Transcript for "Oren John's Viral Content Masterclass": We jamming now. Everybody, welcome to the party, y'all. I am so so excited for this session today. We officially wrapped up the formal version of our boot camp last week, but this week we're kicking off the bonus sections and the master section. But what I'm curious about is let us know in the chat where everybody's dialing in from. I'm so curious. I know we have, like, a global community every single time that this pops off, but who do we have? Orlando in the build building, South Carolina's here, Manitoba's in the building, Espana, Spain's here, South Africa in the house, Mexico, baby. Oh my gosh. This is what I'm talking about. This is what I'm talking about. And we have a big Toronto contingent here joining us for a watch party. So if you didn't have a chance to make it out, it's all good. But we got a lot of people who I was just hanging out with and I'm so so grateful for everyone who's been able to join and we're gonna have a chance to kick it a little bit later. But everybody, I am also curious. For those in the chat, let me know is this anyone's first session? Are they joining us for the first time? I'm always curious about those folks. Chris says it's my first time here. There's a lot of people. Oren brings them out man. If you see Oren Talks you know you got to see Oren Talks. We can't miss that. So Oren make sure to bring them out everybody. Okay so if you haven't been here before I got to break it down a little bit because the next question I'm going to ask is who has been here for every single session that we've had so far? Because we've got a lot of first time people. Welcome to the community. Welcome to the community. Then we got a bunch of people who have been here since the beginning as we see start to flood the chat right now. Okay Everybody, let me go ahead and share my screen so I can start to kick this off. But, Dave, this is your first session. My name is Evan. It is so great to meet you all. I am your trusty spirit guide along this journey of creative strategy. And if I can figure out how to share my screen, I promise you I will. But give me two seconds here. Amazing. Okay. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. But are we are we tapped in now? Locked and loaded? Everybody can see and hear hear me alright? See my screen? Okay. Fantastic. So I've taken away from Orin's time too much here. So let me go ahead and speed through this thing a little bit because we have folks who are joining us for the first time and then we have folks who have been here the entire time. And when I talk about this, what I mean is this journey you can see. So we've had an amazing curriculum so far that's centered around creative strategy. If you haven't had a chance and this is your first time, I recommend that you join our Slack channel. We have 13,000 people strong in there, and there's a course docs channel where you can check out all of the recordings. But here we are in our first master section, the first of our two bonus lectures. So today, your favorite marketer's favorite marketer, Oren John, is gonna be chatting about the viral ad playbook that connects organic and paid. And then next week, we're gonna have Bill Rump. He's gonna be talking about how you scale 8 and 9 figure brands. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, this is a lot of people's first session. If we have not met before, we are Moosh. It's a pleasure to meet you. We have been championing creative strategy for the past five years. We've literally written the book on creative strategy as you can see. If you look to the docs tab right up there, we have a lot of material. And on top of the content, we have a product that we've made for creative strategist to absolutely kill it. So why we've been training people on this, topic of creative strategy is, of course, the content and the product. We also have the data side of things where we work with the best brands in our industries being able to produce the best creative possible. But the third reason, which is the most important, is because of you all. Hell, I think there's, like, 80 people upstairs of where I am in Toronto, and all of you in the chat were absolutely rocking out. You all are the freaking best. Big round of applause for yourselves. I want to hear it through the roof in all honesty so big round of applause. Here's something. Amazing. This is the reason we do it to really empower the community but a couple housekeeping pieces. So for our newbies here, if you have any questions throw them into the q and a tab that you're seeing there. I'm gonna try and pick them up at the end so Orin can knock them out the park. And then the big thing I'll note is on the recording front. This is where I need you all to have my back. If anyone asks for the recordings, do we have them? You sure bet you do. So jump in, you're gonna be able to get the recordings within twenty four hours and you're gonna be able to fly. Okay? And now a note for the people who have not who have been here from the beginning, so not our newbies but the people from the beginning, the certification. So as a reminder you're gonna get those fancy LinkedIn badges as long as you pass the requirements that you see here. Now that final date for the exam is going to be given out on May 21 and you'll have until June 1 to finish this. If there's any questions, I'll pick them up at the end or we can talk about it in person, but this is what it's going to look like. Okay? Now the final note that I wanna make before we kick this thing off is that we're coming up on the end of the road. And I can't believe it and I can't believe it. But this means we're coming up on the last chance to get your swag on. Alright? So if you haven't, start tagging us on social media because we've got a lot to give away. Our Toronto contingent, you've seen the swag upstairs. We've got stuff to give away today. It's gonna be awesome and it's gonna be great. Okay. I did my best to blast through this thing, but who's ready to welcome Oren to the stage, y'all? I know I am, but we gotta get the chat pop. Welcome Oren to the stage. Okay. I lied. We're trying to figure out Oren Wi Fi. I don't think it's a Wi Fi thing. I think it's a Goldcast thing, in all honesty. Something's wrong with Goldcast. It's kicking us off the stage. Okay. Can people hear and see me? Am I okay? And do we see Oren a bit frozen? Is that what's happening here? Okay. So I've described it correctly. Now here's the thing. For everyone new joining us, you see the chat. Right? Like, this community has gone absolutely bonkers, first of all. And one of the funniest parts is is we've broken so many different parts of technology. Oren, we got you back? Alright. Yeah. We get did everyone here and seeing seeing well? got you now, I think. We got you. Fingers crossed though. Alright. Perfect. Audio audio and all that? Audio's alright. You're freezing a little bit on the paper side of. things. But I think we can make it work. I think we can make it work. I'll pop back up though if things go wrong, but you got it, man. Knock it over the park. I'll see you at the end. Alright. Perfect. And so, yeah, I know it's it sounds a little frozen. As long as you can hear me, it's good. If we continue to have some problems, I'll I'll try to come in via phone instead. But, look, super excited to be here. And I'm gonna pop on the screen just so you don't have to look at me glitching out. Yeah. I was gonna say we can just do, we can just do some audio worse comes to worse. Alright. People say audio is perfect, but I'm gonna pop the camera off just, just make this easy. Wait for my screen to show up here. Alright. We got it. Screen is screen is live. Alright. We're we are here. So alright. So kicking this off, what I'm gonna talk to you today is about organic content and viral content and how that plays into creative strategy. So there is a lot to cover within this. We are gonna talk about creators. We are going to talk about, what's working on organic, what works in ads, how to put those into toolkits, and I'm super excited to walk through it. So first of all, a bit of why, you should listen to me about this. So I, was a marketing leader, and my my last kind of formal job was I was the SVP of marketing at a toy company where we were running tons of creator, tons of influencer, tons of paid. And then I became a creator myself to get better at social media content, and now I kind of live in between the two, and do workshops all around the country and with brands and around the world. I'm in London right now, specifically on this type of stuff with brands. Last week I was with Kentucky Fried Chicken. We were talking about their, future strategy. And then tomorrow, I'm speaking here in The UK specifically with ecommerce brands about what we're gonna talk about here. And so a quick note on this, why I love to call this stuff out. And one of the main things I wanna talk about about why people are like, well, okay. Cool. You're a content creator. You're an influencer. Why do we actually listen to you? So as many of you know, I have a program called Cut 30 with two other creators where we have had about 3,000 creators kind of trained underneath the program. But in addition to seeing all the stuff that works for their content every every month, we track it all in a database where we actually have information on what is going live, what is above or below outlier, our rankings and ratings working better than other. We have built our own set of tools, a lot similar to to what Motion has for ads, but for organic content and a little less robust, where we're monitoring the situation, for lack of a better term, of exactly what's happening with people creating content and then using that data, to to work through it. But a quick sanity check for anyone who's worked in marketing before is that, we used to think about media as if we would have basically, we would have our paid media, and we'd have our owned media. So your paid media, you'd have all your ads you are running online, and then your owned media would be the things that showed up on your own organic social media accounts. And so owned is only a small part of the battle right now because we have what we call enabled content. It's a huge conversation happening in marketing today. So enabled content is, do you have creators that make affiliate content for your brand? Are you sending out seeding packages with free products to creators? Do you have accounts that aren't your main account? Do you have five or six accounts for your brand social? Do you have fan pages? Do your, team members, your employees at certain locations, do they make content? And this is the case in a small company where you could have the CEO or employees make content. And it's also is the case in a big company where someone like Ulta, who's like a huge retailer, has the Ulta beauties program where they have hundreds of people that are on the floor employees who are encouraged to to make content. And, so this combination of those becomes really important because your own channels plus these enabled channels leads to this way larger organic pie of how people talk about brands. And most importantly, for what we're talking about here and for strategy, is the learnings from these play into ads. And so, if I was to overlay, I basically make a Venn diagram of what performs on ads and what's performs on this chart of, like, owned enabled organic content, it would almost be a circle. They they are closer than ever. There's still some that goes one way or or the other, but there is so much overlap, that you you'll see it in the ad accounts. And so now I I wanna get into this concept of organic content today is creators first. In fact, the entire Internet today is basically creators first when we talk about social. And what this means is that we are now hearing, instead of from big TV channels or big periodicals or famous celebrities. We are hearing from everyday people every sale who are then posting constantly about the things they are either passionate about or experts out. And y'all know this. Y'all are here for that, but it shapes the way we consume because now that's also what people end up wanting to see inside their ads. And you'll notice that brands today are increasingly becoming creator led, and I'm a call out a few examples there. So Def to Stock here on the left. If you haven't seen them, Def to Stock is a stock photo website. But they have a creator, Agus, she's pictured here, and they have also a team of other related creators that are and all of them are basically talking about things that are happening in the trending world as marketing for depth to stock. And you would say, okay. Why would such a why would a stock photo site wanna talk about all these things happening in the world? Well, the visual world is what they're selling. They're selling their knowledge of it. And so it acts as a funnel for anyone interested in that if they were ever need a stock photo. Do you want the corny old site, or do you want the new site? Gymshark is a great example of a brand that, if you go on their feed, you go on their Instagram, they have collab posts with, like, 50 creators if you go past the last 75 posts. Different looks, different feels, the different, you know, athletes, different body types, male, female. They are, extremely community forward. Cluely, who you may have heard about in software, they are a relatively, controversial company inside this, but their entire organic feed is basically a skit segments with multiple creators. They have other famous creators that basically work for them on their core feed. And then Rarify is another one I like to call it. It's more of a small business. They are, they sell vintage furniture, and they have a creator and some employees who are on feed all the time explaining the things they sell. And I like to call this out because there are basically, if you go to all of these, all of these are popping on social media in their own way. They're all unique, and some are big, some are small, and they all have a creator first strategy. And you'll notice that very few people don't have a creator first strategy who are succeeding in organic for brand, which ties a lot into what you see for sales. And so then we get to this conversation that's gonna tie into, okay, how how are we measuring ourselves as creative strategy? How do we wanna talk about what we're doing here? And it's this concept that you may have gotten into earlier in the course, but it's concept of CAC to LTV. So this is the idea that when you are running ads, you have a customer acquisition cost. And when you have a customer inside of a brand, they have a lifetime value, how much money they spend with them over time. And so the equation you begin to get into as a creative strategist, you will be asked to solve those numbers. You will be asked to say, we are gonna spend x amount of dollars to be able to get a customer based on how much cost that customer will spend with us over time, and there's gonna be a ratio. So Grunz is a, just got acquired. You've likely heard of them. And they were producing, more than 500 creators a month, more than 1,500 pieces of UGC in a month, scaling up to thousands of that, and they had mastered their CAC to LTV stat. They knew that if they could get their, customer acquisition cost at a third of the of the lifetime value, they could have massive scale. And I call this out because these are the kind of numbers that you wanna be able to talk about as a strategist with the media buying team and with the actual brand owners themselves. And what I I wanna mention here is that you will notice in that strategist role, you're gonna get asked for more and more content, more and more creators, more and more people who are able to push the needle, whether it's putting new ads inside the ad account or whether that's just creators creating stuff on affiliate, your hands are gonna touch this when you're doing briefs. And I wanna call this out to say that scale is a really, really, really important note here, how big that this gets. So these brands, and I I'll call out a few more, here as well here in a sec. They are putting thousands of pieces of content out through creators. They're running hundreds, if not thousands a month in their ads accounts when they get to big scale. And so I want you to think about as I go through these strategies we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about the basics, and then we're gonna talk about how many, just the sheer volume, it takes to do this. So one of the core concepts, if you wanna take this all the way back to what works really well on organic content, is this idea of yapping, which is literally talking on screen on the Internet. The idea that you were gonna say, hey. I'm gonna be able to talk about things. This is all people talking about a dating app, like, on this this screenshot. But the idea that you are gonna be able to get on camera and have someone talk on the Internet, and it is the this is the most effective type of content on the internet right now, and is one of the most and what happens is you get all these people from traditional advertising backgrounds or strategists who wanna look at, oh, I'm gonna make an ad, and they forget the fact that people are gonna consume ads that look like they're organic content, and it's gonna work super, super well. And I'm gonna talk to you a lot about yapping. And you'll see, there's a note in here, I hate these kinds of videos. And guess what? That's the problem with strategy work for a lot of people is they dislike inherently the content that is the most effective. And the most effective content is the content the audience wants to watch. And if you take away anything from this, is that you need to divorce yourself from the things that you like and obsess only about what the customer likes. And we'll talk a bit about how to do that and a bit about, like, how you would set up your feed, but you need to be making the things that look like what your customer consumes. And so how do we get started doing this? This? This is a, this is a workshop I was doing in Miami. I I have this chart we have on here. See if my my zoom in will work on this. Everyone gets obsessed. Everyone, every company sees all these shiny objects. Every strategist sees all these new says all these new types of things they can do. We should be on LinkedIn. We should be on TikTok. We should do these ads. There's animated explainers. This is viral, etcetera. But what really needs to happen is you need to focus hyper in on one thing. You can probably do one or two things a year as a company, even a big company, that you're gonna do well. And as strategists, I would say most people get lost in the sauce thinking about some of the wrong things. And the number one thing that is most effective that most brands should be doing with their strategist in their ad account is getting creators, a small number of them to start, to start making content about the products that you put inside the ad account, and you are also trying as affiliate sales channels. And you as a strategist are gonna have to learn how to brief that, and then you are also going to have to learn how to facilitate some of this. How do we start it? Because what's gonna happen is if you're really like, well, where do we get our first creators? How do we do this? And even though it's not technically in the job description, the more you facilitate, the better that it is going to go. So if you wanna start doing this, then we wanna get those first creators. I first got piece of tactical advice I wanna go in here before we get into some of what makes their content work is that they are already in your existing customer base. Whenever anyone's like, how do I get my first creators for UGC that we are able to put in our ad account, it comes from your customers. And the two most common ways you can find that, is a, you can contact them directly through the existing channels. You ask on your Instagram stories. If anyone is a content creator and interested, you put it inside your email blast as a section. But there is also software that helps identify creators inside your, actual existing email base. So one I use is called Outer Signal. There's a few of them. HubSpot has features like this. But for instance, Outer Signal will go through your email base, and will tell you every single person that has any account over, like, a certain number of followers. I think it's a couple thousand that's on social media. And so you were able to go and say, oh, what kind of content do my existing customers have affinity with me make? And then when you reach out, it's a really natural fit. And so when you're a strategist and you're trying to get this type of content in, it comes from getting those people and starting with them, getting that first two or three to make assets for their content. And then there's this conversation around scaling. So these are all examples of this is all Claude content. Claude is running a, look, they have more money than God, but they are running an extremely scaled influencer and creator program, that, like, beyond what most of us can comprehend. There's also brands like Comfort is another one. They're they make the really soft hoodies. Dad Gang, the dad hats, that's another one that just has has a ton. Almost every cosmetics brand, they are pushing, like I mentioned, hundreds, if not