Motion Creative Strategy Bootcamp

The 8-week live training and private community designed to help you succeed as a top creative strategist.

Week 2 Homework - Find 2-3 ads that target micro moments

“When your hooks and ads target real moments instead of made-up pain points, your creative has texture. It feels specific. It doesn’t sound like every other ad in the feed.”

Build a Motion board with 2-3 ads that target micro moments, which we learned about in Sarah's class. For each ad, jot down a few notes about why this is an effective micro moment and why it stopped you. You can add your notes to the board description (so we can all see them when you share your link) or as comments on the individual ads. Here’s an example.
This week, instead of looking broadly at multiple brands, we're going deep into one brand. So choose one brand and go deep into its ad library, sharing 2-3 ads from a single brand. Watch the video above for complete instructions and a demonstration of what micro moments are.
Share your Motion board in the Slack Community in #homework-week-2. Comment on other people’s work, add your thoughts, and our Creative Strategy Coaches will be reviewing too!

Helpful notes

As we learned in Sarah’s class, micro moments are specific, relatable moments, rooted in lived experiences, not generic pain points.

This is a micro moment: “She’s getting dressed for lunch with a friend who just lost 40 pounds, and her jeans don’t fit the same way they did in February.”
This is not: “She wants to lose weight.”

Why are micro moments important for ads?

Because, as Sarah put it: “When your hooks and ads target real moments instead of made-up pain points, your creative has texture. It feels specific. It doesn’t sound like every other ad in the feed.”

Which brand should you study?

You can either use your own brand where you work, a client, HexClad, Ridge, Jones Road, or any other brand you wish to study.

Remember to look at brands with performance creative (not the Nikes of the world). See the appendix of this document for brands you can study that have sophisticated direct response ad libraries.

📙 Companion Resource

We've built incredibly detailed research prompts that you can use in real creative strategy work based on the content from Sarah's live class.

Try them out (see below) and then bookmark this page to reference in your real creative strategy work. They blew our minds when we tested them. 🤯

Start your research process with these golden prompts.

This is optional. Your homework is above. But for the real creative strategy pros, keep reading.

After you’ve completed the homework, go and try the steps below. This is going to give you some real insights you can use to make ads.

Now, we’re doing real creative strategy research.

We’ve turned Sarah’s live session content into a series of prompts you can use, helping you run the three-module research framework — Customer Reality, Brand Reality, and Presentation Reality.

This is a resource you can save and use in your real creative strategy work.

Pro tip: if you're applying for creative strategy jobs, running the prompts below will really make you show up to the interview being very prepared, as you'll be able to speak intelligently about the core customer, the general brand context, competitive positioning, and the ad creative being tested by the brand right now.

🙋Share your findings in the Slack Community

After you’re done with the work below, share a link to your Motion Runneth analysis.

Did the insights ring true? What was one insight that really grabbed you and might make a good ad idea?

Share in homework-week-2 in addition to your first assignment above.

Sarah Levinger’s Research System for Creative Strategists

A prompt-by-prompt guide to running the three-module research framework — Customer Reality, Brand Reality, and Presentation Reality.

You can run these prompts in Motion’s AI Chat Runneth, Claude, or ChatGPT.

The most powerful insights will come from using Motion’s AI Chat Runneth, as we’ve trained Runneth with benchmark data, specific creative strategy skills, and access to tens of millions of ads. This data is key in the Brand and Presentation Reality section.

Step 1: Gather brand context

Complete this before running any prompts. You'll reference it for all three prompts below.

All of this info should be widely available to you as a creative strategist, whether from onboarding materials from a client or some light research.

BRAND NAME:
PRODUCT CATEGORY:
TARGET CUSTOMER: [age range], [gender if relevant], living in [region], interested in [interest/category]
PROBLEM THE PRODUCT SOLVES:
COMPETITORS (list 3–5):
REVENUE STAGE: [e.g., early-stage startup / $1M–$5M / $10M+ / enterprise].

Save this somewhere you can copy from quickly.

Sample:

BRAND NAME: HexClad
PRODUCT CATEGORY: cookware
TARGET CUSTOMER: 35-55, male, living in the Midwest, interested in home chef topics.
PROBLEM THE PRODUCT SOLVES: fast cooking with hybrid technology COMPETITORS (list 3–5): Caraway, Anolon X, Our Place
REVENUE STAGE: 400M per year in revenue

Note: for larger brands, you will have multiple personas and target different pain points and segments. I recommend doing this exercise for each major persona.

For example, above, we’re learning about specifically HexClad’s male audience who live in the Midwest and aspire to be home chefs.

Being more specific in who you’re researching is key, as we wouldn’t want to research males, females, old and young, in urban and rural areas, in one prompt. This would not give us the micro moments, as Sarah taught in the class.

Step 2: Add brand context to the first prompt

Now that we have some brand context, we will use this magical prompt below to get some really interesting insights about our customers.

This will be particularly insightful if the demographic is less familiar to you. For example, you're a Gen Z making ads for Baby Boomers.

PROMPT 1: CUSTOMER REALITY

Fill in your details below, then copy the full prompt. Use this prompt in Claude or ChatGPT. For the best results, use it in Motion’s AI Chat Runneth.

YOUR BRAND INPUTS
BRAND NAME: PRODUCT CATEGORY: TARGET CUSTOMER: [age range], [gender if relevant], living in [region], interested in [interest/category] PROBLEM THE PRODUCT SOLVES: COMPETITORS (list 3–5): REVENUE STAGE: [e.g., early-stage startup / $1M–$5M / $10M+ / enterprise]

OBJECTIVE

I’m building a creative strategy for the brand above. I need to build a deep customer portrait in three parts. Work through each part in order.

PART A — GENERATIONAL CONTEXT

Who is this person before they ever see the ad?

Using publicly available research, help me understand this customer before ad exposure.

Questions:

What economic events shaped them at ages 18-25?
→ How does this affect how they spend and justify purchases today?
What was their informational environment growing up?
→ What formats, voices, and media did they trust?
→ What ad formats now feel familiar vs. foreign?
How do they currently relate to authority, experts, and peer recommendations?
→ Who do they trust and why?
What does their current lived reality look like?
→ Caregiving
→ Career stage
→ Financial pressure
→ Time constraints
What is their relationship to self-spending?
→ Guilt, pride, or ambivalence?

Output Format (for each answer):

Insight:
Source / Basis:
Creative Implication:

Sources to Use:

Pew Research Center (pewresearch.org)
Edelman Trust Barometer (edelman.com/trust)
Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)
Federal Reserve Consumer Finance Reports (federalreserve.gov)
Reddit (r/Millennials, r/GenX, r/Boomers)
Neil Howe & William Strauss (generational research)
GWI (Global Web Index) (gwi.com)

PART B — MICRO-MOMENTS

Where the problem shows up in real life

Build a micro-moment map using real-world behavior.

What to Identify:

5–7 specific trigger moments
→ Describe as scenes (where they are, what they’re doing, what triggers it)
Context
→ Alone or with others?
Immediate reaction
→ Search, text, ignore, spiral, etc.
Real language
→ Direct quotes or close paraphrases (no marketing language)
Highest-frequency moment
→ Which trigger shows up most often?

Output Format:

Moment #1: [Short Title]

Scene:
Alone or Social:
Immediate Action:
Customer Language:
Frequency Signal:

(Repeat for each moment)

Sources to Use:

Reddit (first-person posts)
Amazon Reviews (1-star + 5-star)
Trustpilot
Facebook Groups
Quora
YouTube Comments
TikTok Comments
Google Trends

PART C — EMOTIONAL SALIENCE

What the moment feels like and what it demands creatively

Using Part B, map the emotional experience behind each trigger moment.

For Each Moment:

Dominant Emotion (embarrassment, frustration, guilt, fear, exhaustion, shame, hope)
→ Include evidence from real language
Private vs. Social
→ Would they share this or hide it?
Acute vs. Chronic
→ Sudden spike or long-term build?
Intensity Level
→ Mild annoyance → “fix this today.”
Resolution Language
→ Words like “finally,” “relief,” “I can’t believe…”

Output Format:

Moment #1: [Short Title]

Dominant Emotion:
Private or Social:
Acute or Chronic:
Intensity Level:
Resolution Language:
Creative Implication:

Sources to Use:

Amazon 1-star reviews (raw emotion)
Amazon 5-star reviews (resolution language)
Trustpilot
Reddit long-form posts
TikTok comments
Facebook Group threads
YouTube review videos

Step 3: Save the output to Notion or Google Docs

Take the output from the prompt you just ran. Create a Notion page or a Google Doc called: Customer-Brand-Presentation Reality Doc.

