[0:00] Evan Lee: We are now here to learn from the one, the only Sarah Levinger. So I would love to welcome Sarah to the stage.
[0:10] Evan Lee: Round of applause, y'all.
[0:12] Sarah Levinger: Evan, you're crushing this. Like, just and without coffee. We were talking about this before. I'm like, I am shocked and amazed at your ability to do all this without coffee.
[0:20] Evan Lee: You when I have coffee, it's going to be next level. Oh my gosh.
[0:22] Sarah Levinger: Oh my gosh. I can't wait.
[0:24] Evan Lee: I'm gonna step up. Do your thing. I'll see you at the end.
[0:26] Sarah Levinger: Thank you. I am so excited to chat with you all today. This is, oh, this is like peak. This is the reason why I'm here. This is the reason why I do what I do. Mostly because I love teaching, I love learning. I can't get enough of this particular topic. And I'm excited to share with you guys today because I, I spent a long time on this particular presentation, mostly because research is like, it's everything. Research is the entire foundation of everything we do as creative strategists, as people in this industry, whether you're in B2B, e-com, wherever you are, basically everything we do comes down to this. So, we are going to talk all about research today, how to do it, what it is, where to go find things, what to look for. Uh, but first, I kind of want to start with a little bit of a confession because I think this is a really good insight of like how Sarah's brain works and like might be where you are. Early, early on in my career, especially when it came to research, I was like a really, really good researcher.
[1:20] Sarah Levinger: I had like everything organized, right? I had all these different folders. I had like color coded Chrome tabs. I had like hundreds of ads that were organized all by category. I was like obsessed with the organization of this and I was really, really methodical. And most of the time, when I looked back in all these different folders I had collected, I was very, very lost. And it was interesting because out of all of the stuff that I had put together that I was like, this is going to be it. All this research is going to tell me what to do, where to go, which ads to make. I literally couldn't tell what was going on. I think it's important to note that when it comes to creative strategy research, having a lot of information is not the same as knowing what to do with it. I could tell you what every competitor was doing, and I could tell you exactly which ads or where. I could get all the inspiration to you, but I couldn't tell you why any of this was working, and I definitely couldn't tell you what we should do next. And that's what I want to kind of focus on with this research today.
[2:16] Sarah Levinger: There's this scene, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but there's this scene in Alice in in Wonderland that I think about kind of constantly as a creative strategist. And it's where Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, which way should I go? Right? You should tell me, like, where should I go from here? And the cat asks her, well, that very much depends on where you want to get to. And Alice says she doesn't really care where she wants to go. She just wants to end up somewhere. And the cat says, okay, then it doesn't really matter which way you go. And this scene in particular, like just haunts me all the time because it's so spot on, especially for creative strategists, because I have watched brilliant creative strategists who genuinely understand like the psychology, they care deeply about the brands and the people, they care about the customers, spend hours inside of these libraries, scrolling through their competitor feeds and building swipe files and doing all the things they should be doing, but they can't figure out what they're looking for when they go to the research. They're just wandering through all of this data and all this information. And I personally think it's because nobody really taught us what we were supposed to be looking for when we research for our ads.
[3:22] Sarah Levinger: So we're out here gathering all sorts of information that's supposed to help us, right? And it's supposed to help these brands grow. But we're not entirely sure what we should be looking for or where we should be going. So we just end up getting lost in here just like Alice. In my experience, this is not something that can really be fixed with adding additional team members or really even sourcing good talent, even though that's a big part of it. This is 100% a system problem. And systems problem really just needs a systems solution, right? So over the next 90 minutes, I'm going to show you guys um a research system that I built around three different categories, three different realities, if if you will, um that we have to basically just deal with every single day of creative strategist. So once you have all three of these realities researched and you have a system behind them, your job is going to get a lot easier, right? You're going to move a lot faster and in my experience, you're going to start loving the ad process again because it's going to be easier to know what to do, where to go, where to find it. So, we are going to get started by breaking down these three realities that we're going to learn about today. Each one is going to kind of help us identify not only what we should research, but where to go to find that information, right? So that way we know what to look for and we can build better strategies from the ground up.
[4:31] Sarah Levinger: The first reality that we're going to learn about is customer reality. This is how your customer actually experiences the problem that your product solves. And it's really the foundation of how all brands grow, right? Second reality we're going to research is the brand reality. And this one's critically important. It's something that I don't think a lot of creative strategists get enough insight into. It's something that we're really going to dive deep into today. Um and this is really what the business actually needs from the creative right now, not just what like we think they need, right? And then the last one that we're going to go over is we're going to go look at presentation reality. So we're going to research uh properly how to figure out which format um the human brain will respond to based upon psychology and not just like the trends of what's coming out in creative strategy in particular.
[5:17] Sarah Levinger: Before I give you all these frameworks and tools and and like research sources, I need to give you one hard and fast rule. So this is something that I I need you to ask yourself before you open up any single research tool every single week. And that's this question. What decision will this research help me make? You got to ask yourself, what decision will this research help me make? If you can't answer this question, please close your browser. Because you're not ready to research yet. If you can't figure out what this information is going to help you do, don't go get it because it'll just complicate what we're trying to do as creative strategists. Every piece of research should make a decision. Every piece of research. It should change what you build, how you frame it, who you target, why you're doing it in the first place. Um and if it won't change those things, you just don't need it yet. I really do think that research without the decision to serve isn't just research, right? It's just busy work that kind of makes you feel good for two hours until you finally kind of realize that you've gone down this rabbit hole, just like Alice, and it basically led you nowhere. It's just now you have information for no reason at all. So, by the end of this particular session, you guys are going to have a clear set of tools that you can walk through with any brand, any team, any brief and know exactly what you're looking for and uh where to go to find it. So, let's get started. I'm so excited. Okay.
[6:36] Sarah Levinger: We're going to start with customer reality research. This is my favorite one, mostly because I have just a soft spot for customers and people. And I kind of want to frame this particular module uh with a question as well that might make some of us uncomfortable, but I think it's important. I want to know how well you actually know the person you are advertising to. How well do you know the person that you're trying to draw into the brand? And I'm not talking their demographics or their psychographic profiles, right? I want to know uh beyond that kind of avatar that we generated with the team like three years ago. How well do you know the person, right? Or someone that's just like her? Do you know somebody in your life that is the person you're trying to market to? Right? And I I want to see like, do is it a family member, right? Can you think of someone like a friend of yours who just matches this profile really, really well? Do you know what her Tuesday at like 2:00 p.m. looks like? Do you know the specific moment in her week where she becomes aware that something in her life isn't working? How well do you know this person?
[7:36] Sarah Levinger: There's a reason why I start here is because customer reality and the research we put around it is kind of the load bearing wall of every single brand. Without customers, we cease to exist. Businesses cannot thrive or flourish without customers. And our job as creative strategists is to understand this reality. You can have a perfect brand, right? You can have the most sophisticated media buying in the world, the most beautiful ads ever produced, but if they're talking at the wrong person or specifically to the wrong moment in that person's life, none of this matters, right? The whole house falls down. So, for the past few years, I find this really interesting. We have worked off of avatar profiles and the industry has taught us to build both demographic and emotional avatars. We usually call them something like minimalist Melissa these days. She's 34, maybe she shops in Denver. Um, she's a whole foods kind of a person. She values sustainability, all these different things. These uh descriptions are really accurate, but the problem is it doesn't tell me anything that I can write to get Melissa to pay attention to me. That's kind of the key here that I want you guys to get, right? I want Melissa to pay attention to like what I have to say and hopefully buy from me. Avatars are great, they're very important in marketing, but they're not going to tell you what Melissa is doing at the exact moment that she becomes kind of emotionally aware of her problem. And this is the reason why we're going to do very, very careful customer research so we can figure out what to say to her instead of just drafting a brief that sounds nice. Okay.
[9:07] Sarah Levinger: So, biggest difference here between I know Melissa and I know what to say to get Melissa to buy is that we are going to move away from generalized research. We're not going to try and go find what I call fun facts. There's a big difference between fun facts and insights. A fun fact is basically just a statement. She wants to lose weight. is a fun fact, right? An actual insight is she's getting dressed for lunch with a friend who just lost 40 pounds. Her favorite jeans don't maybe fit the same way that they used to. And now she's really kind of insecure before she has to go meet her friend who just looks fantastic right now. That's a deep level insight that we can actually put strategy towards. And it'll tell you all sorts of things, what creators to source, it'll tell you what tone to use, it'll tell you kind of the emotional truth that she needs to hear. It'll tell you what brief to create. We have to get over this idea that we're researching for fun facts and move towards the idea that we are researching to find deep level insights. So, to find out exactly who our customer is behind this kind of like avatar profile, we're going to split our customer research into basically three different layers. I put it on a cake because I love cake. Here's the breakdown of customer reality research here.
[10:17] Sarah Levinger: The bottom layer is going to help us understand generational insights. Not fun facts, insights, right? This is the world that shaped your customer before your product even existed. Generational insights. This is going to build the entire stack for us. The next layer in here, the middle layer is going to be more about micro moments, right? These are the teeny tiny things, just like we talked about, very specific situations where the problem surfaces the most and is most salient. And the top layer here, after we have those two set up, is emotional mapping. This is where we're going to understand which emotions is this person feeling at this precise moment in time. And all three of these has to be done in a very specific order so that we can understand the whole reality of our customer, not just one specific teeny tiny blip, if that makes sense.
[11:03] Sarah Levinger: So, we're going to start with generational research. Now, this is really interesting because I have a lot of pushback when I teach this to large scale teams and it almost always comes with this idea that why do I need to know this? Right? It feels like we're taking the long way around. Why do I have to understand like a person's childhood to be able to write an ad? This is the reason why. Your brain is really a fascinating organ. It's about 3 pounds. It's mostly fat and water. It's one of these more interesting organs because it's a master pattern recognizer. And the way that it does that is by mapping everything it understands about the world to everything else. So all it does all day long is sit here and process things and connect them one at a time to other things that it has experienced in its lifespan. Now, because the brain processes creative in this way, the shortcuts that it takes are are going to be really interesting. It's going to activate different things for the brain that you may not expect out of your creative, right? So, your childhood is going to influence your teen years, which will influence your 20s and 30s, which will influence your 40s and 50s. The brain is going to make all this happen on its own. And if you don't understand how this person got to where they are based upon when they were born, what they experienced, all these different things, you're just going to be trying to write to the person they are today, not necessarily to a brain that has all these different experiences already mapped. We're trying to basically shortcut that process.
[12:31] Sarah Levinger: So the first question that we need to understand to try and kind of dig into this generational insight is what was their childhood informational environment like, right? Were they raised on like three TV channels that every single message was just broadcast and authoritative and it was the only thing I could get was the news or newspapers, those type of things. Or did they grow up with like infinite internet and learned very early on that everything is negotiable. And everyone has an agenda and I shouldn't trust anything at all. This is going to tell you which formats might feel safe and which ones feel like forcing it. But more importantly, it's going to tell you what you're going to have to do to be able to bypass the brain's kind of like, nah, filter. Right? Understanding the generation is going to help you choose formats and it's also going to help you build trust. This is the reason why we're starting here. So, great example of this. There's a very interesting psychological phenomenon called the familiarity effect. It's really when the brain just processes familiar stimuli a little bit faster, mostly because it has less resistance to things that it sees a lot. So if your customer grew up reading long form like magazine articles, an article format might actually perform a lot better than a TikTok style hook just because it activates familiarity within the brain. And I've seen this happen predominantly with boomers, which is really interesting. They like a lot of information, really long form style content, and usually they're the type of crowd that just really loves the information. They like to learn, right? There's all sorts of like familiar information out there. Cat scans is a familiar piece of information, magazine articles, price stickers, nutrition labels. There's all sorts of formats that we see on a daily basis all day long and we've seen it for years and years and years. We need to identify the ones that your specific customer is familiar with so we can easily access them as a library of formats in the future. So, we're studying generations to understand which formats are they probably going to respond to pretty easily.
[14:43] Sarah Levinger: Second question we're going to ask ourselves is what shaped this customer's relationship with money? We're still in generational research here. We're going to go out and we're going to find sources on what shaped their relationship with money. And this is pretty interesting because if they came of age during like the 90s economic boom, they might have a very different response to different messages just based upon how they experienced money as a child. If they graduated maybe in like the 2008 financial crisis and they spent their 20s kind of paying down student loan debt, they're going to have a very different view as to whether or not they can afford whatever it is that you're selling or whether they should be able to afford it. This matters a ton because the phrase like self-care starts at home lands completely differently depending on their history, especially their history with money. One person is going to hear like very aspirational. Oh my gosh, you're so right. I should definitely do self-care. This is going to be amazing. Another hears, I can't afford that. Like, I can barely afford rent. You want me to do self-care? This is bonkers. So, your second research pass here to understand generations and how they're going to respond to ads is to find out what they believe about money, especially around your specific category. Very, very key here.
[15:58] Sarah Levinger: Third question, again, still studying generations, still kind of getting an overview of like what these people are and where they came from. This next question is really interesting. What is their actual life like right now? Not aspirational life, not who do they want to be, but what's their actual life like? Are they building a career? Or are they like pivoting out of them, right? Are they kind of sandwiched between aging parents and and teenage kids? Are they newly retired and they're really kind of struggling with the lack of structure? Where are they in life, right? This is where you find creative tension that makes an ad feel relevant today. And this is really, really important here. I I don't want it to be relevant in general. When we are making ads, we need our ads to be relevant on a very specific day, like today on a on a Wednesday or a Tuesday, right? This is relevant to me. We need to map all these micro moments and generational kind of experiences that this person might be going through, not just so that we can sell to those moments, but so we can be very empathetic towards that person, right? We need to be kind to the people that we're trying to market to. Life is hard. Life is hard out here for everyone. So if we can be very aware of of where they are in life, it makes it a lot easier for us as marketers to understand how we need to communicate these messages so that we're not just constantly trying to gain something from them. We're actually trying to slot into their life where we best fit. Critically, critically important. So, your third research pass for generational insights is where are they in life right now?
[17:31] Sarah Levinger: Fourth and final question we got to ask here is specifically, how do they evaluate risk and decide who to trust? I love to map out like customer's generational experience around this, mostly because it helps to understand, are they very averse to authority? Like, do they not trust any authority? No governments, no like police systems, like they're just not into authority. If that's the case, we're going to push all of our ads towards more friend and peer focused kind of angles. Or oppositely, if they only trust authority, they trust doctors, they only trust politicians, they only trust these specific groups of people, maybe we want to shift all of our stuff over towards communicating that style of message. How do they decide who to trust?
[18:13] Sarah Levinger: So, in general, this is really interesting when you dig down into this because a Gen Z or a millennial who grew up watching kind of institutions fail over and over again, might be much more sensitive to like subreddits or peer focused kind of reviews, right? Versus your Gen Xers, baby boomers and above, they might be more interested in doctor's endorsements or health claims that come with that kind of backing on it. Same exact product, same exact claims, they're going to have completely different architectures depending on how they process risk. So that final pass on your research for generational research is to find out who they decide to trust and why.
[18:49] Sarah Levinger: So, these are kind of the four core generational questions that I like to take stock of before I start drafting ads. You can always add more to this if you guys want to, right? This is kind of just where I start with it. As you add more questions, what did they think about, you know, their siblings? What what was their lifestyle like when they were growing up? Like all these different things, it's going to add new insights to your stack and it'll generate much better ideas, which is fantastic. So, this is how we build kind of super sophisticated creative strategies that are going to grow brands this year and into the next, you know, 10 years. And it's all based upon where did people come from and where are they going.
[19:25] Sarah Levinger: So, now that you kind of understand what we're trying to find, here is actually kind of a map of how to find this information. When you do this research, you're not looking for angles. I have to call this out because I have people asking me this all the time. Sarah, where should I write down angles? No, no, no, no, no. Your generational research is more of a an existing library in your head. You're looking to become a registered expert on the chosen human for your brand, right? So you can access this library of knowledge when you go to create later. All of this research is for you as the creative strategist, not necessarily for the brand just yet. So, we're going to walk through these one by one just so that you guys have a good context for this. When you need any sort of generational context or worldview, I need to understand where they came from, when they were born, how they kind of like grew up, what kind of informational pieces they had. Um, Pew Research Center is one of the places I go to all the time. There's lots of academic kind of generational studies on this. For this specific research type, you're going to look for when they lived through economic events, right? Technology, when they adopted this particular piece of technology, different trust patterns. What we're trying to find is something that's going to tell us which proof formats, right? Which like actual formats and authority signals will actually land with this generation.
[20:50] Sarah Levinger: If you need to find how your audience talks about their daily life, where they are right now, Reddit, oh my gosh, I could just scroll Reddit all day long. Anything that's very age specific, right? Age specific subreddits, those type of things, Facebook group, Quora, LinkedIn is good for this. What you're looking for here is language patterns, complaints about things. When they celebrate versus when they're actually like frustrated by things that are happening in the industry. This is going to give you actual vocabulary. Although again, I don't want you to write down angles. I just want you to check it and and start to kind of absorb your customer's language and the way that they communicate in the world. That way when you go to write something or you go to prompt Claude or whatever it is, you can double check and say, based upon what I'm reading and just what I've absorbed about this person, I don't think that they would love this particular headline. I think they'd probably love this one. So, absorb, absorb, absorb.
[21:42] Sarah Levinger: If you need any sort of information on cultural, economic forces that are shaping decisions, Bureau of Labor Statistics is fantastic. There's a lot of information over there. Census data is really interesting to kind of browse if you like dry data. News archives, all kinds of different places that you can go to get this. What we're looking for here is cost of living shifts, career patterns, family structure trends. What you're really looking for, especially if you go by category and and industry, you can find some really interesting data on how the price of your product and your category has risen or fallen over the last 10 years. And what does that mean, right? We're looking for all of these different kind of hidden objections that people have that they're not going to communicate in a post purchase survey or reviews, right? If your customer's stress is financial, a treat yourself is going to backfire like we talked about before. So we need data. We need data on what happened over here. Did the price of this jump from $2 to $70 million in the last five, six years? And what does that mean for us?
[22:44] Sarah Levinger: Last one on here, if you need information on real conversation patterns, specifically by group, YouTube comment sections are one of the best places I've ever gone to look for information on this type of stuff. Podcast reviews are also good. Amazon Q&A, those type of things. Here, you're just looking for tone, vocabulary, level of skepticism, what questions they ask. We're trying to understand, is everyone in here skeptical right now? Are a lot of these comments just like, I don't believe anything you say? Or are people actually talking about the fact that like, God, I wish that there was somebody who could tell me what to do. It's very different communication style. So, we're looking at generational research. There's about four different places you can go. Take this with you. I'm going to have more of these coming so you understand like what am I actually looking for when I go look for this stuff and just, you know, go through and make your research so that you can understand where people are coming from generationally. Okay.
[23:30] Sarah Levinger: So, studying these generational insights is going to give you kind of a glimpse into like who your customer was, how they were raised, how they trust, those type of things. But there's a little bit of a slight problem because um as we understand someone's generational worldview, it's not going to tell you which moment, right? That your product is going to become relevant to them, which is the reason why these micro moments are critically important. So, we're going to go through those next. Very important key point here. A good strategist will go find pain points, angles. A great strategist is going to find out when those pain points show up and why. Not pain points in the abstract, right? The exact moment in the year, the week and the day where this like, I have a problem gets triggered. Real world situations, not marketing situations. Very, very key.
[24:22] Sarah Levinger: Great example of this. Say for instance, we have a 57 year old woman who might be interested in buying our weight loss supplement. Typical marketing research would just pair this down. She wants to lose weight, right? But this is obvious, obviously. It's also something that every single competitor probably already knows. So instead, we want to research the tiny moment that this thought might be coming up for this 57 year old female customer, which again, we already went over this kind of example, but she's getting dressed for lunch with a friend who just lost all this weight. Her jeans don't fit. She just doesn't know how she can compare. She's now getting anxious, right? Before she steps out and goes to this lunch. This is key, key, critical, very important to get hyper specific, especially with Andromeda. Like I can't talk about this enough. That freaking update broke the entire system and I'm so sorry if you're experiencing this right now. That that update wants hyper specific content because it's an interest-based algorithm, not necessarily just an angle or customer-based algorithm. If you go towards hyper situations, hyper specific situations, you have something to write towards, right? You have somewhere to put the camera. You have some creator to pull, you have a story to tell. These are the moments that we want to research the most.
[25:37] Sarah Levinger: So, here's where to research these micro moments. This is a lot easier than generational stuff, mostly because like this is pretty easy. We're just looking for very specific situations that we can start to track. If you need to to research real trigger moments and daily friction, Reddit, oh my gosh, this is going to come up a ton. Reddit, Reddit, Reddit, Facebook groups, niche forums. We want to look for those specific situations where they're describing, I was in this place. Look for that kind of content in here because these first-person stories are going to become straight ad scripts, right? Very, very easy to do this. I was at the dentist, I was with my son, I was shopping with my niece, whatever it is. If you want to look for emotional language around this particular problem, Amazon reviews are freaking fantastic. Trustpilot is also a good place. Anywhere that you can go where people are freely giving their opinions without hopefully being incentivized to do so. You're looking for before and after kind of descriptions, what finally made them buy, what they wish they'd known, whatever it is. Um also the differences between five star, three star and one star reviews is really interesting when you look for objection finding. So I love to look on Amazon for these, just browse and browse and browse. When you need kind of unfiltered customer voice, this is when I'll go to qualitative data. Quiz data, customer service tickets, post purchase surveys, right? We're trying to understand why they bought right now, not why they bought in general. And the why now part is the most important. This is going to tell you kind of what tipped them from that kind of objection thinking over into purchase based thinking. So, in general, ah, I love qualitative. Okay.
[27:08] Sarah Levinger: Last one on here, when you need social comparison moments, like I need to understand how people are actually thinking about this in the industry, just as an industry as a whole, right? Like how are people thinking about beef snacks? What do people think about streetwear? What do people think about dog leashes? TikTok, Instagram comments, organic, oh, I I want to see what people are tagging each other in in particular. Stuff that's like, this is so me. That type of content is going to tell you what people are already sensitive to. And I can't get enough of this. I'm just like, oh, these are are so interesting when you start to dig down into the research here. So, in general, go look at your micro moments, track these four different things. Again, this is just to get you started. You can always add on top of it, but really this is kind of the core stuff that I take a look at, especially when I'm doing brand audits, trying to understand customers. Okay.
[27:56] Sarah Levinger: Last one on here is emotional mapping. You have all of your moments collected, right? The final layer on here on our little customer cake is the emotional one. For each micro moment that you've found, I want you to ask three questions. So every single moment you track or you have mapped, three questions that we need to ask. First one, which emotion is present? Which emotion is coming out of this insight the strongest? Number two, is this a private moment or a social one? And I'll show you why all this is important in a second. In general though, is it is it something they deal with alone or is it something they deal with around people? Because that's going to change the messages that we have to put into the ad account. And then last one on here is this is this acute, like it came on suddenly, or have they been struggling for a while? For years and years and years with this? Because again, it changes what type of message we need to put into the ad account.
[28:44] Sarah Levinger: These questions are going to help us understand how, how, all of creative strategy is understanding how do we need to communicate this message? It used to be which formats, which angles, which offers. Now it's how do we need to communicate this message so that people understand what we're trying to say. If we're messaging towards the emotion of hope, right? Maybe we want to give them hope that there's a different way to do whatever they're trying to do. And they've experienced this problem privately and it's been going on for years and years and years. Join others just like you is a little too hypey. We might actually want to do something a little softer, quieter, something like you don't have to suffer alone anymore. They're so close. These messages are almost exactly the same, but they're just communicated just differently that they're going to draw on a very different customer type.
[29:35] Sarah Levinger: Emotions in humans are really weird. Really, really weird. We can experience extremely strong emotion. Other times we might have just barely detectable emotions going on. Often, we experience multiple emotions at the same time. Which emotion you identify is going to drastically change what type of ad you make and whether or not the market responds to it.
[30:00] Sarah Levinger: There's a psychology model that I want to share with you guys. I'm not going to go like super deep into this because this could be its own course and it is. This is a course that I run. This one in particular though will tell you basically which types of emotions you need to target and how. So this is the valence and intensity model. I can't take credit for the model itself. That was developed by a psychologist, um James A. Russell in 1980. I just applied it to ads. This is really interesting because where you find emotion on this quadrant model helps you understand if it's positive or negative, how intense it is, how to communicate towards it, all those different things. And on this particular model, emotion can either be positive, anything that's kind of above that line, or it can be negative, obviously, anything below. Now, that's interesting because just because it's positive or negative doesn't really tell you which direction to go. We also have to track how intense that emotion is. If it's really, really intense, we might see a very different message come out compared to if it's just a very light kind of nice kind of a feeling. So, we can go over deep in this if you guys want more information on it in uh Q&A, drop your questions and I'll answer them for you. But valence and intensity, remember that. Very, very important, also very easy way to kind of figure out which emotion or which messages to put in place.
[31:13] Sarah Levinger: Okay. I think it bears saying, very important here, you can have the most accurate and emotionally precise customer reality research in the world, and you can still build the wrong creative. Mostly because knowing your customer and knowing who they are and how they experience these problems tells you a little bit about what you're trying to go after, but it doesn't tell you what the business actually needs you to do with this information. And that's a completely different question, totally different research. Um and it's the one that not a lot of creative strategists have enough education on. And I wish to God that we would put more education. So thank you Motion for putting on this event so we can get more information on this. This is what we're going to talk about next. So, I want to start this section, now that we understand what we're looking for customer side, with an observation, right? So, a lot of the most brilliant creative strategists that I've worked with, uh have a lot of customer information, but they're still struggling to get past like beginner to intermediate level in creative strategy. Mostly because customer data and information is only one side of the equation. You can understand all these different things about your customer and map their micro moments, you can build all these emotions into it. You can ship it, and everything seems like it'll be fine. But for some reason, even though people are responding to it, you can still have a boss that will come back and say, turn that ad off. And then you'll be sitting here wondering why that happens. Your boss might have loved the concept, the team might have approved it, everything would have looked great, but the ad itself might have been too expensive, or maybe the hook wasn't selling right, or maybe it wasn't reaching enough top of funnel customers. Maybe it just wasn't as cool as they wanted. It doesn't really matter what the reason is. This is one of the most expensive mistakes I think in creative strategy and that's why we got to talk about it before we start building any ad.
[32:55] Sarah Levinger: We've done our research on customers. Now it's time to do our research on the brand. To start with this, we are going to open with a very simple question here. And this is so interesting because every time I ask somebody like, have you asked this question? Almost everybody says no. So, very simple question. What is this brand optimizing for right this second, today, right? And does everyone agree on this? That second part, right? Does everyone agree? Is where this gets really interesting because most brands, the answer is no. Not everyone agrees on this. So, think about what it costs to have uh a media buyer who's kind of optimizing for scale, a founder, maybe this particular person's optimizing for margin, and the creative team is optimizing for kind of brand equity, right? All of this is happening all at the same time. So every ad you ship as a creative strategist is trying to serve all three of these goals. It's not going to satisfy any of them. And the blame is usually going to land on the creative, right? The ads aren't working. But the ads in this case, in this scenario, really just never had a chance. Mostly because these underlying kind of optimization systems, beliefs in the team's mind are causing friction. Brand research is going to help you understand what you need to optimize the entire strategy towards, not just your individual ads.
[34:18] Sarah Levinger: So, we're going to talk about how to actually research this, what comes into play when you go and actually do your research. I have found that brand reality research really only has two parts. Part A, first part here is just health, understanding brand health. Where are we in our ad account, right? What can what can we actually produce? What can the team actually get for us? What will it cost? How long will it take? Who's going to produce it? We're trying to understand cost and a really just a little bit of optimization, right? When it comes to actually creating the ad itself. When uh you start to look at cost from an ad standpoint, it's not just about media spend. There's a lot of costs that goes into this and we're going to talk about this in a second. But the second research that we're going to do for brand reality research is alignment. We got to understand what the heck are we trying to do? What are we prioritizing for this month? What do we need to cut costs? Are we trying to grow? Are we trying to get top of funnel? What are we aiming for? What are we not aiming for? How will we know when we hit it? We need to define these two kind of stacks from the brand before we start to generate our strategies every single month and really weekly if you can get into the habit of doing it. Mostly because this will help us grow as a brand.
[35:26] Sarah Levinger: So, we're going to start by studying this first part, which is the brand health, right? Where we sit in the ad account, our capability as a team and the cost that we kind of need to keep in mind as we start to generate our ads. Most strategists are going to think a whole lot about media spend when they think about cost. This is typically the only thing I get sourced when I ask people how much do your ads cost? They say, it costs X amount in meta. I'm like, no, that's one of the costs. From a creative strategy standpoint, the cost to produce an ad includes quite a lot of things, like media spend, development time, right? Team labor costs, team attention, bandwidth, I mean, operational load, like there's so many different things that come into play when one ad gets generated and we really have to be very specific about which ideas get shipped and which ones get tabled.
[36:15] Sarah Levinger: So, let's walk through an example of why this is so important. This happens all the time. Like I see this scenario way too much. So, say for instance, you build a plan that needs like 50 ads a month to work, right? But your team can only produce 20. So you launch the strategy anyways. The actual strategy itself is sitting at 60% below target. Some clear winners are sort of popping up and you feel good about your progress. So you push for 50 more ads next month. The team only gets 30 done. Now, this doesn't seem like it's an issue, but here's what's actually happening. Over the next month, the plan is going to run at a fraction of what it actually needs to succeed. And the data that's actually coming back is going to get really, really muddy because there's not really enough creative to test properly. And people are going to conclude that strategy failed, right? Meanwhile, your ad account is just going to get filled with whatever was already running. Iterations of winners is what I typically see. Stuff that attracts kind of the wrong customers or maybe is too expensive anyways. And then you go back and you're like, I don't know what happened. I had this whole strategy in place and it just didn't work. The strategy did not fail. It just actually wasn't tried. Nobody ever came and asked, can we actually build this? Can we actually produce this many ads before we commit to it? We just kind of went for it, right?
[37:34] Sarah Levinger: Same scenario applies to kind of other topics and and places in the business as well, like operational load. This is like one of the key places, especially if you're in a brand that's small or possibly just a new brand. If your creative strategy that you put in place drives a giant demand spike and fulfillment cannot keep up with that, you have just paid to create angry customers. And I've seen this time and time again for smaller brands is like, we got to be so careful with how we put our strategies in place. So, before we scale any sort of creative and before we get to like the brand research side that we're going to talk about, we need to ask ourselves, what happens if XYZ happens? What happens if it works? What happens if like we generate a crap ton of demand over here? Can the business handle this, right? Is our team capable of producing this much creative this month? Can we produce this much? How much of it is going to cost? Can we do this at quality? Because if you follow any of my content, Sarah is not a big fan of just like dumping a ton of creative in the ad account. I would so much rather go for quality over quantity. So I want to know how much does it cost us and what needs to be cut in order to hit this goal, right? You need to know the ceiling before you build towards it.
[38:46] Sarah Levinger: So, let's talk about where to go to research this. To understand brand health, where in the heck is the brand sitting? We need to go into a couple different metric places at least once a week. Uh, bi-weekly is probably best so we can kind of give our ads time to breathe a little bit. But when you need current performance metrics, cost, benchmarks, all these different things, obviously, you guys are good creative strategists if you've been doing this for a while. Ads manager, motion dashboards, other platform dashboards. Whatever you guys are currently using to keep track of this, please, please, please do. Obviously, you're looking for places and and things like CPA trends, conversion by campaign, spend efficiency over time. Keep up with your good habits of just understanding how is the business performing from an ad account uh standpoint, right? We're establishing a baseline.
[39:32] Sarah Levinger: When you need creative production capacity, information on like, can we actually do what we think we're going to do ad wise? I want you to go internal. Go check with your design leads, your project management tools. Go talk to your designers, your videographers, whoever it is, ask them, how many assets do you think you can create every single week at quality, right? I I want to understand how we produce, what our systems are in here, how we actually flow through this. What we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure that we don't try and pitch a strategy to the brand when the team can't physically execute it. This is really important because this is the number one reason the strategy dies and it's also the number one reason for burnout. Is we're being asked to produce things that we can't possibly do. But we're going to try to do it anyways. We roll through this kind of hamster wheel and we're just completely burnt at the end.
[40:25] Sarah Levinger: If you need information on operational constraints, this one I find really interesting because um most brands don't actually give this to their creative strategist. I wish they did. But ask, ask for it. Go ask your founder, go ask your CMO if you have one. Can I understand like our ops and supply chain? Like, can you tell me like, can I get access to the inventory kind of dashboards? We're trying to understand, can we handle a spike? What's our fulfillment ceiling on this? Like, are we doing a good job operationally? Because I don't want to create something that's going to cause really just big problems on the back end of the entire system, right? Great creative plus this kind of broken fulfillment is just a lot of refund requests. So we have to understand where are we with inventory? Can we go ahead and start to push demand out here?
[41:08] Sarah Levinger: And then last on here, industry cost and benchmarking. Obviously, you're going to look at Motion has some great aggregate data in here that you guys can look at. We are looking for specifically where do you sit versus the category, right? Are your CPAs normal or in a red flag? I like to look at this specifically when it comes to category benchmarking, mostly because sometimes I have no idea if what we're hitting is actually good. So, for the most part, when you're going and looking at your brand health in here, you're going to look at a lot of metrics, you're going to ask a lot of people internally what the heck is going on, and you're going to try and get a sense for how the business looks in particular.
[41:43] Sarah Levinger: Second part in here is researching this kind of optimization. And I love this one because it it literally is, I'm just trying to figure out what the heck is our goal, right? Because most of the time as creative strategists, we're out here just like, okay, I think our goal is growth, I think. And then it it comes back and then the media buyer turned off our ads and it's all chaos and it's like, I don't know what happened. I had this whole strategy in place and it just didn't work. The strategy did not fail. It just actually wasn't tried. Nobody ever came and asked, can we actually build this? Can we actually produce this many ads before we commit to it? We just kind of went for it, right?
[42:34] Sarah Levinger: Same scenario applies to other topics and places in the business as well. It's not really anyone's fault. It's just working with humans. This is just a natural effect of working with a lot of different personality types, different departments who are optimizing for different things. This is what happens when alignment is assumed instead of established. So your job as a creative strategist is unfortunately to make sure that we bring all this information together so you can get clarification on what we're trying to do.
[42:40] Sarah Levinger: So this is the question I want you to ask every team member at the start of every month. And I mean every single one. If you could only optimize for one thing right now, what would it be? What would that be? Don't summarize what they tell you. Just write it down and then and then kind of have a look at um how everybody kind of maps against each other. What you'll almost always find is that one person is thinking over here, another person's thinking over there, and creative is trying to kind of thread the needle in between the two while also trying to prop up the entire brand and like keep track of our competitor, all this type of thing, right? This is not really anyone's fault. It's just working with humans. This is just a natural effect of working with a lot of different personality types, different departments who are optimizing for different things. This is what happens when alignment is assumed instead of established. So your job as a creative strategist is unfortunately to make sure that we bring all this information together so you can get clarification on what we're trying to do.
[43:35] Sarah Levinger: So, for brand alignment, all of this is internal. This is nice because it's very qualitative and very easy to get. So, for understanding kind of business stage, um strategic like priorities, those type of different things, we are going to ask our founder, our CEO, whoever it is, if you have board decks, if you have investor updates, we're trying to understand what are we doing right now as a brand? Are we pre-product market fit? Are we using ads to try and figure that out? Are we scaling? Are we a mature brand that's just trying to hold our place in the category and expand out? What's the next milestone? We're looking for business stage determines the right strategy. The PMF needs learning, not volume. Scaling needs efficiency, not experimentation.
[44:50] Sarah Levinger: If you need to understand what the media buyer is actually optimizing for, direct conversation, platform settings. Campaign objectives, bid strategies, what they report on. If buying is optimized for clicks but strategy is built for LTV, you're working against each other. Alignment starts here. What creative is actually being produced versus planned? Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Slack channels, creative briefs. Gap between strategy docs and what shipped last month. Reveals whether past strategies actually got executed. If they didn't, the problem isn't strategy, it's bandwidth or buy-in. Retention and LTV data. Shopify cohort reports, subscription dashboards. Are we acquiring customers who stay? What's the payback period? If your customers churn in 30 days, no amount of acquisition creative will save you. This tells you whether to shift focus to retention.
[45:23] Sarah Levinger: If you need information about what the media buyer is optimizing for, direct conversations are fantastic. Platform settings. This this is the time where I want to understand kind of like objectively from a campaign standpoint, what are you doing? Like, how did you set this campaign up? What does this ad account look like? What are you reporting on? I need information if if like are we optimizing for a specific thing that I didn't even know we had in the ad account and you're dumping my ads into a particular structure that I actually need to account for. Go check with your media buyer. Very, very, very important.
[45:55] Sarah Levinger: If you need information on what creative is actually being produced versus the one that you planned, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, wherever you need to hold your project management, um, information is very important. I think it's really just looking for a gap, right? Every single time we put a plan in place, we need to track and see whether we actually did it.
[46:13] Sarah Levinger: And that's the same for weight loss. It's the same for learning a new skill. It's the same for like learning an instrument. You have to put in the steps to practice it because this is going to really reveal whether or not anything we put in place actually got executed. Um, yeah, or whether it's a bandwidth problem.
[46:28] Sarah Levinger: Last on here, if you need any sort of retention data, and I put this in one this one in here because I'm like so fascinated by retention. Very important to understand, are we actually acquiring customers who stay? What was the payback period in here? I want to understand, did somebody I attracted with my ads churn in 30 days, right?
[46:48] Sarah Levinger: Because really, no amount of acquisition is going to save you at this point if they just keep churning. So we need to completely revamp the strategies we're putting in place.
[46:57] Sarah Levinger: So brand alignment research. I'm trying to make this very, very simple for you guys. So like I said, when I give you these tables, and I'll give you access to them at the end if you guys want. One at a time, just go through them this week with your team. Understand the ones that like, yes, I have this. I already got all this information, but maybe these two I don't have enough. And then that way you can find out where do I need to get more information?
Slide with a large text quote: "For the next [timeframe] we are optimizing for [specific goal] because [business reason.]"
[47:15] Sarah Levinger: So, your homework for this particular section, um, I haven't assigned homework yet, so this is the very first one. But your homework for this is just to get an alignment statement from the team. That's it. Like one sentence that just agrees on and commits to a defined window of time that we are going to try a specific strategy. So for the next, however long, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever it is, we are optimizing for a specific goal. We want to cut our cost down.
[47:40] Sarah Levinger: We want to get our volume in check. We want to actually add more quality into here. Maybe we want to do a little bit more top of funnel, whatever that goal is, because whatever this business reason that we've discovered from our conversations, this is the one that we really need to focus in on.
Slide with three icons in circles: a person's face, a diamond, and a wrapped gift.
[47:55] Sarah Levinger: It's going to help a ton.
[47:57] Sarah Levinger: Okay, take a break. Everybody decompress. I know this is a lot of information. Research is is one of the toughest ones. I promise the next part is going to be super fun with Dara because it's all about like creativity and actually applying all this stuff. Very important to get this foundation correct the first time so you don't have to go back and do it all again. But now, we have a research stack for customer insights. We have a research stack for brand insights, but there's still one question left to answer and that's how do you wrap this message?
[48:25] Sarah Levinger: We understand our customers. We understand what the brand wants, but now how do we wrap this so that people will come into the brand, like what we have to say and actually buy. So this is the last and final research stack that we're going to go through.
Slide with a dark blue background. Text reads: "Presentation Reality Research: How should we say it?" next to a gift icon.
[48:41] Sarah Levinger: Um, and this is honestly like one of my favorite parts just because I love content. I find it super, super interesting. So, very, um, very clear thing. As I was like building this particular section, uh, I just kept thinking to myself like, how are we going to, how would you know, right? Which format, which style, like how are you going to be able to decide which presentation reality you need to hit? And I think it's important to remember while you're going through this particular section, you're not making ads for an audience.
[49:11] Sarah Levinger: You're not making ads for an audience. Unless you're pushing organic, that's a totally different strategy. You're not making your ads for an audience. You're just making your ads for a specific type of brain, right?
[49:24] Sarah Levinger: Now, the brains that we are trying to bring in and we are trying to convert into a purchase, they are already on a specific state. And this is something I posted on my Twitter a while ago, but the state that they are in is typically something that's not currently experiencing the pain of the problem.
[49:39] Sarah Levinger: They might be thinking about the problem, but that's a very different brain setting than actually experiencing it. Your customers in this state are on a very specific journey and the brain that's processing all this has very specific rules that we need to adhere to.
Slide with a collage of different ad formats: a product shot of camo shorts, a screenshot of a text message conversation, a before/after skincare image, a native-style article titled "Women Can't Believe This Quiz Is Actually Right", a product shot with a neon sign that says "ENERGY", and another product shot for a skincare product.
[49:55] Sarah Levinger: A lot of creative teams that I work with base all of their creative stack based upon what's trending, right? Or or really just like what feels fresh or what feels good. Um, or really, I mean, I'll just say it, like what the founder likes or what the creative team is excited about. And there's nothing wrong with excitement, but the reality of the situation is, all of our ads are being served to millions of brains inside an organic ecosystem.
Slide showing three iPhones with different TikTok-style videos. Left: an emu looking at the camera. Middle: a cartoon rabbit being decorated. Right: a man talking to the camera.
[50:19] Sarah Levinger: These ecosystems was purpose built for mindless scrolling through topics of interest. That's all it is, right?
[50:28] Sarah Levinger: What this means is we're going to be competing heavily with a brain that's trying to keep itself where it is. The brain does not actively want to click and go out somewhere else and try and figure out whether or not what you're offering is important, is a good value, has like every bells and whistles that it wants. That's just a waste of energy for the brain. So to account for this, we need to choose a creative stack, you know, aka like how many statics, how many videos, how many carousels, how many gifts, whatever it is, we need to choose our creative stack based upon the psychological state of the person who will be processing this ad, right? And that's basically the only question that matters here.
Slide showing an X-ray style animation of a human head in profile, then turning to face forward. The brain inside is highlighted with glowing orange neural pathways.
[51:08] Sarah Levinger: Presentation research that we're going to be conducting has basically one very, very simple goal. We need to match information or like the offer that we're presenting to the psychological state that they're in, right? A brain in exploration mode, something that's just trying to figure out what's out here and it's just kind of like looking at stuff, is often going to reject anything that tries to be too clever or go too deep too fast.
[51:34] Sarah Levinger: A brain that's processing maybe purchasing mode will will really just not like a landing page that overexplains everything because it's like we're past this already. Like, I just want to get to the purchase, right? You really have to try and target this very, very carefully so it doesn't feel wrong to the brain. And there's a very simple structure that I've put in place to try to figure that out.
Slide showing a diagram of the "messy middle" of the customer journey. It's an infinity loop with "Exploration" on the left (orange) and "Evaluation" on the right (green). A red line comes from "Trigger" at the top, enters the loop. A dotted line exits the loop to "Purchase" at the bottom. The entire loop is within a larger circle labeled "Exposure", and a smaller circle below is labeled "Experience".
[51:53] Sarah Levinger: So, we're going to start this last and final research process by identifying what kinds of creative stack we need from a customer journey standpoint because as we just saw, not everybody's ready to buy today. They're all kind of in a different state as they're looking at your ad. Uh, I can't take credit for this particular model again. This one was taken from an actual Google study that was looking at digital purchasing processes, and I'll get you guys that link if you guys want it. Um, but in general, they found that customers in the digital ecosystem move through about four different phases before they buy. First one, obviously at the top is going to be a trigger. Something told me that I should buy. I'm feeling something in particular that was like, ah, I should fix this.
[52:34] Sarah Levinger: Exploration phase and evaluation phase is interesting because people will morph in and out of these. So sometimes they'll be exploring, sometimes they'll be evaluating, and they'll stick in here for quite a while. Eventually, they'll move from evaluation down into the purchase and you'll see this kind of like circle on here that talks about experience. So the actual, um, post-purchase experience is involved in this as well. Unboxing, obviously shipping times, all those different things. But in general, each of these four phases kind of has a very distinct psychological state that's attached to it and each state has a format that matches it. And from my experience, I've tested this over the course of lots and lots of different brands. I'm up to like 150 some different creative strategies built now. Each of these phases is pretty definitive and most brands I think are running creative towards basically just two, which I find really interesting.
Slide titled "T-E-E-P Creative Framework". It shows a bar divided into four equal 25% sections: Trigger (blue), Exploration (purple), Evaluation (orange), and Purchase (yellow).
[53:24] Sarah Levinger: So, the creative framework for this particular, um, stack is called the TEEP, uh, creative framework. It's literally just trigger, exploration, evaluation, and purchase. So, it's really helpful for kind of understanding how much coverage we need to see across the entire journey. Depending on how many ads we have in each category, we can very quickly see where we're over indexing and this is why I love, oh, I love, love, love the TEEP framework because it helps me understand what types of ads do I need to create this week, right? And which format in particular do I need to choose?
[53:56] Sarah Levinger: Overall, TEEP is going to allow us to optimize for that kind of top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel within the ad account, but I would like to call out that technically speaking, in my experience, most brands should be doing top of funnel with organic. And that's something I'm going to die on that hill. You should be doing top of funnel with organic if you can. I know that no creative strategist in here has, um, control over that, but I would suggest you do it there because it's a lot cheaper and it also directly affects your ads, which can we can talk more in Q&A if you guys have questions about that.
Slide titled "How to Optimize for TOF Success". The bar is now weighted: Trigger (60%), Exploration (20%), Evaluation (20%), Purchase (20%).