thousands of creators through these things. And that comes from developing systems, which we'll talk a little bit more about here. So first, okay, if you're gonna start talking to these creators or talking to your in house team, I'm gonna run through an exercise I do to kick that off every time. Because your job, once you've said, okay, we are gonna be putting creator account content in the ad account, whether we're making it or we're hiring people to make it. What do you do? And, this exercise is where I start with. I basically you get a whiteboard. This is a great way. If you are a freelancer and you wanna do an initial project as a creative strategist with a team to see if it's a fit, I would do a workshop like this. I would do it either free or I would do it as your kickoff call, or I would do it as a paid workshop, and then they could apply the amount they pay towards an ongoing retainer with you. But, basically, what you're gonna do is you are gonna outline on a in in an actual like a whiteboard ideally, or you could do it in a Miro board online if you're doing it online. But in person is usually better. You start with the messages. What does the company wanna get across? So for instance, if you are sitting down with a cosmetics company for the first time, you need to look at what are their core value propositions? Are they cheaper? Are they better? Are they better for certain skin types, people of certain ages? What separates them? What are their core value propositions? And let the company articulate that to you. And then also I would use tools. Perplexity is great for this. Cloud code is great for this. I would go scrape what's happening in TikTok comments. What's happening in Reddit? How do people feel? Get some information there. And then also that your story. What are stories you can tell about the brand? Those are also messages. What do I mean by a story? Did you just release a new product? That's a story. Did you did your founders have some crazy backstory that led them to start the brand? Is there did you have some really cool experience with a celebrity or an influencer? Did you have some big thing happen at a trade show? What are stories you can use as through lines in your ads? And you'll actually find when people start brainstorming, there's kind of a lot there. Because it might even be that you have an employee in the engineering department who had some really interesting thing happen with them that would turn into a good story for an ad. And then there's trends. So at the bottom of this, this is the most interesting one. So for instance, I I did this the other, the other week with a friend of mine who runs a gym. We were running this exact exercise to help improve his funnel. And he was talking about I was like, what are the questions that are coming up in your gym? What is, like, what are the conversations? What do the coaches get asked? And, basically, the conversation that was coming up was around peptides and GLP ones. They were getting asked all the time, how do my workouts and my diet plan need to change if I'm on tirzepatide or Ozempic? And that was coming up enough that it was a a message. We're like, hey. What what do you do when you answer that? Okay. If that's a common question in your community, that's a trend that may not last forever, it didn't exist three months ago, should we make ads around it? Right? And we did. We tested ads in the ad account, basically saying, hey, we're a gym that specializes in helping you come up with a workout program tailored to your peptide routine. And so this is the first thing you outline. We actually go through this, and then you're gonna make a list. Let's say you get seven, ten messages of what the brand wants to get across. And this could be by product. This could be overall. That's the first thing you wanna map out. Then you have this idea of concepts, and this is where the organic ties in really well. I'm gonna go through some organic content here in a bit to to talk through it. But there are organic video types and that work really well as ad types and back and forth. The first is is a transformation concept. And so concepts are just basically a type of content you can execute. So if you have a graphic designer, you could probably execute carousels. If you have a if you have a creator who's basically great at yapping, you can do certain types of videos. If you have an ASMR creator, if you have a video team that does high end stuff, some of that's gonna impact what concepts you can actually do. Right? I don't recommend writing down every concept in the world. I recommend writing down concepts based on who you have to execute them. So a few examples is like transformation content. Okay. This person had this thing happen to them, and it changed what happened. Changed, like, some results in their life. For cosmetics, for instance, it could be a get ready with me with a full look at the end. You know? Or it could be of a supplement, what happened after this. Credible explainers is another huge one, and this takes directly from organic. Can you get somebody, a doctor, a, anyone in scrubs, anyone with diplomas on the wall, anyone who's authoritative to speak about your content. Right? I do a lot of this content for marketing brands, where I can do a I can credibly explain as a former CMO why you should use a piece of marketing software. That's a good angle for an ad. Testimonials, we all know what those are. And then tutorials overlooked, how you actually use something. So now you have all your messages in your left column, and you have all your concepts in the middle. Now if you start multiplying those together and you go, okay, all of this trend content, can we do a transformation about the trend? Can we do a credible explainer about it? Can we do a testimonial? Can we do a tutorial? Now you're starting to get a pretty big well of content that you could execute. And then the last one, where organic really plays into this. What you'll see people run versions of the exercise with just the first two, but you fail on social media without this third one, which is the idea of hooks. Of what are you able to do to get people to stop scrolling to watch the video? And the hook applies obviously for organic content, but it also applies for still imagery as well. Why would someone stop? What's in the, what's in the visual for the ad? So a couple examples of this, so visual hook for instance could be, is there something really unique happening on screen? You know, a, really interesting lighting, or a cool car, or a cool setup. Poke in the pool is one we call out a lot. That's when someone is doing something else. So when someone is, for instance, if someone was, like, juggling a soccer ball while they're doing the video, it's like some other thing that keeps people engaged. I have some visual examples of that a little bit later. Familiar face is another hook. If you, it's why you'll see someone say, oh, I'm gonna break down, Becca Bloom or Justin Bieber or whatever it is. Someone that people may know, you're using them to hook. That's familiarity. And then, like, a call out. What I mean by call out is you will see a lot of ads start with, especially if they're local ads, someone might say, like, if your ad was tailored towards Miami, Florida, they'll literally say Miami, Florida, and, like, specifically talk to an audience is another good example of a hook. But your job as a strategist is to guide them through the messages, is to then have a wide list of concepts you can then cut down to see what the brand can actually do, and then curate your own long lists of potential hooks. Because when you map all this out, you should be able to walk out of this whiteboarding session in ninety minutes, two hours, with probably 30 or 40 pieces of content to try, whether inorganic or as ads. And so I just wanted this wanna leave you with this. Yes. You do guys do get this deck afterwards, I I believe. I know the Motion team has it. And, this is a just a a worthwhile if you need ideas, you need to know where to start, how to do it, and then you we'll talk about how to leverage organic with that. So going into hooks, if you are in if you are in ads and you are only taking examples of hooks from other ads, you are gonna be behind. You have to be taking good hooks from organic content if you wanna be running the best ads in your account. And so all of these are I save this every week, and I'll get into how I do that in toolkits here in in a minute. But, so these are all ones I have saved recently. So for instance, this this one, this guy, they knew something in 1996, and he flips through a magazine. And, and that's a great starter. You're like, oh, what magazine is that? It's a visual that he opens it up and starts turning the pages. I think that gave me an idea for an ad for a project I'm working on where I thought we could have, like, a kind of funny book, like, almost like a juxtaposition. Like, say, it was a get ready with me, and the girl's reading, 48 laws of power or or whatever it is. There's something you can do there that's visual. It's why I saved that. I'm just showing you the the thought process. Then we have angle. So you'll see a lot of these, like, car mounted shots. Right? It's just the first shot. It's pretty simple to do. You buy amount that's a $102,100 bucks. When you start working with creators, you'll also notice you can start sending them stuff that helps their videos get better. That's a great creative strategist hack. You'll be like, alright cool. If I'm doing more cinematic stuff, maybe for the first shot we do a car rig shot, because it's just gonna have a good hook rate. This one, he pours the milk into the cereal throughout the entire video, and eventually it overflows. And it's kind of like a gimmick, but you know what? It works. And you is it it's cheap to try. You probably bought two two gallons of milk, right, and was able to cut that video through it. That's just an example of like a hook that I'm saving. This one too, there's just a purely visual. She's using a bunch of cool graphic overlays. She has a spoon in her hair. She's talking on the pliers. You'll see people do little stuff like that. Oh, I'm talking with a spoon. I think that's dead, honestly. I think that's boring. If you're gonna do it, you have to be all in. I I bookmarked her because she's all in. There is no not stopping from, like, all the things she's doing. Whereas I think just doing one little thing doesn't quite add up anymore. And then another one, this is a trend. And I bookmarked this because it's a trend. It's about there's this whole thing of, like, teaching you x, but y. So teaching you productivity, but you don't understand complete sentences. Or teaching you