You now have a rich portrait of your customer that you can use when concepting with LLMs. You will use this output in Prompt 3.

Here’s a sample Customer-Brand-Presentation Reality Doc using HexClad as the brand we studied. All of this info was generated from running the steps above.

Step 4: Research the Brand Reality

Before running the prompt, fill in your details from the Brand Context in the block below.

For best results, run this inside Motion's AI Chat (Runneth) so it can pull your actual performance data and benchmark against $1.3B in ad spend. This is most powerful if you connect your ad accounts to Motion, as it can analyze your own creative performance and compare it against benchmarks.

You can also use Claude or ChatGPT.

Now, as we covered in Week 1, creative strategy begins with a business-level diagnosis.

Typically, you're going to get that critical context from your boss and by working closely with the growth team.

This prompt is merely a starting place. But it's a really good one and one that you can be proactive about even before you have your first meeting with your boss.

Additionally, you'll want to:

Book meetings with leadership to understand the business goals
Dig through recordings of past growth and creative retro meetings to understand what the growth team is trying to achieve.
Dig into the ad performance data of what's worked in the past and what hasn't worked.

PROMPT 2: BRAND REALITY

Fill in your details below, then copy the full prompt. Use this prompt in Claude or ChatGPT. For the best results, use it in Motion’s AI Chat Runneth as it will access performance data and competitor ad libraries.

OBJECTIVE

Analyze the creative performance landscape and competitive positioning.

PART A — COST & PERFORMANCE

What is the performance reality right now?

Questions:

Current spend and ad volume benchmarks
→ What is the bar at this stage?
Which competitors have durable creative (30+ days)?
→ What formats are they using?
Most cost-efficient formats
→ Based on longevity + spend signals
Creative production velocity
→ High volume testing vs. hero concepts?
Where is spend being wasted?
→ High visibility but low longevity

Sources to Use:

Motion Industry Benchmarks Report
Motion competitor tracking
Motion inspiration boards (format patterns)

PART B — COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

What are competitors optimizing for — and where is the gap?

For Each Competitor:

What are they optimizing for?
→ Acquisition, LTV, brand, or volume?
Has their strategy shifted in the last 6 months?
What does their format variety + frequency signal?
What business milestone are they chasing?
Where is the gap?
→ What customers want but no one addresses?

Sources to Use:

Motion (ad history, format patterns, velocity)
LinkedIn (founder/CMO posts)
Crunchbase (funding + milestones)
Glassdoor (hiring signals)
Website + email flows
Reddit + social comments

Step 5: Again, save the output to Notion or Google Doc

Take the output from the prompt you just ran. Save it to your Customer-Brand-Presentation Reality Doc.

You now have a rich portrait of your customer that you can use when concepting with LLMs.

You will use this output in Prompt 3.

Here’s a sample Customer-Brand-Presentation Reality Doc using HexClad as the brand we studied. All of this info was generated from running the steps above.

You can see the output we got from Motion’s AI Chat Runneth. Notice how we can see real creative volume and testing strategies. It pulled the full ad library data for HexClad and all three competitors (Caraway, Anolon, and Our Place) across the last 90 days, combined with public market intelligence.

Step 6: Paste your Customer-Brand findings into the final prompt

All right, now it's all gonna make sense. All that stuff I had you save in the document; we're going to need it.

As we learned in both week one and week two, a good creative strategist doesn't jump ahead to the creative execution and ad formats.

You are basing your creative decisions in the brand and business context.

So now we've collected all that, and we can now move into what Sarah calls "Presentation Reality.”

And by that, she simply means how customer insights, pain points and key messages are wrapped inside ad formats and creative executions.

Before you paste this prompt into Motion's AI Chat Runneth or Claude, you need the context that we gathered in the previous two prompts.

What I recommend is to create a PDF of that document and upload it along with the prompt. Here is my sample.

PROMPT 3: PRESENTATION REALITY

YOUR BRAND INPUTS. BRAND NAME: PRODUCT CATEGORY: TARGET CUSTOMER: [age range], [gender if relevant], living in [region], interested in [interest/category] PROBLEM THE PRODUCT SOLVES: COMPETITORS (list 3–5): REVENUE STAGE: [e.g., early-stage startup / $1M–$5M / $10M+ / enterprise]

First, analyze the attached PDF called "Customer-Brand-Presentation-Reality Doc.” This document is referenced in the prompt below, so you'll need to analyze it to complete the actions below. You'll need to reference and understand both the Customer Reality and Brand Reality sections to complete the task here.

OBJECTIVE

Build a format strategy grounded in:

Customer psychology
Brand reality
Competitive positioning

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER.

Exploration Stage (Top of Funnel)
→ What formats win when awareness is low?
→ Which competitors do this well?
Evaluation Stage (Mid Funnel)
→ What formats win when customers compare options?
→ What proof formats show up in durable ads?
Purchase Stage (Bottom Funnel)
→ What formats close the deal?
→ What objections are being handled?
Longevity Signals
→ Which formats run 30+ days?
→ What does that reveal about real performance?
White Space Opportunity
→ What format is missing that the emotional data suggests would work?

OUTPUT

For each funnel stage, provide:

Recommended format
Competitor example
Strategic reasoning

Ground everything in:

Customer emotional state
Competitive dynamics

Step 7: Final step! Save the output

You made it!

The final step is to take the output from the last prompt and paste it into your Customer-Brand-Presentation Reality Doc.

You now have a rich source of insights that took you about 10 minutes to gather. You can use this as a starting point.

You can upload it to LLMs to assist with brainstorming and concepting to make the ideas actually grounded in reality, or you can use this to prep for job interviews with a brand that you're interviewing with.

You'll constantly refine and update your knowledge of these three realities. But we've made an important step of starting to understand the customer brand and presentation reality that gives us insights that we then build into ads.

Here's a sample of my final doc.

Additional Materials

This is how the LLM is using each source to uncover insights about your customer, brand, and presentation reality. You can also manually drill down into these or build more specific prompts using these rich data sources.

Source	Best For
Pew Research	Generational worldview and trust patterns
Edelman Trust Barometer	Who this generation trusts and why
Bureau of Labor Statistics	Customer economic reality and spending behavior
Reddit	Real language, real moments, real emotion
GWI	Global data on how consumers use social media and ad perceptions
Amazon Reviews	Trigger moments and emotional resolution language
Trustpilot	Emotional arc and before/after language
YouTube Comments	Social vs. private moments, relatability signals
TikTok Comments	Private vs. social, friend-tagging as a salience signal
Facebook Groups	Full story posts with high emotional charge
Motion	Competitor ad history, format patterns, longevity, creative velocity, whitespace, and category-wide inspiration
Motion Industry Benchmarks	Primary source for CPA, ROAS, and creative performance benchmarks by category
TikTok Creative Center	Category benchmarks and format trends
LinkedIn	Founder and CMO's strategic priorities
Crunchbase	Funding signals that explain strategy shifts
Glassdoor Job Postings	What capabilities competitors are building
Competitor Email Flows	Purchase stage objection handling
Amazon Q&A	Evaluation stage content topics
Reddit "worth it?" threads	Final purchase blockers
Competitor FAQ Pages	Competitive ads, every question is a conversion barrier

DTC brands for reference

For our homework assignments, it’s important to study brands that use direct response principles in their advertising.

If you're looking at brands like Nike or Apple, you'll have a hard time seeing the principles we talk about in play. We're talking about creative strategy, and those brands don't generally do creative strategy.

Here's a curated list of the most well-known DTC brands across key categories — these are the names that consistently show up in competitive research, ad library searches, and creative benchmarking conversations.

One great place to start. Look at the brands where all the creative strategy coaches in this course and community work. These brands all understand creative strategy and apply direct response principles in their advertising.