[54:28] Sarah Levinger: Okay. Let's go through some examples of how this kind of helps us drive better creative selection. So say you're optimizing for this kind of like top of funnel success, right? In this particular example, if your CMO comes to you or if your boss comes to you and is just like, hey, we really got to get top of funnel eyeballs in here. You got to do something to help us. I want you to wait towards trigger formats. And if you can, talk to your media buyer, consider making those ads link click or traffic conversion optimized, right? Not conversion optimized, but link click or traffic optimized. Save your conversion optimizations for everything else, right? A top of funnel goal really needs like a wide net, right? So we're talking like short form video, lots of pattern interrupts, novelty focused kind of ads. You need to get in front of as many pre-aware customers as possible when you're trying to go after trigger that particular phase, and you need to let those moments kind of do the work.
[55:23] Sarah Levinger: You can wait the rest of your funnel towards even distribution for exploration, evaluation and purchase, right? So you can have a good stack of ads that will cover that. But if you're trying to go after top of funnel, we got to do a way better job of just making good content.
Slide titled "How to Optimize for CVR Success". The bar is now weighted: Trigger (10%), Exploration (10%), Evaluation (40%), Purchase (40%).
[55:36] Sarah Levinger: So that would be the strategy there. Another example, if you're optimizing for increasing overall sales, like we just need to see growth this month, like please go get us some customers. We got to wait towards evaluative and purchase phase formats more than anything else. The math on this is really interesting. If you're going after growth optimization, it's very different than a top of funnel kind of a growth strategy and the creative and the account structure really should kind of reflect that. You need a lot more depth.
[56:04] Sarah Levinger: We need to put in more proof, more specificity, a lot more trust into these particular ads. It's not really a place for short hooks, although I have seen them sometimes perform. But for the most part, if we're trying to go after conversions, I need more ads that are going to help people evaluate and purchase and that's about it.
Slide titled "How to Optimize for Cost Reduction Success". The bar is now weighted: Trigger (10%), Exploration (35%), Evaluation (35%), Purchase (20%).
[56:22] Sarah Levinger: If you're optimizing for cost reduction, which I know a lot of brands are right now across the ad account, we need to choose formats that your team can produce at extremely high quality. And I'm not talking about like make me a a movie, right? You can still do these like UGC style ads. You can always kind of do these like quick and dirty style ads. When I say quality, I'm talking about like, I want it to be as close as possible to the best story we can tell.
[56:50] Sarah Levinger: The best story we can tell. And then I want you to put a lot more effort into the middle here, right in the middle of the TEEP structure. Quality is a cost reducer. If you tell a real good story, I'll buy anything you have. If you make me laugh, I will buy anything you have. If you send Sarah a cat meme, I will buy anything you have. I need it to be quality content that's just really, really relatable because this is going to help draw in customers who align their identity with your brand, which is typically a lot cheaper of a sale. So, a good strategy, I think, uh, comes from understanding what your your structures are like and how you're actually splitting up your formats depending on which TEEP level they are in.
Slide titled "T-E-E-P Format Selection". It's a table with columns: Phase, State, Format Watch, Why This Format. Rows are Trigger, Exploration, Evaluation, Purchase.
[57:33] Sarah Levinger: So, let's take a look at formats because ah, I love this part. Um, typically, TEEP formats will fit into one of these four categories. Uh, and we'll take a look at some examples in a second. But I want you to use this as a way to build your library. You go build a library, go to Motion because for obvious reasons, go build a library of all these ads and categorize them into each of these phases so that you never, ever like get lost in the sauce, right? So the first one here, trigger, obviously this is pre-awareness phase. The formats here are going to be those micro moments, things that we pulled from our very first research stack. I want it to be really relatable, just this is so me. Like I was talking to the team today about the fact that like Sarah didn't sleep well last night. So I just downed two cups of coffee and then I woke up this morning and I was like, we're going to do this. We're going to get hyped. So relatable to a very specific type of person, right? They don't know they're in market yet. Your job is to name the moment here. So keep a library of ads that you can pull from that just make people feel seen, not sold to.
[58:39] Sarah Levinger: Exploration ads, these are lovely because they're in kind of a low commitment state, but they love high novelty. So if you're the type of creative strategist that loves like ASMR, sticky things, things that gloop off of stuff, is that a word? Gloop? In general, if you like to create all kinds of like weird ads, short form video is fantastic here. I want lots of visual hooks, different memes, car chases, dogs barking. This is where they're not really ready to invest attention yet. You just need to earn the right to say more. So the content here shouldn't feel like a heavy sales pitch. It just needs to feel like, God, this connects to me so incredibly well. We're just continuing to get deeper and deeper with this customer.
[59:19] Sarah Levinger: Evaluation ads are fantastic because this is where we start to bring the actual brand in. I usually tell people, exploration is where we talk tell them about the industry. Evaluation is where they tell them about us. So this is where we can put in our very, very strong marketing skills, testimonials, before and afters, educational content, case studies, those type of things. We are looking to help them compare options between us and somebody else. They need evidence that you are who you say you are and they do not need to worry about trusting you.
[59:52] Sarah Levinger: So this is where all of those marketing skills, direct response in particular are going to come into play. And then obviously purchase ads. These are great because they're super easy to make. They're making a commitment now. They're ready. They just need to have that friction, friction meaning like, I'm just kind of waiting for a good deal kind of to happen. Long form is great here if you guys want to just dig real deep. I've seen founder ads work really, really well as purchase format ads. In general though, purchase ads are typically the ones that are just like, hey, it's time to buy. Here's a 50% off offer. Here's a free gift. Here's whatever it is. We just want to get you into the ecosystem.
Slide titled "Trigger Ad" showing an ad for a ring. Text: "3 OUT OF 4 MEN MISPLACE THEIR WEDDING BAND IN THEIR LIFETIME."
[1:00:26] Sarah Levinger: Let's take a look at some examples. Um, I love Ridge. They run a ton of really high quality ads. Uh, and I specifically targeted their rings just because it's not a part of their like like original stack of products. So I love to kind of study some of the other products that they're trying to push up into the ecosystem, um, as like from scratch. So, trigger ad, your customer's emotional state here, like I said, is very pre-awareness. They don't know they're in the market. They haven't really typed anything into a search bar yet. They're just kind of living moment to moment. Your job in this phase is not to sell. Like we talked about, all you're trying to do is just bring up a moment. So this one is really interesting. This three out of four men misplace their wedding band in their lifetime. I didn't know this.
[1:01:38] Sarah Levinger: Totally normal. We're going to catch them in the next phase. Phase two is exploration. So your customer is now very aware that they have a problem. They can name it, right? They want this problem gone. They're very curious and open to kind of options, but they may not be ready to watch like a four-minute video of everything you have to say. They just need to be kind of intrigued here. So your job for exploration ads is kind of to earn the right to say more. And in this particular phase, um, we're going to produce ads from some of the generational insights we had. We need to use formats that are going to connect to a specific age range of customer, um, especially if they grew up with a specific like style of trust, right? So if I need a doctor, let me get a dermatologist. Maybe they need somebody involved in the system so that we can show them that this is going to be worth it. So, this one I would categorize as an exploration ad and not an evaluation ad because we are not calling into play anybody else, right? We're just kind of still talking about the industry in general. He finally wears his ring after seven years of marriage. He said I do years ago, but uh, now his ring finally does too. Clearly this person's in market because they've been married and he's been dealing with losing rings for a long time.
Slide titled "Evaluation ad" showing a comparison chart: "RIDGE VS. OTHERS".
[1:02:46] Sarah Levinger: Phase three, evaluation style ads. Now your customer is kind of comparing options. They've moved from is this possible to more like is this the right one for me? So they're skeptical, but they're looking for evidence. So, if you have any data on the reasons to choose you, please, please, please put it out here. These table style ads I have ran for the last like six years straight and I've never seen them not work. It's really interesting when you bring in some of this like, um, brand research as well. So if we're optimizing our ads for a specific goal, for example, this one obviously wants to bring in customers who want a big value instead of just a cheap price. This is going to align really well with what the brand is trying to do because we're communicating, look at all the value that you get from our rings.