productivity, but you're a golden retriever. Or, like, teaching you how to do a makeup routine, but you're a four year old boy, whatever it is. You are able to to basically make a kind of a funny gimmick to get people to stop and watch the video. So, and look and there's it's not and when you look at any of these, none of them are really enragement. Right? We'll talk about that kind of stuff in a minute. Like, no one's getting mad from any of these, And they're not they're, like, not quite engagement bait. Right? They're not being, like, you have to comment on this. You do x or y. They're just visually interesting. I'd say the most baity is probably just her entire look, but also she's making really valuable content. So another kind of key thing I wanna call out for, for any creative strategist is you will hear a lot of people be like, oh, well, that's too click baity or that that hook or that, that kind of thing is, I would never say that. We can't take that strong of a stance. The number one thing to think about when you're doing that with creator content, with the content with someone on screen, is that the hook doesn't really matter if they're measured and intelligent and credible after the hook. So for instance, if you say something outrageous for that first sentence, like I like I did this recently in a video. I made a video about Coachella where I was like, how can all these brands send all these influencers to Coachella? Isn't this a complete waste? Right? But then I go, well, if you actually look at the economics of attention around how much Coachella content gets consumed, it tells a different story. So my hook got people excited. It was kind of an engagement bait hook, but then immediately I'm saying something credible. That doesn't hurt me at all. It's just a setup to be able to share good advice, and I would really think about that a lot. And look, and if you were someone mentioned like a boss that wants to change the hook, whatever. The, with this, testing is your friend. Right? Every one every piece of content you make is a strategy. So especially if you're going organic, but obviously in the ad account, test multiple hooks. Redo it two weeks later with a different setting and a different creator with a different hook. But you and the way to beat a boss who's telling you stupid shit is to prove it inside the testing process. Be like, great. I'm gonna put your idea in. We have a testing process. I run this testing process with every brand I've ever worked with. We do four versions of everything over the course of six weeks, and we're gonna report back on the results, and we're gonna compare these to these other ones. And if they don't wanna test, they hate money, and they're probably not gonna have things work out well for them. Right? But most people who are reasonable will agree to a testing framework like that. Alright. So now let's talk about what actually goes viral in organic and what to learn from that. Rankings and ratings is the number one. Especially so we we talked about kind of creators you can get on screen. If you have an expert, and by I mean an expert, is there a founder who wants to get on camera? Is there a doctor that's a member of your board, a nurse, a good influencer, someone who's just smart? Rankings and ratings is great. From a place of credibility, and this this woman just did it from a place of, like, she's an interesting person. Rate things that are happening. And so you will see if you start watching some content like this, the algorithm is gonna throw you a ton more. And it is an excellent way to say, okay. If I if we have a dermatology brand, we're gonna rank sunscreen. Let's rank 10 sunscreens by based on a dermatology. Dentist ranks x and y. This woman's rating jobs she had in her life, and it's a great hook because she's in a military uniform. And you're like, what? How you know, you were in the army, right? You begin to get like a and then she she has a really interesting arc, so this went really viral. But you have that ability to say, having an opinion on things on the Internet is a scroll stopper, and it is an excellent format for an ad. And again, if you have if you have anyone who is a doctor on your board or whatever it is, and someone called out, they're allowed to advertise something, you can 100% just talk about your experiences. Like, right? We had a doctor in Cutthirty, a knee doctor, who's literally just saying, let me rank the, like, the procedures you would use for this thing. Right? You are establishing credibility. It doesn't have to be specifically related to the product. The other thing around ads that everyone always forgets is you can run an ad about a concept or about something useful that takes you to a landing page that's a listicle. The landing page and the creative ties together that does not have to be some big product endorsement. If you are gonna be a strategist, you have to think like a strategist, which means when you are put up against an obstacle, like, oh, well, this person can't say that technically. It's like, well, what can they say? What will people trust? And then where can we send them that actually reflects that? And then how does that start a journey with our brand? That is the strategist arc. Then we have, definitive cultural statements. That's another good one. So this one, the algorithm prefers blondes. Definitive cultural statement. If you have, you know, x x music type, this this thing or that, this look is the look for summer, this thing in culture is dead. That is a definitive statement. That is working that goes viral on organic right now. Something worth pulling from. Provocative scenarios is another one. You will see I do this a lot in my content now where it's not even necessarily the hook, but you put a scenario in your content. I have one the other day about, like a fictional couple going out to lunch in a really odd scenario to then prove a point about health and wellness. So this idea that you can make up a fake scenario of how people interact or and and this one, it was like, these are just different jobs ambitious couples should try to have together, and it was kind of, like, humorous. But this is a really creative way to put an ad out there to get people people retained. And someone asked, how do I craft this around a stationary brand? Stationery is amazing. Right? Stationary is such a killer concept to do creative strategy for because you know what gets put on stationary? Every emotion in human history, right? I am going to apologize to somebody in a letter. I wrote a love letter to a person that's at war. I'm leaving a note for my husband before I go out to go to to go to work. I have a communication where I I I journal every day. You have every realm of human emotion to play with on your product, and I would use that. And then last is unpopular opinions. So this is, and you will have, as a brand, I know, basically every brand has these. They have something that everyone in their industry does they think is really stupid. There will be camera companies who are like, you know what? Micro four thirds is a terrible camera format. No one should ever shoot on a 23 millimeter lens. We don't engineer this thing this way because of x reason. People should not be using loose powder in their cosmetics anymore. Creatine doesn't work. And if you have those things that you really believe, embrace those and put those in the ad account. And again, when we talk about creators doing it and representing your brand, and we'll talk about brand, kind of comms and stuff a little bit later, You have a wide world where you can use your customers, you can use your creators to express opinions and test opinions that don't have to be on your main account. Someone asked and I know we'll get q and a going here later. Someone asked for utilities company specifically. Like, again, utilities, absolutely amazing niche and, like, electricity and, like, I don't know what you're running ads specifically to do, but if it's to get people to, like, switch providers, like, you have, like, unpopular opinion. You shouldn't be paying more for, like, x versus y. Like, ranking and rating the appliances that use the most electricity in your house. You know, like, like, unpopular opinion, you got ripped off by solar. Like, there is so many, I just basically look at it. Like, no industry is unsexy. No thing that you cannot make interesting. Someone said, like, regional furniture. Furniture's amazing. You have every trend in happening inside of a home. You have how to reuse your existing stuff. You have how to make this room versus that room. How do you make a small room still feel big? How do you make a big room feel small? How do you coordinate your art and your other? There's infinite tips there. And again, I, I do this all day. Right? I am a creative strategist for brands at the highest level, and so I've learned to think like this. But that's the way I need you to take it as well. You need to be able to say every topic you hear, you need to get as excited as I got for those last 10 topics. Regional furniture, electricity, whatever it is, stationary, you're like sick. I like and then think of what the most interesting thing is. That's how you become a great strategist, and it becomes natural the more, the more you do it. Service businesses, whatever. Insurance is one of my favorites. Insurance, because people don't know how that shit works. They don't know about term life versus whole life. They don't know about how much they can expect that their car gets totaled. And then if they see anything happen in the news, someone's house got hit by a hurricane, viral car accident, celeb, whatever, break down what the insurance scenario would be from it. There's so much good content. So, okay, how do we even determine what's a viral format right now? How to monitor? Similar to how you have motion, there is, one we use. This is the internal tool we have in cut 30. It's called video database. There's a lot of tools like this. But just like you see in motion, you see stats. These same tools exist for organic content. Right? It shows you this was an outlier, 6.1 x percent. You know, there's a lot of, platforms. This one's video database org. There's, you know, there's sandcastles. There's a whole bunch of platforms like this, that basically do similar what Motion has for ads for organic, where you can save and find and, like, look at things. So that's one way to do it. But the other way to do it that I think is is most useful for all of you who don't wanna who don't wanna pay for more software is to set up an account from your audience's perspective. Ideally, one or two. And I'm gonna go back through. People keep listing things that they're like, oh, this is