creative strategy is easy actually lol (learn it in 15 mins)

Creative strategy is actually ridiculously easy. And in this video, I'm gonna prove it to you by teaching it to you in however many minutes it takes. My goal is to do it in 5 to 8 minutes. Let's see if I can actually make that happen. If you need to know anything about me, my name is Luke Iha. Together, my business partner and I, Mario Castelli, we've run a community with over 433 creative strategists, marketers, and brand owners called Genesis. There's more information down below in the description. We help them make winning ads, funnels, and a fuck ton of money. This is some of the brands who our members work with. This is a wall of some of our recent wins, right? Top 2 ads in the account are mine. $7K plus 1.3% performance bonus. Back-to-back weeks, big winners. $550K in ad spend this month. I'm at $17K, number one business investment. And you can go on. These are not even all the wins. We're actually pretty bad at collecting them, but you can check those out and those will be linked below and you can watch other videos on my YouTube channel. That's enough about me. The timer is going to start now and I'm going to teach you creative strategy. So number one is you need to understand what the job is in a nutshell. It's to create winning ads and funnels. And the best way to do this is to write ads that resonate with the audience and have enough diversity. The algorithm serves them separately. Focus on making great, fun, and creative ads that are persuasive and target the right people. Understand your market deeply so you know how to talk to them. Stay on top of winning formats and styles and apply them to your brand. Pay close attention to patterns and winners and new gaps. Make strategic bets based on variations/net new ideas, wildcards/proven ideas, different sources, and what you think has the highest likelihood of working. Write amazing hooks and understand direct response fundamentals so you can execute them accordingly. That's the ultimate job and what we'll be covering. So the first thing you wanna understand is the anatomy of an ad. I call this the DNA of an ad. Every ad can be broken down into 2 components, which is the messaging, the core thing that you're saying, and the creative, which is what it looks like, which is basically a video or an image. Now you can break this down further into these components. So for messaging, I like to think about the who, which is the segment, the what, which is the concept, the angle, the mechanism and copy blocks, and the how, which is the hook and the format. So how is how we're saying the thing that we're saying. These elements right here are the most important building blocks of every single ad. There are other components that are important, but these are the most important ones to pay attention to. The next thing, and this is for video specifically, is to understand The CAST system. This stands for conceit, actor, style, terrain, and setup. We'll cover this more a little bit later. So, for example, if you wanted to look at an ad like this, you could look at this ad and break it down into the following things. So, the segment is kind of broad anti-aging. The concept is that men cheat because their wife stops glowing. The angle is a confessional whistleblower style. The mechanism is the low molecular weight collagen and hyaluronic acid that absorbs into skin. These copy blocks are present: pain, promise, and curiosity. These are weak and these ones are missing. The hook is right here and the format is basically a confessional, although it doesn't follow a specified format, like almost like a timeline ad. It's kind of a newer iteration. When we look at the creative, we basically see that it's pretending to be an interview. The actor is a high-end escort. The style is realistic. The terrain or environment is a dark studio. And basically the setup is we have captions and then we have testimonial and demo splices, which sort of happen in here and some B-roll. Okay? Now with that thing, we can basically define almost this entire ad. Those are the most important things. So if this ad works, we could look at what are the elements in here that are making this work? Is it the combination of elements or is it the specific elements themselves? Here's another ad. Great. So this would be a segment of diabetic men with ED. The concept is high blood sugar scars arteries for your erections. Angle is a personified object. The mechanism is 5 science-backed ingredients. It has all the copy blocks, although the proof is a little bit weak. Here's the hook. And the format is a personified body part. The conceit is not really pretending to be any media format, so we don't need that. The actors are basically the arteries itself, the clogs, the product, and the ingredients, which get personified. The style is sort of in the Pixar animation style. The terrain is inside the body, and the setup is basically just captions. Everything else happens inside of here. Okay? This doesn't describe the entire ad, but it comes pretty dang close. So again, if this ad works, these are the elements that are making it work. So let's go a little bit deeper into some of these. So segments and personas. A segment is just a slice of a market. For example, these ones right here. And every segment can be broken down using 3 dimensions, which is basically the outcome, the core thing they want or don't want, the demographic, which is things like gender, race, age, buyer, and a facet, which is a specific feature about them, like some sort of state, an event, or a condition. So for example, for testosterone product, you may target these specific outcomes. You may look at some of these specific demographics and you may look at some of these specific facets, right? Maybe they're a cigarette smoker or on finasteride or considering TRT. Okay. Then what you could do is you could multiply these together, as many or as few as you want. You could do all men who just want to have better sex, right? All men who want to get rid of man boobs, all black men struggling with erections, or all men over 50 on finasteride who want to lose weight. Okay. So, you can go granular or bigger, but that's how you can define basically any segment that you want. Most of your biggest gains will be found in finding new outcomes and sub-outcomes, and then by multiplying facets like vegetarian, vegan, smokers, runners, on GLP-1, diabetic, That's called horizontal scaling. So, you just focus on targeting these types of people and writing ads specifically for them. So, next thing we have is the concept. The concept is the core idea that you're communicating in your ads. For example, too much vitamin D is bad for you. It's really important to understand what your concept is to write your hooks and get clear on what ideas are resonating with your market. The angle is how you present this core idea. So, too much vitamin D is bad for you could be a conspiracy about the vitamin D industry, a whistleblower, Or 2 people who with and without vitamin D and the negative consequences maybe that one person has, right? Next, we have the mechanism. This is basically how your product works. It's divided into 2 parts, the unique mechanism of the problem and the unique mechanism of the solutions. Why do I have this problem and how is your solution perfect to solve that problem? The best mechanisms are simple, intuitive, and new. Typically, they involve one problem and one solution, but not always, as we saw in some of the ads above. But the more that you can create a coherent story that ties in your founder, your product creation story, unique features and ingredients, unique characterizations, and unique moments in time, the better your positioning will be and the stronger your mechanism will resonate. Next, we have copy blocks. I have a video on my channel that will help to cover this, but this is basically pain, promise, proof, curiosity, constraints, and conditions. These are the building blocks of persuasion. They're like Lego pieces. Make sure that you have them in your ads. The more that you have in your ads and the stronger that these are, typically the better your ads will be. So it's like almost like a checklist of sort, and it's one of my videos on this channel that Next are hooks. It's really important to understand hooks when it comes to the messaging. This is probably 90% of the messaging. The best way to write your hooks is to, one, isolate the idea. 2, commit to that idea. 3, deep fry the idea, which means adding contrast, surprise, novelty, nuance, and stakes. 4 is make it bang, which is how you write it. This means adding emotional trigger words, making it simple, prioritizing the best information, and adding open loops. So let's say you have a basic idea that there's a magnesium cream that's better than capsules for pain. Right? So we ask, why is it better? Well, it absorbs through the skin. And we think magnesium cream is boring, so can we make it a little bit sexy? So what do we know about it? Well, maybe it's a specific type of magnesium that doesn't have a type of molecule attached to it. So we ask ourselves, how can we stretch that idea into something that sounds interesting? Well, if it's missing a molecule, it's bare, we could call it naked. So we could say things like, maybe it's a naked magnesium. Then we could add in contrast and trigger words like, oh, my grandma used this weird naked magnesium trick to fixed her back pain in 2 weeks. So the contrast here between grandmas and naked, the emotional connotations between weird and naked is interesting. This idea of a magnesium trick creates kind of an open loop, and now you have a decent type of hook. I'm not saying this hook would— is the best or this hook would work, but that's an example of how to use this process, and I will have other videos on my channel to help break this down even more. Next thing to understand is the format. The format is the structure and angle of how you approach your idea. There are a ton of formats that are usually trending, things like the whistleblower that we just saw, timeline ads. We also have personification, which is an example that we just showed on here, the Wall Street Journal style, which is basically when you say these 2 people and you compare their, their paths together. Pay attention to the winning formats because typically if you have a winning concept or angle, you can just apply it to a winning format as well as a winning style. Boom, it becomes easy to make ads. When it comes to creative, you basically have different types of creatives. You have branded, template, and natives. These can be broken down into bottom of funnel, middle of funnel, and top of funnel. Native ads look like native ads. They look like realistic images, and templates follow pre-assigned types of templates. And I don't have examples to show on here, so you'll have to just use your imagination for that. For the video, you