AMA: Creative Strategy | Dara Denney

Evan Lee: Cool. So, without further ado, because we do have so many questions, let's jump into things here, everyone. So where I'm gonna kick us off now is I'm going to share my screen.

Evan Lee: And welcome to the event. So, uh, we're we're excited to kick off here at Motion with Dara just on this AMA. She's dropped some amazing content recently around creative strategy and she's been doing so many great things over the past couple of years. So really excited to be with her here today and just starting to to go through these questions. And before we get to those questions, I just wanted to give a quick update to everyone to kind of level set on the motion side of what we're all about before we hear all from Dara. So on the motion side,

Evan Lee: what we are all about is just the creative and analytics reporting and we like to call ourselves the creative strategist hub.

Evan Lee: And essentially what that means is for everyone here, I know you know all about it. This is all about how do we make creative the most important lever that it already has post iOS 14 and everything in between. And where motion focuses as I go through a little bit of lag on my computer here.

Dara Denney: You're all good on my side, so I think.

Evan Lee: All good on your side? Yeah, perfect.

Evan Lee: So where we get, where we get the just basically outside of the creator economy and outside of the most important lever being Facebook, uh, being the actual creatives is on our end, we ultimately know that there are two types of teams and what Dara is going to outline today. We have the creative side of things and then we have the performance marketing side of things. It's all about how we bridge that gap together.

Evan Lee: And at Motion, how we help do this is we make it easy to analyze.

Evan Lee: We make it then easy to visualize those types of creative findings.

Evan Lee: And ultimately what we're doing is we're making it easy to share in between teams.

Evan Lee: So with all of that being said, the quick housekeeping rules that I want to give in, everybody's heard me say this, but please, please, please throw your questions into Slido if that's going on. There's going to be a recording of the event, whether it be through YouTube or on the Zoom side, we are going to share it after. So everyone who's registered and everyone who's here, you'll get that good old recording. And then just from a motion end, if those of you are interested, feel free to just jump in. We have a 10% off using Dara's code of DARAD10. So that's what we got going on.

Evan Lee: And without further ado, we can now talk about the amazing woman we are here with today.

Evan Lee: And this is Dara. So Dara is the senior director of performance creative at Thesis. She is a uh, full-time senior director of performance creative, part-time YouTuber. You know and love her also well. She's done amazing, amazing things for so many different brands, whether it's started out from just like copywriting to media buying, but she's been in this game for a long time and now really killing it on the creative end. But my favorite thing about Dara is just she's just such a nice person. Like in all honesty from every single conversation I'll have with her, I feel like I learned some stuff. So it's really, really, really, uh, I'm really grateful to have her here today to go through this. So please be sure to go ahead and give her a follow if you're not already. And then let's get into the good stuff. And let's Dara, if you have a couple words you want to say to the people who are here to see you.

Dara Denney: No, just thank you so much for everyone that has joined us today. I'm always really amazed when I see you guys commenting on my videos, adding me on Twitter. Um, because really my whole impetus behind creating this kind of content is I really just wanted to create content for the media buyer and the founder who didn't know where to start. Um, so as always, like my main driver for doing this kind of content and these lives are are for you. So, um, and I wouldn't be here without any of you. So thank you so much for joining us today. It means a lot to me.

Evan Lee: Love it. Okay, so now what we can do here is we want to get over to these questions that everyone has asked and there's really started upvoting.

Evan Lee: But what I'd love to do first is actually set the stage. So, like I said before, Dara's made some great content, but Dara, I'm wondering if you could let the people know like what is creative strategy and we can start there. Does that sound good?

Dara Denney: Yeah, of course. So for me, creative strategy is everything that happens before the actual execution or like creation of the ad creative. And it's so funny. I actually had this question um, pointed at me yesterday in the in a meeting that I was in, um, with some of our counterparts at BMG and I was like, you know, you know, creative strategy is going to be the most important part of this and we don't really have the bandwidth for it. And that team was like, well, what is creative strategy? And for me that's really the research and the overall, um, management of what the ad creative is going to be. But it's really that research portion of it that I think is the most important.