a little bit harder and they're not hard. I'm just gonna zip through, like, three of those in a second. But before I get there, if you are, set up accounts, like, again, if we go back to that concept I had earlier where someone was, like, I hate those type of videos, which again, I totally respect. I hate a lot of type of videos, but you need to look from your customer's perspective. So what I would do is I would find your customers, go into your Klaviyo, go into your Shopify, find five repeat customers, and find their social media, find their Instagram, and then go start a new Instagram account and just follow 50 of the same accounts. It doesn't have to be individual people, follow the brands and the influencers and stuff like that. And guess what? Now you have a mirror of their feed that you can log into, and you can just scroll. So I schedule I have two thirty minute blocks a week where that is literally what I do. Because look, I don't consume the kind of content I create. As a creator, I make, like, two or three minute videos now. My attention span is, like, forty seconds max, probably more like 20. So I don't even consume what I create, but I wanna understand what that looks like, so I intentionally scroll people that, make content like me. And I would do this for any account you have, any customer you have, and I would set that time to scroll it, and then you'll start to see. You start bookmarking, oh, this is a hook. Oh, this is stuff I would never see on my profile, and you'll begin to realize the sheer vastness of the world that is out there. Alright. Before I get into this next portion of this, I'm gonna talk about people where we're asking about some some more of these can we share ideas for this or that? Again, this is your job to think about these ideas. Right? If you wanna be a strategist, you need to be able to think like this. Now I'll break down a bit of these, but someone said, like, okay, wellness, well-being. That's the same thing. You gotta think of every human emotion, everything that ever happens to a person. You're going through a divorce, you're having a hard time at work, you can't afford your groceries, you're hitting a wall in your fitness. All of those are a mental state. You have every one of those human stories to work with, with a creator, with a written piece of content, whatever it is. So and I would go lean into those human emotions. The the the stack for every creative strategist is to try to tie whatever you're selling back to one of the core human needs. Right? Love, spirituality, money, physical health, and, like, mental health. Right? Like, how can you begin to bring stories about those? Those are gonna be immediately compelling, and I begin thinking of that. Alright. I lost inside the comments. Financial advisor. Financial advisor, another amazing one. People don't understand how financial works. I have a Roth IRA. I have no clue how a Roth IRA works. Right? I I am I doing the right thing? No idea. Four zero one ks match? What does that mean for me over twenty years? How different is a 6.25% mortgage rate than a 5% rate? How bad did the boomers stick it to us with how the Fed changed? Explain those things from the financial advisor's perspective. Use scenarios, like I mentioned in the viral ones. Scenarios are your friend for any services business. If you were a financial advisor and you used a scenario hook and you said, okay, recently divorced couple, she made $21,000,000 a year and he made $48,000 Immediately, people are gonna be like, what? What happened? Was it a sugar baby scenario? And you have them hooked. And you get to break down, here's this is how I do their financial plan post divorce to make sure they can da da da da da. Now you're sharing your expertise in context of a funny scenario. Now you may not wanna go that far, that's fine. But it's immediately more interesting to do any scenario that you're describing that's interesting than just to try to make an ad about your financial products. Right? And that is a there's there's a lot of that. There's been a lot of stuff about bra companies on there. Look, bras are great. You know why bras are great? Because there's an inherent problem that every woman has that she's like, do I really have the right size? You could probably just run an entire ad account purely off of you're wearing the wrong size bra ads. Right? But look at those consumer insights. And then b and, like, then walk through those stories and have them be kinda tongue in cheek or kinda funny. But unpopular opinion, like, a cup isn't really a b cup, or pink isn't actually flattering on dark skin types. Like, you have so many approaches you could, you could look at there. As much as I want to keep workshopping through those, I'm gonna continue through this deck. Alright. So to do this right, to do this well, you need to build a toolkit. This is mine. This is a screenshot of mine. It's a Notion doc. And I literally have, it'll be, like, types of content, like a like a worksheet organic video content, a pinch in effect. I have a tag system, organic video launch, AI content, BTS, carousel, whatever. I have the link, and I have the status. Is this just a reference or have I used it? And then if I used it, did it work? That's just a literally a spreadsheet, and they'll have the screenshot in here. Just something like this that you update once a week at a scheduled time, so you don't procrastinate on it with stuff that you have bookmarked. So basically, you will have stuff in your Motion Creative Analytics Creative Analytics account. You will have stuff in your Instagram bookmarks. You will do the intentional scrolling I mentioned. You will have stuff in the ad account, and you're gonna be like, what do I have? You should make a note. What is it? Did it work? What would I use it for again? And I have it in a big sheet. Because guess what? When you go to your next job as a strategist, and someone's like, why should I hire you? And you go, well, here's my reference kit. Here's the 75 things that I have saved. And I and now there's these 10 from Motion Creative Analytics. They're my highest performing ads I've ever worked on. These are 40 I haven't gotten to try. I'd love to try for your brand. And you were able to walk through that list, and they're like, wow. This person's super so it's organized, dialed, and cares about their work. And then you don't have to. I I know all of you have have have dealt with this, where you're like, what was that one video I saw with the thing that we should do other? Prevent that from happening as much as you can. Spend one one I I used to do Sunday nights. Now I do a lot of, like, community calls on Sunday nights, so so not anymore. It was a great anti procrastination for me, which is to organize my bookmarks on on Sunday nights. And so someone asked, could you use Claude to keep track of your your framework and wins? So the biggest thing about this is, what I've noticed by anyone who tries to do any of this stuff with AI is they end up forgetting why they did it in the first place and then not actually really organizing things well. Now what it can do for you is actually go grab some of your winners for them to you to decide what you should put in. I would use it to help save you some time organizing, but you still need to manually put together your toolkit or you're not really gonna be sharpening the knife. What's so a couple things are working on ads right now I wanna talk about, because I am in ad accounts right now. And, and a good example of, like, things that are in the toolkit. One is these videos where people have, snacks and stuff in front of them. They're like she's, like, eating a plate of, I apologize to if this creator's in this chat because she looks insane in the screenshot. But she's literally eating, like, a plate of cheese and crackers. And it's just a completely normal video, but that's just happening right now. There is, like, half of the UGC I have on one project we have is all people doing something in the foreground, and I would just, like, note that and be running with it. Run all of your same winning ads. Just run it back with someone eating in the foreground. This one, these are AI explainers. AI explainers are ripping. This they're they're just going into OpenArt or Luma or wherever they are, Veo, and and generate an explainer. OpenArt is great for this, because they have, like, a storyboarding function. But they're literally, like, in this visual type, explain, you know, what's happening inside your body when you have the supplement, what's happening in your brain when this well-being thing happens, like, ask it to animate how the money changes x or y. They are a super high performer in the ad account right now. It's not gonna last forever, and it will take you probably or you or whoever you have do it a good forty five minutes to do one right, which is a crazy advantage versus what you had to do to get, like, someone to animate those those prior. And, okay, so yo. Someone say, yeah, someone saying that should not compliance is is hilarious. You guys just don't wanna win, like, straight up. There's people doing, like like that's a whole separate conversation. Alright. And then we have, yeah. Open art was the one I called up that has, like, a storyboarding function. They have a function called I think it's like smart shot or something where you describe what you want. You say, hey. I want to explain how, how a person would save a million dollars over time in a four zero one k in a visual in, like, an animated style, you know, like like a like, whatever. And then share some examples. And it will then be, like, here's eight or 10 shots that we would generate. You approve the shots, and then it will generate you the whole video. So that's, like, one of the easier ways ways to do that. Then this other one is the reaction videos. And this is one of my favorites we're doing right now is you can even react to your own brand content, like, content on your organic feed or content you made, which is a great way, obviously, if you're running in the ad account to not, you know, be using any copyrighted content. But, basically, it's just like showing another video on screen, and this is like a how to. But you could definitely be, like, like, reacting to or following up, which is a banger organic format right now that is also working great in the ad account. We can have a career be like, oh, yeah. I tried that and it didn't work. Or, oh, yeah. I got the same result, but I would recommend x instead, is is another great one. Yeah. OpenArt was that other tool. Outer Signal is the personas one. Yeah. And looking, you have to divorce again, the going back to what you like and don't like, if you are going if you