the "boring" ad moves behind $100mm+ in winners (this is what actually works)

In this video, I'm gonna show you the most reliable moves that you can use to increase the probability that you're gonna get winners as a creative strategist, because that is one of the most important things that you can do. That's your hit rate, right? And in creative strategy, it can be really hard to get winners. So why not make it easy on yourself and follow these specific moves that I've seen work over and over and over again to produce winners for massive brands? And by the way, if you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Iha. My business partner and I are copywriters who've generated over $100 million each with our copy. Right now we have a community with over 433+ creative strategists. This number has gone up, probably it's closer to 450 at this point. We help people make winning ads, funnels, and more money. These are some of the brands whose creative strategists work with us. Here's a wall of some of our recent wins, which we're pretty horrible at updating, but shows a little bit of some of the things that we've been able to do. And I'll link this document down below so you can check it out for yourself. Okay, so let's break it down. Now the moves I'm going to show you are not really creative, okay? They're very, very simple. So you may think that they're too boring, they're too easy, but at the end of the day, your goal is to get winners, and that's what these moves are gonna help you to do. In order to do this and to execute this well, you need to understand a handful of concepts, okay? So from a very, very high level, and this is not gonna take too long before we get into the nitty-gritty, the whole job of creative strategy is looking at patterns in your account and other people's ad accounts and then looking at gaps in those accounts. A pattern is just any element that you keep seeing that are significant, right? This could be specific actors or characters, this could be specific formats, this could be a style, this could be specific concepts, messaging, things like that. And if you see a bunch of those in winners, that could be a pattern. Doesn't mean for sure that it's a pattern, but if you're seeing the same kind of thing recurring over and over and over again, that should clue you in that, hey, maybe this is something that my market is responding to. Okay, again, we're not in a scientific environment, so you need to hold your patterns loosely because you don't really— you can't really control the environment and control every single variable, right? So you're looking for the most significant variables that are gonna withstand the noise of the environment that we're working in. The next thing is you're looking for gaps. So gaps are anything that's missing in your account. So how do you find what's missing in your account? You find that by comparing your account to competitor accounts. Right, or the theoretical ideal. So basically you can say that you'll find gaps in your segments and personas, the types of formats that you run, awareness levels, or the types of concepts that you run. And again, you can compare your account to a competitor account and see what are the missing gaps, or you can just say, all right, what are all the possible segments, personas, styles, formats, awareness levels that I could be targeting? Am I targeting all of them? If not, then those are potential gaps that I could fill in. Okay, that's basically it. You wanna pay attention to these because both of these patterns and gaps give you information about what's worth paying attention to. If you keep patterns and rotate other elements like new creative on winning messages, and if you fill in gaps, then you can pretty reliably find new winners. Again, the reason I'm bringing this up is because every single move that I'm gonna tell you, the prerequisite for this is understanding these patterns and gaps. Okay, the next thing that you need to understand is you need to understand the grammar of every single ad. We've talked about this on this channel many, many times, but every ad is basically made up of messaging times creative, which breaks down even further into your messaging is your segment times your concept and angle times your mechanism times your copy blocks/beats times your hook times the skeleton, which is the structure of your ad itself. And the creative, at least for video, is your conceit, your style, your actor, your terrain, and your setup. Again, more or less. If you try to decompose every ad, it can get messy, right? What's messaging? What's creative? Again, hold these terms loosely, but in general, you could deconstruct every ad into these specific elements, and these specific elements are significant elements. We're not talking about sentence length. We're not talking about how good the copy sounds, right? We're talking about the elements that actually move the needle— who you're talking to, the core idea, what What you're saying is the mechanism of how your product works. Some important copy blocks like pain, promise, proof, curiosity, the stuff that we know is the building blocks of persuasion. Beats, which are like specific points, things like I would call intensification. So negative intensification, here's what happens if you don't fix the problem and how it spirals out of control. Positive