Evan Lee: So interesting, so interesting. And then we've heard a lot about like the buzz term of creative strategy, but then more importantly, like this role that's starting to develop being a creative strategist. I know in your video you talk about what that means at Thesis, but for everybody here, can you talk about what it means to be a creative strategist as well?

Dara Denney: Yeah, so just to sum it up in like a simple like one sentence, a creative strategist decides what ad creative to create next. They're the people that are going to own the strategy portion of it. So they're going to own the research. They're going to own the pipeline and execution of the ad. So they might not actually be the one executing or like editing the video, but they are going to be the one who's going to pair the video or the asset with the right type of creator. So maybe it should go to a graphic designer or maybe it should go to an editor. A creative strategist is the one that really needs to know that. And a creative strategist is also going to be the person who ultimately does the QA on the ad and decides if it's actually ready to not only go to final client approval, but also ready for the ad platforms or whatever platforms that it's ready to be deployed on.

Evan Lee: So interesting. It makes a lot of sense too, especially the new world we are in. And then after describing that role, how do you think it differs from like a media buyer at this point?

Dara Denney: Well, I think that for a long time, most businesses and even agencies sort of thought that media buyers could be the creative strategist. But as the demand for more not only more creative, but better creative, um, started to increase, like I think that what we learned at Thesis pretty quickly was that these roles needed to be separated. It was way too much for one person to manage solely. So at Thesis, like we really do have these divided up and we also have more senior, um, creative strategists. So the way that it works at Thesis is you can become a creative strategist, then you can become an associate creative director, and then you can be a creative director, which really is that, um, senior creative leadership, aka visionary that oversees the entire creative process for our clients or book of business.

Evan Lee: Okay, gotcha. Love it. And then right now, like with all these different insights you have and eloquently worded statements just around creative strategy and creative strategist, on the flip side of things, I saw a question that came in here, but it's like, what are the most common misconceptions you actually find about creative strategy?

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing. Yeah. The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before this. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: Yeah. So, oh God, I love this question because again, I really do feel like for a while as performance creators, we've all had this ethos of just like, let's just test everything and see what works and like we really don't know. Now I find myself a lot more being like, like challenging my creative teams and being like, what are we trying to learn from this test? Like if you don't know what you're trying to learn from a specific test, then you shouldn't be running it. And if we're not like extracting real, if we're not extracting like certain variables for certain tests and we're just doing things willy-nilly, like that's when I get really nervous and I start pushing back on people. Um, so I guess like to button that up nicely is if you don't have a reason for testing a creative and if you are not going to learn something from testing it, then you probably shouldn't be testing it.

Evan Lee: So interesting because even with that in mind, with the creative that we're working on, um, that's one side of the equation, right? So this almost leads to this next question that I saw somewhere, I think it's a little bit deeper that it started plugging in, but it's related to landing pages because one side of the equation is you're making some amazing creatives that are driving people exactly where we want, or exactly where media buyers want them to go, right? And then one of the questions that somebody has here is like, should they test multiple landing pages on the same ad creative?

Dara Denney: Yes, it will make a huge difference. Now, something that's kind of controversial that we like believe at Thesis is that like there doesn't really have to be landing page to ad creative or like ad creative to matching landing page continuity. Like I think that's a really big, um, like myth is that you have to have matching ad creative to matching landing page. And like sometimes I have seen it work and the case for it is compelling, especially if you have like a press hit ad where you're not mentioning the press then in your landing page, like that could be kind of confusing as a user. But like I don't think that you have to match the headline of your like creative to the headline that's going to be in your landing page. Like you're actually, I think going to get a lot more traction out of trying different types of formats on LPs. Like secret Thesis thing, we have like three main formats that we are testing on our LPs. They're quizzes, they're listicles or like advertorials, and they're overview style pages. And that's kind of it. Now, if you haven't tested like one of those three, you probably should. If you haven't tried sending your ad content to the product page, try it. I'm skeptical of whether or not it's going to work in 2022. You should also try sending it to a collections page, try sending it to your homepage. Like I just like it's a complete like false idea that like anyone, including myself could step into a business and be like, these are all the things that you need to do and immediately you're going to get the performance you want. You have to test everything. So like, yeah.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then obviously after that, you're going to be launching, well, you're going to be creating net new concepts that can then go live, of course. But is there ever, and I don't know if this exists, talk to me if that's wrong, first of all. But then the second thing is, is there ever a ratio between like net new things that you'll create versus, hey, in the account, we can make a small change to three seconds and make those smaller iterations.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah. Like actually when we're building out our creative roadmaps for clients, we're really dividing the concepts between iterative creatives or net new creatives. And it's going to depend client to client whether or not we're like doubling down on completely net new like content or, um, iterative content. I will say when we onboard clients, traditionally, um, we generally start off with iterations just because, I'm going to be honest, like every time I get on a like client onboarding call and I show them that slide deck that I showed you guys earlier and I'm like, three to four weeks to see new creatives, um, I always get a message after that call and they're like, no, we need it now. And what we always end up doing is making some Frankenstein type of content where we take like the assets that had the best hooks and combine them with the best holds. And like that's an iterative concept.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely.

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: I love that. Um, okay, one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to fact check that it's actually correct. But one of the questions that we have is like last year for BFCM, you had mentioned how you had to spend up from 40k to 60k. Can you explain when you look for or what you look for and do during these intense spikes in spend in the account? So making sure that like you don't kill performance overnight.

Dara Denney: Yeah, so this was not actually last Black Friday Cyber Monday. This is the Black Friday Cyber Monday before that. I actually vlogged that Black Friday Cyber Monday. The real OGs would remember that like vlog that I did in 2020. It was wild. But yeah, I had a client that like wanted to spend a million that week, um, that weekend and it was crazy. But like the things that I was looking for were honestly like the ad sets that were getting the best, like the most amount of purchases, like for the best price and we were just scaling those up. And like it sounds a little like counterintuitive, but it was way more intuitive than like process oriented. Like you see the results, you increase the spend. You see results going down, you decrease the spend. Like I really wish there was like some deep in-depth process I had, but I really didn't. Especially when you have to move that quickly, it's like you follow the performance.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely, especially within like such tight time frames like when the actual event comes up and it's really literally you're rocking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday and whatever it might be, you have to move quickly at the end of the day, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah, exactly. Um, I know like a lot of times people want like a system for scaling. Um, and when you're first starting off and you have those like under 10k per month budgets, like yeah, don't scale above 20% on any given day. Like definitely like don't rock the boat too much. But for those bigger account spends, like it's a little more art than science, which I know is another question. So, you know, like it is what it is.

Evan Lee: Entirely, entirely. And then one of the other things, so the question that exists here is saying, how do you determine whether a creative is worth testing or not? Now, I feel like, yeah, you could jump in with that one, but what I'd also love if you could tack on to is is there ever any a situation where there's a creative developed, whether it came from a UGC creator or whatever it might be and you're like, that's not it, we can't go live. Like it's not worth it at that point.

Dara Denney: I'm just going to throw this one out here immediately and it's that you don't need it. Um, I have definitely had pushback from not only clients, but also like team members or um, just other people that are really skeptical about needing to do that much research. I think a lot of times there's this ethos or thought process that's like, oh, we really don't know what works on these platforms and we have to throw everything against the wall and just see what sticks. But there's actually just a major need of all the research that goes into creating these like winning ads, so to speak.