are involved in spending people's money, your job as a creative strategist, you are spending other people's money in an advertising account to get them money back. People hate distilling marketing and creative work down to this, but this is literally what it is. And you have you will admit it at some point in your career or not. And so you have a fiscal responsibility to do good stuff for them and to do stuff that is performing. And there is a, you don't wanna go break the law. You don't wanna go make unsubstantiated claims. You don't wanna do, like, you know, generate AI people that are saying something that didn't really happen. Right? But you want to make good creative whether you like the format personally or not, and you will notice that there is a wide variety of stuff, and stuff will work for two weeks and beyond for two weeks. You'll have good ideas, other people will have good ideas. You have to be open to the breadth of it, because back to what I mentioned at the beginning, scale is success. You will notice your 50 ads is not gonna get you to the promised land. Any of the brands that are really scaling in creative strategy have thousands of active ads in the ad account, and that comes from trying a shitload of ideas, and having a ton of creative that they work through. And I will be the person to tell you the the hard things here. Alright. Yaps. So we talked about the idea of people talking on camera earlier. This is the most successful format on the Internet right now for organic content and for ads. A a person talking on camera, male, female, young, old, doesn't matter. We'll talk about scale in a second. But it's not just a person talking on camera. There are multiple of these. So notebook yaps, we have over here on the right, where someone has an open notebook, and they have basically a list they run through in the video. It's a type of yap that's worth noting. Me in the middle here, an object yap. I am pulling a jacket out of this ridiculous crate I have in my house. It is immediately more compelling than just showing the jacket. Car yap is just way more relatable because it looks like a really natural creator thing to just be having your creator film it in the car. Walking yap, same thing. And then graphic yaps where graphics pop up over that. And so this is just a good example of if you have a good, if you go back to this chart we had, and you were like, I wanna make more ads. And you had a a story message about, you know, or even a core message, this thing happened. And And you one one of your things is, hey. I wanna do an explainer. We're gonna do like a Yap explainer. We're gonna do a certain type of hook. Run that with all of these. Run it with a notebook. Run it with an object. Run it in a car. That is how you get if you have a winning message, you get more creative diversity through doing this. People will look. You can say, I will I I'm gonna this is my last point in this AI conversation because I look. I feel generally the same way. I, no one notices for the majority of it, and it works in the ad account. And then you will have that bias of saying this doesn't work, or this customer's gonna think this or that, are is going to end up losing wherever you work with money, and they will right now, we're at the very beginning of this, where it's it's one you know, maybe it's one hundredth of the ads that are running out there. It's not gonna ever get to some huge mega portion of it. We're not gonna see 70% of the ads. It's gonna be a format like any other, like a carousel, like a yap, like a call out ad, whatever it is. It'll be one other type of ad, and for a good percentage of businesses, they will work extremely well, and the lunch will get eaten for the businesses that don't wanna run those formats. And if there's a moral hang up that the company has, no problem. That's a company choice. If it's a moral hang up than you have, then this may not be the line of work. Just gonna throw that out there because that's what's gonna actually end up happening when you are really inside an actual agency competing for work. If you are a freelancer competing with others, or you're in a brand you wanna move up the ladder, you're gonna be caring about results. So a quick note on here, another of Tom, we talk about scale. Content and the algorithms. People like to see different people. Content gets served to different types. And so when you look at okay. I have winning ads, and I have winning ads with a a younger male creator, and then I have winning ads with a younger female creator. Okay. Now let's get more diversity. Let's get other genders. Let's get other ages. It just work with an older creator. This is work with and and it's I use I say this to say, not like people like to consume either from people that look like them or people that look a certain way. Some people might wanna consume content from older people because they want credibility. Some people might wanna consume content from younger people because they, you know, they're for whatever reason. They they may wanna, you know, from different genders, different whatever. You it's your job as a strategist to test through that. And what you'll notice is when you have a winning message and you have a lineup of creators, like, look, every beauty company I work with has girls of every single skin tone. Right? And then a lot of them also have three age brackets at least. And so when they get a winning type, they go and they pay for their $150 to $400 whatever it is, their UGC content, and they go and they will spread it out through that entire group. And then they have styles. Right? Oh, they have ASMR. They have Yap. They have get ready with me. They have whatever. We can we take that same message and put it through styles? So once you get your winning formats, and you should be cataloging all this and seeing what you can in organic, running it through a machine like this is how people really get scale inside their accounts. This conversation around brand standards. I usually every time a brand and I've had big brands on both sides of this equation. Brings up, well, you know, okay. If we can't have our content look too much like organic content, and we can't have or and we can't just have anyone posting about it. We don't wanna use creators on other accounts. We don't wanna run affiliate. We can't control what they're saying. This is this comes up very, very commonly. And there's basically three scenarios that can work. Right? One is, hey. We have to test it. That's the most common. Anyone that actually is really about their money is will be fine with the testing. I mean, like, great. We're gonna test the higher end, and we're gonna test the lower end. This is how we test. This is the framework, and they'll work through it. If they are still, like, not on that, the other scenario you do is you bring up I do this all the time. I go into TikTok. I bring a TikTok up on the screen, and I search for the brand name because most people have never done it at the brands they work at. And I go, you know what? The number one source of advice in the world right now for anything, this is a terrifying truth, but it's a real one, from financial advice to what happens to cosmetic advice to life advice is on TikTok. And people are searching it constantly, the algorithm is feeding into it. And you search that brand, see what comes up. Guess what? Maybe one of your organic pieces of content comes up, maybe. Noah else comes up? A 100 people that you do not have any control of talking about your brand. That is your brand. That is your brand perception. That is the world we live in, and you cannot control it. But you know what? You can certainly help control it better is if 50 of those people who show up there work for you and are paid by you and are making content that is ads for you. There are ads in that AI and UGC account, and you are going back to this chart that we have up here. You are enabling as big of an ecosystem as you can to help improve the perception of the brand organically. And once people start to really realize that's what the new internet looks like, then you get a lot more lenient with what that's those those standards are and how you see brands that will have five, ten thousand creators. And then the third scenario that you have, if someone either won't go there through testing or doesn't admit that, you know what? We need to embrace this because how the world works. The third scenario is that they fail. And if you work at a job like that and your job is to scale ads, you should look for another job. And if you're pitching those places at an agency and you want to work that bad, just know it's probably not gonna work. And it's just a harsh truth that I will tell you having done this with brands small and large is that that is the scenario that they're in, and that's who wins and who doesn't. Alright. I'm a pop through and say come in more. Got alright. Got two two more slides here, and then we'll get into the q and a. A. You should also one thing I would consider is as an example from mine is have a checklist of the things that work. So what happens is you're a strategist, and you're gonna be thinking about, okay. I have all these ideas. I have all these things. How do I actually put them into perspective? How do I actually, like, repeat these? So you are going to likely have have two scenarios. One is anytime you launch a new product, you're gonna have to do a fresh batch of ads. You're gonna have to write briefs for and make strategy for. The other thing is you're gonna have to do a refresh. For instance, a brand I work with, we refresh every month. We get a new set of ads in the ad account every month. And so your job as a strategist, going through all these things that we just talked about and learned, is to build yourself your toolkit of all your references and then a checklist for each brand. So, for instance, this was a checklist for a brand I was working with last year, where every time we relaunch, we would do a price focus. And I noted this is a top performer for us when we focus on price. Expensive doesn't equal better was a winning headline that I I was I literally noted we would should run this every single time we do a refresh. Review and quote ads, find your shade, it was cosmetics, right versus wrong, hero imagery, a starter pack ad. Like, I this is just examples. I had all my examples linked here. You should build this from what works and what you wanna try for each brand. And then, you know, you begin to have, oh, if I wanna do a, a starter pack ad is with a graphic designer. So I could just send that to him every time I do a new launch. Or, like, a visual showcase is with, this creator. Okay. I'm a send it to her every time