have this system, which is the CAST system. This is the DNA of every sort of video. So you have the conceit, which is what media it pretends to be. You have the actor or actors involved, the style, which is the visual gloss, whether it's claymation or felt or Pixar. You have the terrain, which is the environment and setting. And then you have the setup, which are what kind of big chunky production elements are involved— captions, B-rolls, inserts, cutaways, split screen, hook stacking. Again, you can use this information to define your entire video. The reason all this grammar is important, because it allows you and AI to identify patterns in the data a lot better. You can see if specific formats are working or specific styles or concepts or mechanisms. You look for winning patterns in your account, your competitor accounts, and in the outside world like organic content, forums, comments, reviews, etc. Being able to see these elements allows you to make connections, hypotheses a lot better. And pattern detection is a huge component of the job. You want to be asking, why is this ad working? Why is this ad kind of working? Why is this ad not working? And then forming and testing hypotheses from there. Understanding this grammar also allows you to rotate out elements. So for example, let's say that this ad up here again is, uh, is working. So we could say, all right, what is the element that's working? Is it the confessional whistleblower? Is it the core concept itself, right? Is it the fact that there's an escort? If we think it's because there's an escort, we could do more ads with escorts, keep this the same and rotate out some of these elements. If we think it's this idea that men cheat because their wife stops glowing, then we can rotate this. If we think it's this concept and this actor together in combination, we could keep those things the same and change the angle, change the mechanism, change the hook, change this. Maybe now it becomes a podcast, right? Maybe now it becomes a high-end escort speaking on stage. Maybe it's a street interview, maybe it's a slice of life type of movie, right? So when you understand the grammar of these things, you can easily detect patterns and then you can also create new iterations and variations a lot better as well as completely net new ads. The next thing that you wanna do is you wanna be able to find gaps in your account. So basically if a competitor is running a lot of timeline ads and you're not, that's a gap, but you're only gonna see the gap if you're able to understand and break down the anatomy of an ad. Again, if they use a new style and you're not, that's another gap. Or if there's a segment that you could target that's buried in your ad comments or Amazon reviews, that's another gap. So you always wanna be looking for what are the patterns in the winners or even the losers and what are the gaps in my account. The next thing is you want to develop your taste and instinct. This is really important. Your job is to understand ads deeply and make tests and hypotheses over time. Your goal is to develop your taste and instincts for what works. This is almost like a 6th sense and operates beneath language itself because you're noticing very subtle patterns and connections that are difficult, if not impossible, to express. This is a phenomenon observed in chicken sexers. You can look up what that means later and discussed in the book Blink, but it's all over. And this is really the most important thing for you to develop, especially in the age of AI. Literally just watched an interview with the CEO of Shopify and he was talking about the exact same thing. This is not a mystical process, it's a very mechanical clear process and is very important. The next thing is you want to diversify your ideas. So in order to do this job correctly you have to come up with a lot of ideas. However, if you're only pulling your ideas from competitors or from your own brain or from proven templates, you're going to become limited in the types of ideas that you have and so you're going to have a lower hit rate because you're not really diversifying your sources of ideas. That's why we use an acronym called STORMING, which stands for swipes, templates, organic research, matrix, internal vectors, new styles, and gambit. This is basically all the different sources from which you can pull winning ad ideas. Again, from competitors, you can pull it from organic content, you can pull it from proven templates or formats, you can pull it from research, which will fall into comments, Amazon reviews, Facebook comments, forums, things like that, new research, new papers, the matrix, which is basically understanding all the possible types of segments and all the possible types of formats and identifying gaps that are missing. Internal vectors, which is basically just identifying patterns. So for the matrix, you can say this is our potential gaps, and this one you could say our patterns. New styles are just any trending new styles that you see, like a Pixar style, a claymation style, etc. And a gambit is just kind of a guess, which means it's just something that you come up with that's a shower thought or a wildcard thought. Those can have a low hit rate, but they can be bangers if you execute them correctly. If you use this framework, you'll never run out of ideas, and you'll find the best ideas that are unique because you're diversifying their sources. Next thing is you want to make strategic bets. So you understand the anatomy of ads and how to put them together. You know how you can use those to identify winning patterns and potential gaps, and you can refine that information using your taste and instincts, as well as pulling a ton of diverse ideas that can work. So your problem isn't coming up with ideas, it's actually choosing what to test first, which is the most important part of The job. This is where your taste and instincts come into play, and it's also where you, you need a strategy. So this choice becomes really important. The types of decisions you want to make are: do I iterate on a winner or make a net new ad? What sources do I pull from? What ideas do I prioritize? Should I do more of what's proven or more wildcard? Should I focus on new segments? Should I focus on deepening a segment? Should I focus on more new styles, formats, or conceits, etc.? These are the types of questions that you want to answer. If you're making 10 ads per week, you only have so many ads you're going to make. If you're if you're making 50 ads, right? Doesn't really matter. Eventually there's a limit in terms of how many ads can be produced by editors, right? That's becoming more and more with AI, but there's also a limit on spend. How many ads can you actually test? Okay, there's no one-size-fits-all way to answer these questions. However, in general, making new conceits or formats on winning ideas is smart. Applying new facets and sub-outcomes to winning ideas is smart. Making new styles on winning ideas is smart. Applying winning styles across past winning ideas is usually smart. These are some of the highest leverage, most common sense moves that you can make that are going to usually get you a win. In other words, the simpler and easier you make it for yourself, the better. Normally the easiest answer is the right one, and most, most people move away from ideas way earlier than the market does. Okay, the next one is how do you actually make your ads? Making ads are pretty easy. Once you find your idea, the first thing I like to do is come up with a hook or hooks for that idea. Then typically I'll use AI. I use the Genesis bots, which we have linked down below if you wanna access them, or our Exodus machine, which will basically automate these workflows and allow you to come up with whatever you want. I may do light editing manually on some of the big major points like the mechanism or copy blocks, but oftentimes if your hook is right and you have a good AI writing process, the rest of the ad writes itself, okay? I'll make the statics using Exodus and then basically the rest I'll send to a, a video editor with a winning reference. Okay. And eventually we'll have videos inside of Exodus, which is our proprietary AI software, which you get access through inside of our community coaching community, Genesis. Then you want to refine your thinking. So multiple times per week you should be looking at your account, competitor accounts, the market, etc. Let the data and your judgment refine your decision-making and focus. Most of your ads will fail and that's okay. Keep going. Last thing is to have fun. This role can be insanely fun if you allow it to be. Allow it to be. And I believe the creative strategists who enjoy the work get the best out of it. Okay, so we were way under time. That was about 15 minutes for me to explain all the creative strategy. But considering that some of the creative strategists in our community are making upwards of $20K, $30K, and some all the way up to $60K and $70K per month— no indication that you can do that, these people are at the top of their game— but creative strategists are in demand. So if you're running your own brand, it's important to understand this. And if you want to be a creative strategist or you are a creative strategist, it's important to understand these things as well. So hopefully you got a sense of what the job entails. Want access to this document, you can opt into my email list, which is below. If you want access to my coaching community Genesis, where we have training calls, feedback calls, tons of different coaches and a community, and we train people to be top 1% creative strategists, there's a link down below. It has a video that you can watch as well as a place where you can talk to someone on our team and they can see if you're a right fit. There's also some other things that go a little bit deeper, different products and things that you can get access to inside of Genesis, our coaching community. You also get access to our proprietary software, which is called Exodus. Inside of Exodus, you can do things like, you know, you can create your different segments inside of here. You can create workflows inside of here, which are pretty powerful. So you can borrow templates that are already made. You can generate static images. You also have access to this chat inside of here, which has a ton of different agents. We actually call those bots, but we have over 104 different bots that we've personally developed all the way for direct response. You can generate tons of images, etc. It's a very, very powerful tool and it's only getting more powerful. So if you're interested in any of that, you can book something below. For everything else, I will be sharing inside on my YouTube channel. So just continue to follow this and there'll be some lower ticket products and things that will be great resources for you. I appreciate your time and I'll see you in the next video.