Hope you’re having a great week. I loved last week’s episode of Marketing Operators, where I tried to define our Creative Strategy on Meta. It’s a worthwhile exercise I think every brand should do.

I wanted to do this because we’re trying to be more intentional about our testing, and as we ramp up volume, we want to make sure we’re guiding our internal team and agencies in the best direction we possibly can.
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A lot of these “rules” sound obvious, but that doesn’t make them any less important in my opinion.
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1. Volume Matters - Duh, we all know that. Volume by itself doesn’t equal success, but success is very difficult without it.
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2. Creative Is The Targeting - We’ve all heard this a thousand times by now. But that doesn’t make it any less important.
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3. The system is mostly incredible at giving you what you ask for with the inputs you provide - the system thrives on specific inputs - Before you try to force spend to a specific audience or demographic, make sure you have the right creative to resonate with them. And if you're not spending on the audiences you want to, think creative strategy before media strategy.
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4. Creative is the prompt, and creative strategists are prompt engineers - think of creative strategy as a form of prompt engineering. The quality of your creative will dictate the effectiveness of your campaigns. Creative is the prompt, and the output you get in an AI system is only as good as the prompt you provide it. If you’re struggling to reach new audiences, you probably don’t have the right creative to resonate with those audiences.
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5. The system will definitely find a local maxima if varied inputs are not given - I’m just trying to say the same thing in different ways. You have no shot at reaching new audiences profitably without the right creative. I think most brands (us included) aren’t taking large enough swings and optimize their diverse creative too quickly, which kills any opportunity they have of really reaching new audiences, so they further reinforce Meta going after the same people.
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6. Align Creative and Media Strategies - the gold standard is aligning business strategy (offers and products) with media and creative strategy. I fundamentally believe that’s the best way to reach new audiences. For example, if you sell men’s shoes, you can try to target your ads to women with female creators, but your scale is going to be limited (local maxima). You have the best shot when everything is aligned.
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7. Scale happens from reaching new audiences, and reaching new audiences comes from creative that speaks to those audiences - Don’t think you can grow forever with the same ads, products, and audiences. You’ll hit a plateau with your business as usual, and you’ll be better off scaling horizontally with different products, styles of creative, messaging, and more. You’re not AG1, so know the limits of your one SKU or one style of creative, and unlock growth by cracking new funnels.
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8. Hooks should very clearly call out and indicate who the creative is for - Your hooks should clearly indicate who the creative is for. This helps in capturing the right attention. Focus less on what your product is, and more on who it’s for. Make it painfully obvious as a test. If you want to reach dads in their 50s, say “Why dads in their 50s.” That’s an extreme example, but don’t overcomplicate it here.
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9. There should be as much cohesion between ad and landing page as possible, without being overkill - You don’t want to serve an ad that talks about great skin and land on a page about eyelashes. That would be a weird experience. But you also don’t want to go too crazy and try to make a new landing page for every ad. I’d recommend thinking more about funnels and personas—and testing scaling into a few core funnels that match ad to landing page well. If you’re spending $50K/mo, you only need 1. If you’re spending $2 million, you might need 5 to 10.
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10. Creators as the targeting - Sure, creative is the targeting, but I think you can take it a step further. Creators can also serve as very powerful targeting mechanisms. Like attracts like. So if you want to reach guys who play golf for your apparel brand, run ads with creators who play golf and run it from their pages. Not only will the content speak to the intended audience and run from their page, but there are also learnings from the creator’s page that serve as a signal to Meta on who to show ads to.

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I hope you enjoyed this one. This is my attempt to define some of our creative strategy principles, which I highly recommend you try as well. We went way deeper on the podcast, so check it out here.

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Let’s continue to innovate and grow together!

Best,
Cody

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