we do that. And then you literally have your launch of it, and you do you'll always all get through all of them, but it makes your job really easy every time you do a new campaign if you have these lists like this. And, and you're curating stuff to add to them. So just just a pro tip there. Yeah. So different brands are different. When someone someone asks only once a month. But once a month is, you're basically adding ads in the account all the time as you get them back. But as a strategist, you need organization. Right? So what we would do is, Biscuit, the beginning of every month, I would deliver a toolkit. The toolkit would basically be briefs for all of these. And usually, I'd honestly, I'd get through, like, two thirds just to be realistic. And I would have a brief for all those. I would deliver that brief to the team for 12 or 13 assets. Then the the PM at that team would be, we had someone who just managed UGC and creator because it was at a certain scale, was then sending them all their assigning the briefs to all the different creators and designers and whatever, and they're responsible for chasing them down. Right? In a lot of positions, that'll be just one role. I'm in a slightly different scenario than I'll I'll think a lot of y'all are. And so most of the time, you're doing both of those. And what you'll realize is you start getting that stuff back at different speeds and volumes, and you need a way to track those assets, and you wanna be able to put those assets in the account. So you're adding them in as soon as you get them back. You don't wait to get them all back to add them in, but kicking off that process once a month will give you some some sanity. Last thing I will talk about here, and I have a download. There's a free download. There's no email sign up or there's no gate not gated or anything. It's just direct access that the motion team will be able to share after after this. But if you wanna get really good at this, you're gonna really wanna dial into personas. And the AI era is actually, like, the best era for personas. So that tool I mentioned before, outer signal is a great example. You may have your own persona tools, but there are tools now that will go through your email list or your customer list and to generate pictures of who your customers are. And it's not like the fantasy land we used to live in ten years ago. And if anyone here has been in marketing for a while where you literally just, like, a CMO would, like, make up who your customers are and people will go, yeah. That sounds great. She's 35 to 44 and drives a Subaru. You know, like, that's that used to be like a fictional thing. Now it's very rooted in data. And then you can, with those personas, have a cloud project or a chat GBT project where you are able to say, I'm working on this launch or I have this feature. Like, what are pain points this persona would be facing? What are things happening in this persona's life? And it's gonna generate you a lot of those ideas I talked about. What are popular opinions? What are life events that they're going through? And being able to basically take those personas, those things, whether you're making them up yourself or generating with AI, and then bringing those into, ads is how all of the cutting edge teams are doing it. And they will have three or five of those personas, and they will be quantifying their ads. They'll be tagging stuff in motion, whatever it is, by what those personas are to understand what works. And they'll also be segmenting out landers, emails, whatever. So just just a note that when you wanna get advanced on this, when you're getting into the eight figure, nine figure, d to c, there's a lot of operation that comes like that. That is the end of me yapping. Sorry. It was only on on audio. I'm gonna stop sharing, and we can get into some questions. Chat, go crazy. Chat, go crazy. Lauren, kept it a buck as always. Killed it, man. Killed it. Okay. Let's see if this video hangs up. We'll start pulling a couple of these questions here up on the side here. So the first one that popped up that I found to be quite interesting is from Oren. So you talked a lot about the the industry and where it's shifting. Now Oren question specifically about the role. So what's your prediction for the future of the creative strategist role, and how do you think this is gonna evolve over time? Yes. This role is just getting started. And right now it's right now it's kinda segmented. You're either a creative strategist for performance or you're a creative strategist for organic. I think what we're already seeing is there's a lot more people doing both. You kinda have to be good at one to be able to do the other. And and I, and, yeah, I think, like, it's still such the early innings. I don't even, like, necessarily have a prediction. Like, we're still at there's only a fraction of companies even doing this, and all the ones that do are I mean, I would say all, let's say, 95% of the ones that do are, like, it's enabling their ads way better than ever. That, like, we're we're just getting started. So even this version, we still have we haven't even seen the the mid level chapter of. We're we're at, like, on the bell curve. We're we're, like, still down here. So the other one that popped up was from Ashley that I think bleeds into this one quite nicely. Let me see if I can find it here. She's basically talking about how to build the muscle. I might not be able to pull it up. And then I'm gonna answer Patrick's while we're here. He said, I don't wanna do the creator sourcing and managing. Another conversation I have all the time with people. If you don't wanna do it, that means other people don't wanna do it. Right? And you you know who, you know who, like, gets the director of marketing jobs and the creative director jobs is the people that do all the shit the other people don't wanna do. Like, at the end of the day, a lot of people wanna become a creative director after a creative strategist. The creative director job kinda sucks because it's not like you sit in the idea lab like most people think it is. It's like, hey, guess what? Our campaign shoot is in two weeks. We need a a list photographer and a concept and models and talent and needs to go to ads. And you need to be able to convince people on a low budget to do that in that time frame. And guess what? Anything that you can't hire somebody for, you need to do personally. And so I would just say that, there's a book I highly recommend called The Obstacle is the Way, which is literally just, like, anytime you see something and in your head you go, I don't wanna do that. The first thing you should do is be like, I'm gonna get good at that. And if you are the person that because all of a sudden, if you just added that creator sourcing to your toolkit, how much more valuable are you as a creative strategist? Like, 10 x. And so I would just, it's just just something to think about, and I cannot recommend highly enough. Preach. Okay. Keep throwing your questions to the q and a. Upvote or throw them into the chat because we're gonna be able to pick them up. I'm just gonna pull some of these top voted ones that we see pull pull through here. So this was a long road from Andrew. We've a lot of UGC from affiliate creators as well as from TikTok, but much of it is unusable. We don't have the rates to use it in ads. How do we make and so we get better content or utilize the UGC we are already getting created. Is there a template. for briefing Yeah. the. approach? So, I mean, I would just, like, literally if you're already getting content and you don't have it there, you should just figure out what an asset is worth to you. For a lot of companies, it's like a $100 to $200, and go back through any of those ones you got for for TikTok shop and just message those creators and be like, hey. I'd like to get these three videos you made from us. We can pay a 150 per video, and, you know, we're gonna run them in our ad account, and you will have some creators will be like, no anymore. And some creators will be like, yeah. Cool. Send the wire. And, and then you're immediately getting your assets. So I would if you have good performing assets, go hunt them down and pay and pay for them to run-in your ad account. It's like you should 100% be doing that. It's worth the time. And then just be building it into your options going forward. When someone makes, like, a TikTok affiliate or whatever, when they're when they're if you have them in a Discord or a WhatsApp or whatever, like, let them know that, hey. We we offer this for for running his ads. We're gonna reach out about it and be open about it, but I would just be building that into your workflow for for all of this. And you'll notice most people who are really doing TikTok shop, your best people, you're usually gonna have in a Discord or a WhatsApp, and that's the kind of stuff you can discuss in there or have your community managers, hitting on. But, like, any asset that bangs there, I'll be really trying to get in your ad account. Do you have an affiliate? Do you have an opinion on affiliate? Is that something everything Yeah. everywhere should be yeah. Affiliates every every physical product branch? will be running affiliate. Not so there's TikTok shop affiliate, which is one that is obviously a little more nuanced. But standard affiliate, like what people do on social snowball or or, super affiliate. We're that just comes back to what I talked about. How do you get all those creators? Well, hey. You can reach out to them and just pay them for content, or you can have them actually making you money. And so I so I would be running an affiliate program. Just run that, like, you know, any of those are social snowball, super affiliate, whatever it is, just go hard at it. That's the only thing I would mention is, like, if you have five affiliates, that's great to test. But if you're not running a 100 plus, then, you're not really. like, you need to be going after it. And look, these brands are running thousands, and it's really not that hard. The software makes it easy. It's about you have to just set up a flow, but it will save your life as a creative strategist, right, where you're like, cool. I'm already getting 600 pieces of content back every quarter that I can just put in the ads account, and it makes money. It's just such a no brainer. And look, this is this is weird. We're in maybe a we're in, like, a twelve month affiliate window that is, like, a a kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. Right? And people are catching on. Target just launched a huge creator affiliate thing. Obviously, Ulta has their own in, like, internal thing. Big brands are catching on faster than ever in these tactics. And so I I would say if you should you should gas pedal affiliate the next twelve months. Huge. Help with the volume too. Let's pull another question up from Zach here. So, Zach, this is more on the communication front, like training. How do you help older veteran VPs and older graphic design teams who aren't shifting creative strategy and advertising to get them on board, and help build the growth engine here. Yeah. I think it's it's about getting people excited about creative. Like, at the end of the day, people tend to look at performance advertising as, like, low brow for whatever reason, and I think you have to excite them with it. Right? Like, when when you show graphic designers really cool references or some stuff that they might want to work on versus, like, kind of the same boring banner ad, they're gonna be more excited by it. Like, I look at, like, look, I I make carousels on my social media account, and, my carousels are really well designed. And I couldn't if I asked those same graphic designers to work for me to make typical carousels, they wouldn't wanna do it. But because I'm like, you know what? Take your time. Make the craziest shit you can make, and I'll pay you for it. They get, like, excited about it. And I I would just basically, like, try to set up briefs that fit their challenge, and then you'll and also get people excited about the results. Like, I'd be gassing people up on Slack or Teams or wherever it is, like, a video they make, a thing they make. This is a top spender. This is this is scaling. This is whatever. Build your own emoji set for it in Slack. Those it's stupid, but it works. And you'll see, especially with senior people, they're like, oh, the TikTok that I did the hook for, did the other, like and then then they're in. As soon as they're in, then you got them. You know? Alright. How do you go go about finding these people who, you can collaborate with and get excited? What do you mean? Like like creatives or, like, creators or Oh, sourcing the talent. So I'm seeing a lot of people like vetting creators, but I'm also thinking like vetting graphic. Start start with open with. carousels. Yeah. Contra Contra is great for graphic designers. I my website's all done by a kid on Contra, c o n t r a, which is look. All the design you see from me, and I, consider myself a pretty good design on, like, carousels, websites, whatever, is I hired them from Contra, Dribbble, or Behance. Right? I found portfolios I liked. My EA messaged them, all shout out shout out to god. And then, and we got rates, and we we select them. Right? And so and you'll be surprised. Right? Like, there are some really good people that are really expensive. There were some younger people who are solid, who are really reasonable. And, you know, and so I I think it's just a it's just a messaging game. Huge. And then, Oren John, I think one of the pieces that, that Ashley had asked earlier that I wanted to allude to was, like, how do you go about building your content strategist muscle? So you had mentioned. a ton of good things. Where do we get started? yeah. So just I you need a couple frameworks. Right? I always like to break things down to frameworks the way I had that, like, messages, messages, concepts, hooks. So I think similar like the way I talked about emotion, like, you know, okay. Love, spirituality, money, physical health, you know, even just so you can take those four. If if you are trying to build your strategist muscle, think of every single thing that you have. Right? Like, okay. This, like, this water bottle, how can I attach that to spirituality, money, physical health, whatever it is? Like, can I get an angle on that and just be kind of constantly workshopping that? This is why I do recommend a lot of people, like look. Agency work sucks, especially when you're lower level agency, but it's really good for getting reps in. Right? I worked one of my first jobs was an agency job where we have more clients than we could handle, and it was a nightmare. And I also did strategy above my pay grade on all kinds of stuff. And so working on a lot of clients is one great way. So sometimes those jobs are are high pressure, low money, but get you real reps. But I think just having that mind state. Right? Look, my even my, my friends, love it and hate it, but, like, I workshop bits all the time for content. Like, you'll notice all my content now is like, hey, you know, is a is a big house versus a little house, like, better? Is you know, like, I'm working I'm workshopping one right now about, like, if if you think someone's a bad person for for using peptides, are you a bad person? Like and this just comes from conversations I'm having with people, And I'll workshop that. I'll have that, like, in the seven people I talked to this week, I'm kinda like seeing how people feel about concepts. And if you're always kind of challenging or throwing those ideas out there with your friend group, that stuff actually really comes into play, especially in this conversational content era. It's like, okay. What are people talking about? What are they thinking about? What do they feel strongly about? It's like you're kind of building the muscle in every social interaction. The last one here it was sorry. Go ahead. You pick people were asking? about people asked about tools and stuff. And so I just wanna make just just to call out the tools. Like, obviously, you have your Motion tool kit for what you're doing on on the ad stuff. You have, like, outer signals, the one that did personas. Open art was the one that did the scripting through there. Social Snowball and Superfiliate are both, like, you can find affiliates. They have access to creator ads manager. I forget that my brain's broken, but it's either Youfi or Youka, e u k a, I believe. That's the TikTok shop creator sourcing one. Yeah. Just to make sure, like, you guys know the specific tools there. Yeah. Yuka, thank you. Then, Oren, there's a lot of people who are just one person teams. Like, if you're in their shoes, Yeah. where would you start? Well, I'd say, like, you so the kind of question becomes, like, why are you a one person team? So I basically view, if you are just getting started, then you should specialize. Right? You should be like, yeah. You know what I do? I do briefs. You know, like, I do I do creator sourcing. I do whatever. Or or if you can't if you're just trying to get whatever you can, then again, ask for the world and try to learn as much as as you possibly can. But as soon as you have some traction, as soon as you're good at something, you it's build build the lean team is the answer. Right? And that doesn't mean and that literally can be like, okay. I hired a graphic designer from Contra on a monthly contract. They do eight carousels for me. I know I'm delivering those to clients. And guess what? I'm paying for that, but now I'm upcharging. Now it's not just they're getting me, they're getting my team. So my retainer is no longer 3,000, it's 5,000. And then it's like, alright. Now I have a bench. I have two video editors. I have this and that. Started out as contract. There's so many contract creatives who would love to have that work. And then as you get more and more work and you develop relationships with those people, you bring them in. You'd be like, hey. Cool. Now I'm getting more retainers. Now I should have that. And I think a lot of creatives don't wanna have an agency. I feel you. I get asked, you know, I get asked from, like, big name celebrity marketers. Like, why don't you have an agency? I'm like, you know, that sounds fucking terrible. I'm not gonna lie. It's like just sounds like a lot of work. You know, but you know what, like, is a is not a lot of work and actually very rewarding is having, like, five or seven creative people that you work with. You can tap on stuff, and you will make a lot more money that Lauren, before we get you up on out of here, I'm wondering if you have any final words for our audience. way. Look. This is a being a creative strategist right now, you are you have the rare opportunity of being in a burgeoning field, which, again, hasn't hit the main part of the bell curve that is creative. You still get to have an interesting dynamic life and do creative work that also is directly responsible for generating revenue. These will be some of the most interesting, like, highest paid jobs and deliver you to places you can move up in your career in a really interesting way that the older generation probably can't do. And so I would, I would just be really excited by it. And, like, there's a lot going on in the world. There's a lot happening, but it's an exciting time to be a creative strategist. I wouldn't be afraid of that. You heard it from the master himself. Everybody, get in the chat. Show some love. Let's see the emojis. Let them fly. But, Oren John, you're the man. Thanks so much for coming up here and absolutely smashing. Appreciate y'all. Oh, man. Everybody. Everybody. I know you are all as fired up as I am. Those notepads filled on up with all the different content. This recording is definitely gonna be made available. You'll be able to see the content after the fact, so you're all good. Any final questions that came up in the in the chat for Oren John? I know, like, he's dropping content literally every single week. So it's just, like, tapping with his content. Whether it's, like, directly answered or not, you're always gonna pick up some nuggets that you wanna be able to pull. So, everybody, this has been a blast. For those of you who have been to a session before, you know what it's like. You know what the content comes here and absolutely smashes it. And for anyone whose first time this is, you're getting a sneak peek of what the content has looked like throughout this entire journey and what we are in store for next week. So for all of our new folks who haven't been here before, we're gonna go ahead and just throw the Slack link into our chat on Goldcast. So if you're down, join that thing. See you in there. I'll throw it in. Hopefully, on works. We'll see you on in there. But then we also have curriculum. So if you look to that docs tab, in that docs tab, you're going to see a tab that's titled syllabus or course directory course overview, something like that where you'll be able to see a lot of the content, homework as well as previous recordings. So you can go ahead and access all the material as you study or just get familiar with what we have going on. But everybody sincerely appreciate the time. I gotta go hang out with the Toronto folks who are upstairs, but everyone else who knows is always a blast. We'll see you on Slack, and we'll see you next week. Alright, y'all. Peace.