intensification, here's what happens when you do fix the problem and how it extends to all these other areas of your life, okay? These are specific persuasive tools. And again, we'll cover some of this with creative, and I have videos on this channel that break it down. The reason this is important is because when you're looking for patterns and gaps, you're looking for patterns in these things, right? Is this ad working because of who it's targeting? If that's true, then I target more of those people. Do I think this ad is working because the mechanism is done really well? Okay, if that's true, I'm gonna do more of that mechanism and highlight that mechanism. Do I think this one is working because of the skeleton or the structure? It's a timeline ad, therefore I'm gonna do way more timeline ads. Okay, or is it a combination of a couple of these different elements? So until you can actually look at an ad and break it down intuitively, as well as using AI or whatever tools you want, before you— unless you can break that down into its component parts, it becomes a lot harder to see the patterns and gaps, and it becomes a lot harder to make variations. Because when you make variations, all you're gonna do is highlight the element that you think is the winning element, and then everything else you can change. Okay. So what you're looking for is a majority of ad moves that I'm gonna tell you fall into putting new creative on winning messaging and new messaging on winning creative. Okay, that's really like the most basic formula. It's so simple and yet it works over and over and over again. You're looking for new creative on winning messaging. So you're looking to change up this creative and apply it to winning elements on the messaging. You're looking for new messaging on winning creative, right? You know a specific type of creative is working, so you're gonna change the messaging accordingly. All you're doing is you're taking one big element that you know is working and it's winning, and then you're just creating novelty in some of the other elements. Because, you know, you can look at this chart right here where we basically have creative and messaging. We have winning, new, new, right? Now if you do new messaging and new creative, It could work, and a lot of those become blockbuster winners, right? 'Cause they're completely new and something nobody has seen before. But your hit rate's gonna be very, very low. But right in here where you're taking some winning elements and applying some new elements, and some winning elements and applying new elements, like with creative and messaging, that's the sweet spot, okay? Because you're not reinventing the wheel, you're relying on what you've already spent money to prove is true, and you're adding the novelty which is gonna appeal to the psychology of people who are looking at the ads as well as the algorithm itself. Itself. Okay, the next thing is if you want to understand what format means, you need to understand that a format just describes a winning combination of creative elements. So I don't like the terminology format, or let me correct myself, I don't mind the terminology of format, it's just not that precise. So I like to use format, but I want to break it down into further parts because, you know, people will say a monk ad is a format, or a skeleton timeline ad is a format, or a podcast ad is a format. And on the surface, that seems like it makes sense, but underneath each of these, we're concealing a hidden structure. Because a Pixar song ad is basically describing the style, Pixar style, the conceit, right, which is basically the fact that it's a song. A monk ad is just describing the actor in the ad. A skeleton timeline ad is describing the structure, which is timeline, and the actor, which is a skeleton. And again, you can see some of the other breakdowns on here. The reason this is important is because if all you see when you look at a monk ad is format, versus, oh, this is a specific actor, it's gonna limit the types of patterns that you can see and the types of variations that you're willing to make because you're only looking at it from a very high level. I want you to be able to look at it at a more finely, like, coarse-grained or fine-grained view, okay? So all of that preparation is to get us to a couple of very winning high-probability ideas. One is to swap a new style on a winning message, right? So you basically then take a claymation video and put it on a winning static ad, or a claymation video on a Pixar-style ad. Okay, and here we're specifically talking about the style, which is the visual gloss. So claymation, Pixar, 8-bit, paper, things like that. All we're doing is changing the visual approach. Now this is cool because we're changing the minimum amount of structure. It's the same exact structure. If it's a podcast Pixar ad, we could do a podcast claymation ad. All we're doing is changing the style, which is going to refresh it in the algorithm, and it's also gonna look look different and look new. So it's a very low-risk move that you can make. Now the next one is you could swap a new format on a winning message, right? So let's say we have a winning message. Now we're going to swap a new format. And remember, a format is broken up on these different things on here: conceit, actor, style, terrain, setup, and things like that. So in this