Week 3 Homework - Prioritize your creative ideas based on evidence

• Pitch two ad ideas — one iteration, one new concept — with evidence for why you think each will perform. Post both ideas in #homework-week-3.
  • Pick proven personas to anchor your ideas around. Then, come up with one iteration of an existing ad for that persona and why you think it'll work.
  • Next, come up with one net new concept for a proven persona (either the same persona as above or a different proven persona) and your evidence for why it'll perform.
• Share both ideas in the Slack Community in #homework-week-3. Comment on other people’s work, add your thoughts, and our Creative Strategy Coaches will be reviewing too!

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Sample - Completed Homework

Here’s my Week 3 Homework.

My iteration:

The iteration idea:

The persona this targets:

Link to the original ad that I’m iterating on:

My evidence this iteration will work:

My net new concept:

The net new concept idea:

The persona this targets:

My evidence that this idea will work:

Full instructions and extra tips

Make sure you watch the video above as Ed walks you through every step. Last week, we gathered a lot of research. We've looked at a lot of inspiring ads with formats we could copy. And we have ideas swirling in our heads.

Now we need to practice the skill of turning raw research into an actual plan for what ad creative to make next.

This is where things become real.

Average creative strategists look at competitors and are reactive, bouncing from one new idea to another.

The sheer act of prioritizing and mapping out creatives in advance will put you leaps ahead of your average creative strategist.

The best creative strategists plan and prioritize their ideas by impact and confidence, looking for evidence that a creative will work.

With ad production, we're going to invest a lot of time in getting an idea live, so we want to make sure that we're betting on the right ones.

So this is the skill you’re learning: prioritizing your ideas based on the most evidence for performance.

As Dara covered, these are some of the signals you should be looking at, ranked from high confidence to low confidence.

1. Pressure tested past performance, aka iterations on existing winning ads.
2. New formats for proven messaging.
3. Partnership ads for proven performance and messaging.
4. New insights and hooks from proven personas.
5. New personas from thorough research.
6. Because it's working for our competitors.
7. Because it's our competitor's longest-running ad.
8. Because our competitors did it.

You typically want to go from the top to the bottom, as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are the highest confidence signals you can have. The lower numbered ones—like “because our competitors did it”—are low confidence and shouldn’t be a big part of your creative pipeline.

For this week's homework, we suggest you use either 1, 2, or 4 in the list above to prioritize your ad ideas.

Step 1: Pick a brand

This can be your brand, a client you're working on, or you can do it for a sample brand.

If you don't know what to start with, use the brand you did last week in week two homework, or select Jones Road, HexClad, or Ridge.

Step 2: Identify an existing persona targeted by that brand

Note, we're not inventing new personas. That's a whole other exercise. Instead, we are looking for a persona that already works for the brand.

Beginning with a proven persona is our first piece of evidence that our ad idea will work vs. testing random ideas against a new audience.

If you use Motion and have connected your ad account, good news: you'll be able to see that right away with the Intended Audience tag.

These personas are picked up by Motion’s AI. Motion analyzes your ad creative and then understands which personas you're trying to target. Pick one from the personas Motion has identified for you.

If you don’t have your ad account connected to Motion, you can do this on a sample brand by giving Motion’s AI Chat Runneth this prompt: