yeah call my daddy yeah call her daddy you are still up there though um i actually for one day did beat her i think i had a video that's doing really well and i was like guys everyone's helping adis cooper into youtube i'm beating the the call daddy girl um but you do have to type in ad or ads or something but you know twitter or youtube is in the best place cool we appreciate you coming on yeah thank you very much and yeah make sure you subscribe if you haven't and we'll see you on the next episode

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