What's up, Marketers! This is Aazar.
This newsletter is all about giving you ad ideas to find winning ad ideas and help you scale.
This newsletter includes: Analysis of top internet ads, insights from other performance marketers, and my learnings (this issue).
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• Data-Backed Benchmarks: Year-over-year spend trends and global venue snapshots to back up your next media plan.
Get the full picture of how media buyers activate out-of-home today.
I’ve spent more than 10,000 hours on creative strategy. And spent roughly $50 million.
A lot of those hours went into getting things wrong.
A few were in ad accounts where other agencies were uploading creative next to ours, on the same budget, for the same brand.
You learn fast in that setup.
When your ad beats every other ad for the same product or when someone else's ad beats yours.
Today I’ll share what’s stuck with me…
Visual and format
1. Every account has a North Star visual
Every account has one visual setup that works. Everything else underperforms, however well it's shot.
I've seen clean, well-made in-house UGC flop on accounts where the fix was simply filming somewhere else.
Retail product: In-house UGC went nowhere. We filmed on-site in actual retail stores, and it worked right away.
Health product: We tried funny, and it flopped. People buying health products want to see a healthy person. They don't want a comedian.
Cybersecurity app: If the creator isn't shown on stage, the ad doesn't work.
Find that visual before you brief another round of creative.
Below is the ad that failed:
It failed because we didn’t have a proper visual to align with the ad.
2. An organic format stops being organic once it says Sponsored (or looks like an ad)
Paid and organic look the same. Same hooks, same edits, often the same creators.
But the viewer sees the label. They know it's an ad, so their guard is up from the first frame.
Treat it like an ad and build for direct response. It has to earn the click, and a watch alone doesn't pay.
3. Study organic creators more than competitors
We look at organic content far more than competitor ads.
A competitor ad shows you what someone decided to spend on a while ago.
Organic shows you what people are choosing to watch right now, with no budget behind it.
On a Pokémon account, our best ads weren't really about Pokémon. We borrowed what was working for viral organic creators in that space. The videos felt native, and nobody watching them thought they were ads.
For example, this is an amazing organic creator who does great pattern interrupts:
Script
4. The script does 85% of the work
Around 85% of whether an ad wins comes down to the script. The visual is the other 15%.
The script should decide what you shoot. It carries the weight because it's what makes people believe you.
A great edit on a weak script gets you a great-looking ad that nobody buys from.
5. Every winning script has a proven structure underneath
Winning scripts follow a structure. Watch enough of them and you'll start seeing it.
Take a structure that's already proven, then make it yours: same skeleton, with your product, your customer's words and your angle.
Do that and your creative moves up a level.
6. Lead with the psychological driver from the first second
Pick the psychology first and the marketing angle second.
If you're leading with scarcity, the ad opens on scarcity in the very first second. You can't weave it in halfway through and expect it to land.
A scarcity ad opens on what's running out.
A fear ad opens on the thing they're already worried about.
The first second sets how the viewer feels about everything after it.
7. Find the one core hook
When beginners review an ad, they look at all of it. Experienced strategists go straight to the hook.
Two questions to ask:
How different is this from everything else running in the category?
Which single line is doing the work?
Five decent hooks in one script cancel each other out. One sharp one can carry the whole ad.
Thanks to our partners who support this newsletter.
Tools worth checking out:
Atria: You're only as good an advertiser as your swipe file. Atria helps save good ads and analyze them in-depth. But the best part? Their AI helps me create concepts and scripts within seconds. Check it out for free. Most importantly, they now have built-in ad analytics, MCPs, and an AI creative strategist to make more winning ads.
Research and judgment
8. Real customer research beats AI research anytime
AI has made a lot of strategists lazy. They grab an ad format, paste it in, ask for ten versions, and upload them.
Judgment is still on us, and so is the research.
AI research tells you what the internet says about a category.
Customer research gets you the exact sentence your buyer used.
Creative strategy used to reward raw volume. Now it rewards people who think and who do proper customer research, beyond what AI can dig up.
9. Comments are free research
Under every ad and organic video, people tell you what they care about in their own words.
What to look for:
The objection that keeps coming up. That's your next hook.
The phrase people repeat. Put it in the script word for word.
The question nobody has answered. That's an important angle.
Read the comments on your own winners too. They'll often tell you why the ad worked.
10. Copying a competitor gets you half an ad
Looking at competitors who spend heavily helps a bit. But most competitor-inspired ads come out half-baked, and they don't win.
That's because you copied what you could see, and you missed what you couldn't:
Their offer
Their positioning
The research behind the hook
All the versions they tested before that one
This is where beginners and pros split.
A beginner copies the competitor's idea directly.
A pro starts from positioning and builds iterations of ads that have already won.
Take what works and bend it to your brand. Change the hook, the proof or the setting. You can keep the structure as long as the ad comes out different.
Reading your own account
11. Most people who find a winner can't tell you why
I see this all the time. A client finds a winner, scales it, it dies, and they have nothing to go back to.
They usually haven't looked at everything they've run side by side. Here's how to fix that:
Put every ad you've run in one place, winners and losers together.
Watch the winner again, and then a few more times.
Read its comments.
Work out what it has that the losers don't: the hook, the format, the setting, the claim, or the type of creator.
Once you know why an ad worked, you can easily replicate it.
12. On a new account, test a lot
Testing campign
With a brand-new account, there's no shortcut. Make big, different swings, and skip the ten small tweaks of one ad:
Different formats
Different psychological drivers
Different creator types
Different openings on the same offer
At this stage you're buying information. Narrow tests feel efficient but teach you very little.
Scale
13. Past heavy spend, hunt for content gaps
Once an account spends $250k or more, small iterations stop moving the needle. It has already tested every standard angle and format.
Another variation of a known winner won't do much. What works is finding the pockets nobody in the category has touched yet:
A format the category has never used
A buyer segment nobody is speaking to directly
An objection every competitor avoids
How you actually get good
14. Taste comes from volume
I got good at this mostly by watching thousands of ads over years. Now I can tell whether an ad is good the moment I see it.
Watching only gets you halfway, though. You also have to make a huge number of ads before you get good at creative strategy. Watching tells you what to look for, and making ads shows you what actually happens when they run.
15. Get on big, crowded accounts
Big accounts speed up your feedback loop. You run the same test with more spend behind it and get answers sooner.
Put a few agencies in that same account, and you learn even faster. Your ad either beats theirs or it doesn't, and you can see exactly what beat you.
Big budgets plus sharp competitors will teach you far more than working alone.
Happy Growing with Paid Social,
Aazar Shad
Since this newsletter is free, I do it to follow my curiosity. But I’d love it if you could leave some feedback so I know if I am helping you or not.
One way I can help you, whenever you are ready:
Want my creative strategy services for your Q4? Last time we crushed it for a brand and our ad spent more than $ 10 M. Book a call here. I’m open to more clients now in Q4.