During this course, you’ll hear from coaches who work as creative strategists at the following brands:

Caraway - non-toxic ceramic cookware brand
Drool - art marketplace brand
Happy Mammoth - supplement brand with science-backed nutrients for women
Your Heights - supplement brand for your brain and gut
Harry’s - personal care products and the #2 shave brand globally.
Calm - the #1 app for meditation and sleep
Spacegoods - supplement brand for focus, energy & mental clarity

🧬 Health & Wellness / Supplements

AG1 (Athletic Greens) — The category leader in greens powder; massive creative volume
Seed — Probiotics; known for premium brand design and science-forward messaging
Ritual — Vitamins; clean aesthetic, transparency-led positioning
Olipop — Prebiotic soda; one of the biggest DTC beverage success stories
Bloom Nutrition — Greens and supplements; heavy Meta and TikTok presence
ARMRA — Colostrum; fast-growing with aggressive video testing
Momentous — Performance supplements; Huberman-adjacent positioning
Happy Mammoth — Gut health / hormonal support; massive video ad library
Ka'Chava — Meal replacement shake; one of the highest-spending supplement advertisers
Ryze — Mushroom coffee; huge Meta spend
Four Sigmatic — Functional mushrooms; OG in the category
Liquid IV — Hydration; now owned by Unilever but still runs DTC playbook
Organifi — Superfood blends; heavy direct response advertiser

💄 Skincare / Beauty / Personal Care

Curology — Custom skincare; pioneered the quiz-to-subscription model
Topicals — Skincare for chronic conditions; Gen Z brand darling
Jones Road Beauty — Bobbi Brown's DTC brand; massive UGC and Yapper library
Glossier — The defining DTC beauty brand of the 2010s
Drunk Elephant — Clean skincare; now owned by Shiseido
Native — Natural deodorant; one of the OG DTC exits (acquired by P&G)
Dr. Squatch — Men's personal care; known for aggressive video ads
Obagi — Medical-grade skincare; heavy Meta advertiser
Versed — Clean skincare at accessible price points
True Botanicals — Luxury clean beauty
Harry’s - personal grooming products.

👟 Apparel / Footwear / Accessories

Vuori — Athleisure; one of the fastest-scaling DTC apparel brands
Allbirds — Sustainable footwear; the original DTC shoe brand
CUTS Clothing — Men's premium basics
True Classic — Men's t-shirts; one of the highest Meta spenders in apparel
Bombas — Socks + basics; mission-driven DTC
Gymshark — Fitness apparel; social-first brand
Skims — Shapewear / loungewear; Kim Kardashian's brand
Alo Yoga — Premium activewear
Everlane — Transparent pricing; staple of DTC apparel
birddogs — Men's shorts/pants; known for irreverent ad creative
Cotopaxi — Outdoor gear; colorful, mission-driven
Faherty — Coastal lifestyle apparel
Rhone — Men's performance apparel

🍽️ Food / Beverage / Meal Delivery

HelloFresh — The dominant meal kit advertiser on Meta
Factor — Prepared meals; massive video ad volume
Liquid Death — Canned water; culture-brand with legendary creative
Athletic Brewing — Non-alcoholic beer; fastest-growing in NA beer
Huel — Nutritionally complete meals and shakes
Daily Harvest — Frozen plant-based meals
Thrive Market — Online health food marketplace
Magic Spoon — High-protein cereal
Oats Overnight — Protein oats; heavy Meta spender
Mudwater — Mushroom coffee alternative
Chomps — Meat sticks; clean ingredient positioning

🏠 Home / Lifestyle / Sleep

HexClad—Premiun non-stick hybrid cookware brand
Casper — Mattress; one of the defining DTC brands
Purple — Mattress; known for demo-heavy video ads
Eight Sleep — Smart mattress; tech-forward sleep brand
Brooklinen — Bedding and bath
Cozy Earth — Premium bedding; Oprah-endorsed
Our Place — Cookware (the Always Pan)
Caraway — Non-toxic cookware
Ridge — Wallets and accessories; one of the top DTC advertisers on Meta
Ruggable — Washable rugs; heavy video ad presence

🐾 Pet

Farmer's Dog — Fresh dog food; one of the biggest DTC pet spenders
Ollie — Fresh dog food
BarkBox — Dog subscription box
Chewy — Pet supplies marketplace (public, but DTC DNA)
Spot & Tango — Fresh and dry dog food

🏋️ Fitness / Outdoor / Tools

Peloton — Connected fitness (public, but DTC-first)
Whoop — Fitness wearable; subscription model
Hyperice — Recovery tech
Therabody (Theragun) — Percussion therapy
Bala — Weighted fitness accessories