Evan Lee: Yeah, and then sorry everybody, I'm going to be selfish here, but something I've wondered about a long time, Dara, is more importantly for yourself, you have such like a wide range of experience, ultimately touching ads, right? And with creative strategy being somewhat of a new concept, how did you start determining like what to do first, what to do second, what to do third and all the different steps there?

Dara Denney: I mean, it was a lot of trial and error. I'm not going to lie. Like our process at Thesis, it's not perfect yet and we're editing it and making adjustments to it every single day. So, but I'd say really like knowing that like I've seen it so many times, right? Like when we onboard a new client, there's always this immediate feeling of, oh my gosh, like what are we going to do? Like where do we start? And I found that it's actually a lot easier to take a step back and be like, you know what? We don't have to have the award-winning creative right now. What we actually need to do is take a look at their analytics. What have they run before? What do the what do those hook and hold rates look like? What are the ads that are driving the best performance? And then once we have that information, we go into, well, what does the reputation look like of this brand? What type of press hits do they have? How do their customers talk about them? Not only on social media, but in the press or in like bigger review style blogs. And then it's also the time to be like, well, what what are their competitors saying? What are other big giants in the industry or their industry? What type of ad creatives are they running? How are they communicating to their customers? And I often find that once you're able to look into those action items, the idea of what type of creative is going to win here actually becomes a lot more, um, a lot more clear, at least where to begin and where to start creating that creative roadmap.

Evan Lee: That's awesome. And especially when we talk about like where to begin, I think that's a great segue just to get to like the most upvoted question that we see here, right? So the most upvoted question is, how do you structure your creative and ideation process, especially when working with such a large team? Where do you start? What does that flow look like?

Dara Denney: Cool. Well, what I'm going to ask you, Evan, is actually if I can share my screen a little bit. Now, I know that I had shared some documents in the video that I did with you guys. And I actually just want to give like, I'm just going to like really open the hood and let you guys see like exactly like what we're doing at Thesis. Now, what I'm showing you guys right now is actually a version of our creative kickoff template. So this is really like taking a step back, like when you first start working with us, like, hey, this is what it looks like. So like we have the initial like creative kickoff call. We have the creative strategy research, which I'm going to dive to in a second. Then we develop the initial creative roadmap. Then we submit that creative roadmap to the client. Then we onboard for UGC and studio, and then first creatives are going to be delivered three to four weeks after this call, right? But it's really the first step is the creative strategy research. Now, I know a lot of you saw this document that I created. This is not a special document. This is a word document. It's not beautiful. I am working on like transferring this into something that is more of a slide deck form because I think that that's what everyone wants to see and it's a lot prettier, especially when showing it to clients. But this is really how I guide my research process. So here we have an overview where we can link to the planning and onboarding document, kickoff, brand guidelines and info, ads library, asset library. And then that's when we start to research. So we start looking at press, we start looking at socials. And what I'm also doing here, like when I'm looking at these things like socials is I'm making notes, I'm making comments. Like, oh, I keep on seeing this question popping up on their TikTok comments. Maybe there's something to explore there. Or, oh, I always notice that they use this sort of tone when communicating with people on Instagram. Maybe that's something that we should look into further. Then we start diving into review sites and to customer reviews. And a lot of times I'm extracting not only the positive ones where I'm like, oh wow, like that's really interesting. That could be a really cool angle. Um, but also the negative ones because I also think that there's a lot to be said about creating content that is like, um, handling objections. After that, we're going to look at competitor brands. So we're going to be linking out to all those ad libraries so that we can immediately access them. I'm also going to be looking at the landing pages and the overall websites that they're linking out to in their creatives because that's also a really important part of the process that I feel like a lot of times media buyers or creative strategists just totally miss because a lot of times we're thinking so much about just the ad creatives. Now, this is something that I've added more recently, which is just use cases versus demographics versus awareness. So what I like to do is think about common use cases for the product. Now, this might be really obvious, especially if you're like a jewelry brand, for instance. Now I saw a lot of people in the comment section asking about what I thought about jewelry brands. Now, of course, like the idea is like, oh, you wear it so that you feel good, look pretty. But I think like what some of the best jewelry brands do is like, oh, like I wear this because I know I can wear it to the gym. I can wear it swimming. I can wear it showering. Like those are things that you want to highlight for use cases. Um, and then for demographics, it's like, who is that, who is actually like buying your product? What are their age? Where do they live? And what is their education level? What is their income level? All of that stuff should go into the multiple demographics that you're ideally targeting. The other thing too is like awareness levels. So this is a little bit nuanced, but it's thinking about like what awareness levels do your customers have of not only their problems, but the potential solutions that they have. So again, thinking about this jewelry brand person, like maybe they're already super aware of your brand, like Majuri, and they just need to get over that hump and they just need to know that they're making the right investment in your brand. So testimonials about why Majuri is the best are probably going to be something that you should look into. But if they don't actually know of your brand yet, then those are the types of like, those are the type of places where you could think about like, oh, like maybe they get like green stuff on their ears when they're wearing like normal jewelry. That's something that you can then highlight in your ad because of their awareness level of that problem. Now, of course, like beyond that, we're going into the creative audit and then we're also diving a little deeper into hook rates and hold rates. So, I know that was a lot, but and and if you guys want, let me know in the comment section, we are happy to like send over that little template creative strategy workbook. So I know a number of you had mentioned it. So if you signed up for this, be sure to just like keep a look out for your email box and we can link send that to you guys in an email because again, I don't think it's anything super special, but um, I would be happy to share that with you to help guide your strategy research.