case, if we're going to take a winning message, we could take a message that is somebody just like a yapper video, and we could adjust that to a podcast video. Or a street interview or a tier list or something like that, right? So now we can change the structure, we could change the conceit, and a conceit just means kind of what media format is it pretending to be? Is it pretending to be a news interview? Is it pretending to be talk shows? Is it pretending to be podcasts? Things like that. And we could change the style. So in this way, we're changing some structural components, so we're shifting the messaging a little bit, but the core idea stays the same. The next one is that you swap a winning message on a new winning style. So if you notice that there's a new winning style, so for example, what are some new styles that are trending right now? Now, we see some of these like kind of mini dramas, right? Cora Derm has this one. They did another one on here. So these are like hyper-realistic ones. Here's another one. Let's see. More realistic, but it has kind of like a fictional ape character. So again, you could look at whatever sort of creative styles are trending. And then all you do is you go back and you say, what were my winning ads in the past, right? And then you apply that, you know that they work, they just fatigued for some reason. So now you take those and then you put the new winning styles on top of that, okay? And the last one is that you just swipe a competitor fully, okay? It's not creative, but you just look at it and you swipe the competitor. Those to me are the highest reliability ad moves that I have seen produce massive winners. It's very, very, very, very simple. Now the ability to which you're going to do this is your ability to see patterns and gaps, which is your ability to understand the internal grammar of an ad, which is why I pay so much attention to it. Now there's a couple other things that are sort of like mid-range reliability, like swapping a winning message and/or creative on new segments and personas. So if you have a winning ad or winning creative and you just basically want to do horizontal scaling, which means you're adding— focusing on new outcomes or new demographics, right? White guys versus Black guys. Or you're adding in new facets, which are just kind of like conditions that you would apply, like, oh, I'm gonna do this for smokers or vegetarians or something like that. This is another pretty reliable ad move that you can do, right? You're controlling the winning elements, which is messaging and things like that, and adjusting it for segments. The only problem is that a winning message is sometimes dependent on the segment, so you need to use some common sense and adjust accordingly. The next one is that you can swipe a winning message and/or creative from organic and apply to your winning messaging and/or creative. Okay, so basically you're gonna look for creative from organic, and I say winning in the sense of if it's viral and scaling, you can consider that a winner in the organic context. Is it gonna be a perfect 1-to-1 mapping when it comes to putting it in your ads? Of course not, but it's winning, so we'll put it in quotes, okay? Winning/viral. And you're gonna take that message and/or creative, you could do both or whatever, and you're just gonna apply it to your ads. Okay, so pop the balloon, or where they do those like kind of Jubilee-style 20v1, right? I've seen those be applied to ads and have some success, so that's a great way to do it, okay? Then you can swipe a high-signal comment, review, and apply to your winning message and/or creative, right? So all this is is looking at the ads underneath your, or the comments underneath your ads, or reviews on like Amazon from competitors or something like that, okay? And you're picking high-signal ones. High-signal ones are typically ones that have a lot of likes, or just ones that have really good information. This is where your taste and judgment, intuition come into play. But taking those and then turning those into ads is really, really, really, really powerful. And that's basically it. Again, these moves are not the most creative, and there are way, you know, way more different things that you can do, including more creative type of moves. But if you're looking for just like high reliability things that you can do to get winning ads, this is the way to do it, okay? It ultimately comes from just playing around with combinations of messaging and creative until you find something that clicks. Right, and that's all. Let me know in the comments below if this was helpful. Let me know what other types of videos that you would like to see that I can continue to cover. I try to reply to as many comments as possible. Down below you'll also see a place where you can book a call for our program Genesis, where you can join, you know, the almost 500 different creative strategists, marketers, and business people, brand owners that we have inside of our community. You get access to our AI tools that allow you to produce statics, produce videos, write copy, build complete creative strategy workflows. To me, it's one of the most robust AI tools that you can have as a creative strategist. And there's some products down below as well. So I'll see you in the next video. And as always, I appreciate your time. Thank you.