Evan Lee: The people have definitely been asking even in the chat to be like, is this going to be made available? Are we going to get this? So that's amazing.

Dara Denney: Oh, yeah.

Evan Lee: The thing that I really love about your process is like even with those first initial steps when we look at, as I go back to sharing my screen to those questions here, even when we see this next question of where do we start conducting the initial creative research, you tackle that too, right?

Dara Denney: That's where we start. That's where I start because you should not feel like you have to have all the answers like the first time that you are speaking with a client, on boarding a client. It is all a process. But I do find that like having that document, it's just, it provides me like a lot of comfort as well because again, you don't have to start with the award-winning creative just yet, but you just, you have to have a roadmap, you have to have a plan. And that strategy workflow helps me get that plan.

Evan Lee: Love that. And then the one follow-up question that I have is I really like that all of the different steps that you have actually are looking at to see in the world how are people speaking about a specific brand more than anything, right? But then there's also that like common part of what does the brand think about themselves and that element.

Dara Denney: Which is often different than the way that your customers are thinking about you.

Evan Lee: Talk about that. Talk about that. Yeah.

Dara Denney: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the bigger like discussions that I have to have with brands, especially ones that like demand a certain level of scale in a in a smaller amount of time, which is like, you know, as like a performance creative strategist, like I'm looking at what the masses are going to say and frankly like what I think is going to make you the most money. And a lot of times that goes against brand guidelines, which is a hard pill to swallow sometimes with brands. And I've found that honestly, like I just have to be straight with brands and encourage them to step outside their comfort zones. I'm never going to do anything or post anything, um, creatively on an ad platform that I think is going to be damaging, but I think that from the brand perspective of what damaging is is just like it's very safe. It's very safe, right? So, I don't know. I can talk a lot about this subject, but I don't actually feel like I'm going to say anything definitive other than it is sort of like a brand marketing versus performance marketing like kind of conversation.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Yeah, I think you said the most important part, right? As long as it's not damaging to the brand, then it's something that you can just trade off. It's like it's making enough money, so like let's just keep doing it. We're not hurting us too bad at this point, right?

Dara Denney: Yeah.

Evan Lee: And then one of the other questions that I saw in here, I just wanted to make it more relevant to the time that we're in is BFCM, like it's right around the corner at the end of the day and then the holidays right after that, right? So something here, and like first we need to