Slide titled "Purchase Ad" showing an ad for rings. Text: "THESE DEALS WON'T LAST" with an anniversary sale offer.
[1:03:33] Sarah Levinger: Phase four, purchase ads. Very simple. Your customer's ready to buy. They have the credit cards in hand, so you might as well just let them have it, right? This is something that I have learned very painfully in my career is if you don't just give people the option to buy, they'll be sitting there with their credit card in hand and then they just wait for it and then you just keep talking and talking and trying to educate them and then they just kind of like walk away because they're like, okay, I was trying to buy and you didn't let me buy. So I'm going to skip out. Please just let them buy. Put some purchase ads in here. You've answered all the questions already. It's not going to turn them away if you offer something to them. During this phase, I really do think this is kind of where we bring all of it in, customer research, brand research, and our presentation research in here, staying consistent with your message is going to help a lot during this phase.
The "messy middle" customer journey diagram slide reappears.
[1:04:20] Sarah Levinger: So, this is the TEEP framework. Solves all kinds of problems for like which ads do we need to actually make and you get to be creative in here, right? Trigger ads don't have to be a specific style. You can get all kinds of interesting. You can do parody style where one person is talking to themselves in different like aspects. You could do text overlays, you could do product focus, whatever you want to do. Just make sure that you're thinking about which phase am I trying to go after because that will help you narrow it down very, very quickly to what style of ads you want to make.
The "Where to Research Presentation Realities" table slide reappears.
[1:04:54] Sarah Levinger: Last research panel. I know this is a big one. You guys are hanging in there. I'm so proud of you. Research is thick. It's like a really intense like experience. But having all this information, like I said, is going to make it so breezy. Like you're going to go through your week and just be like, I know exactly what to make. So, to find out what style of ads that we need to make for which TEEP category, we're going to conduct a final round of research, um, basically just to get inspired. This is typically the research I think most creative strategists are very strong at. Um, and obviously, when you need all of these different things, there's lots of different places to go. What you're looking for is anything that's that stops the brain, right? You're trying to find something where the information is just presented in a very interesting way. So when you need formats about what's working in your category, Motion's inspiration library is actually super interesting. There's lots of cool stuff in there. Uh, obviously you can check out Meta ads library, although take it with a grain of salt. Meta drives me crazy. Lots of good ways that you could use it. Just, uh, I would check some other resources as well. TikTok's Creative Center is also another good one that I check often. You're looking for top performing formats by category, not just trending hooks. This is going to give you a starting place of your kind of like library of ads. But remember here that you're filtering for state, not just copying what's trending. Top performing also comes with its own kind of caveats, right? Because something could look like it's performing when it's not. So, just keep in mind, all we're looking for is the interesting stories, different ways that we could possibly communicate the information, not just things that look like they're winning.
[1:06:33] Sarah Levinger: When you need any sort of information on what your competitors are running, obviously Motion has a lot of like really cool saved searches you can do. Um, Meta library for their longevity filter is really interesting. In general though, anything that's running about 30 plus days is a good signal. But again, be mindful of the concepts. If you see something that's been running for like 500 days, but the ad itself, like the concept is just like, why would this be running for 500 days? Go with your gut. I have had some brands tell me that they have specific campaigns that have a plethora of 100 ads sitting in there that just have spend running to it because they're afraid their competitors are going to copy them.
[1:07:10] Sarah Levinger: So they just have some ads that have some sort of spend on it just so that they can be conscious of that. So I always tell people, longevity is a good signal, but double check the story. See if the ad is an actually like a good ad, well produced, good story, good creator, good delivery. And if all of those things check out, then that's something we want to keep track of. In general, how your customer consumes content at each stage is really interesting. I look at Google Analytics. Content paths are really interesting if you can get access to it. You can tell pretty quickly like where people came in from and then where they explored after that just to see was this customer in exploration, evaluation or purchase phase? How deep did they go on the website? And then we can try and understand what do we need to put in place for this customer gets to the end faster. Heat maps are also another good place for this. YouTube analytics has some really interesting tools if you guys, um, want to go check those out. But in general, we're looking for watch times, drop off points. We're really just looking for how is the content being consumed in general because it's going to tell you a lot about like whether your customer actually likes watching this type of content and if it's something that you could possibly put into the ad account.
[1:08:16] Sarah Levinger: This big yellow bar in here, this is where I spend the majority of my time when I'm looking for presentation format. Organic, organic trends, stories, cultural knowledge. I want you guys to go surf the web. I'm looking for basically anything on a reel, any sort of shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, I mean, I kind of just want you to go out for at least 30 minutes a week and consume content that's in your feed. Mostly because I find it so interesting that we don't look at what the organic creators are doing very often because they have to be interesting in order to get what they need out of the algorithm.
[1:08:58] Sarah Levinger: So their skill set can help us a lot when it comes to understanding which trends are going to be popping off pretty soon or which narratives, which storytelling things that we need to actually put in place. Spend a lot of your time on organic these days, guys, because it's going to help you especially now that Andromeda is really picky about what it serves. Okay, last one, if you want data on what's actually converting, obviously Motion, fantastic for this. I know this is a Motion event, but I love these guys. They are the best at what they do. This is a really interesting place too when you go and look at like customer quizzes and compare it with what's coming in with Motion, post-purchase surveys and compare it with what's coming in on the analytics. What we're looking for is which creative actually drove purchases, right? Not just click through rates. I think click through rate lies sometimes. It can be a very, very cool piece of content, um, but a click is not a customer. So if you see these high click through rates, but you're not seeing a lot of conversions, there's something in here, something about what we're doing and what we're communicating that we need actually more data on so that we can shift it more towards conversion for the bottom of that funnel.
A video of a hand pulling a book from a bookshelf.
[1:09:58] Sarah Levinger: Okay. Another pro tip. I know we're almost done. Um, is basically to tag things. So tag, tag each idea. I love tags. I'm just like tagging everything in my life these days. Tag each idea, um, that you source from all these different researching, um, like platforms that you're going on with the appropriate TEEP category. We talked about this briefly before, but I want you to tag them, trigger, exploration, evaluation, or purchase. This is going to help you build something that's like invaluable in this industry, which is an ad library that's not just usable, but it's also browsable, browsable both by customer reality and by brand reality. At any point in the months or the week, if one of your concepts is dying, we can go back to our library of ads that we have chosen as inspiration and we can choose the right format for the right level of customer at the right brand optimization level immediately. We won't have to go search for new concepts or try and figure out what the heck are we trying to do. That's how you build good creative strategy into this type of work.
Slide with a dark blue background. Text reads: "Final Step: Building your monthly/weekly research" next to a gear icon.
[1:01:00] Sarah Levinger: Okay. We did, oh my gosh, we like sped through this so fast. Okay, final step on here. We kind of started this course talking about like Alice in Wonderland. We're all out here kind of lost and wandering with kind of no destination. I gave you guys a ton of tables with very specific things that I want you to go find every single month, every single week. Um, and we learned kind of why it's critical to know what you are looking for before you go research. Now, I want to show you the system, right? So this is how we bring it all together so we can get a solid system in place so you can do this monthly and weekly, um, basically so that you don't get lost as you go through this.
The three icons (person, diamond, gift) slide reappears.
[1:01:37] Sarah Levinger: We have a, uh, customer research stack, right? Or like a process for customer insights. We have one for brand insights and we have one for presentation selection. So we have one, two, three. Every single month, every single week, we need to go through these so that we can understand more about what our customers need most.
The "Psychology-Based Research" flowchart slide reappears.
[1:01:52] Sarah Levinger: This is a high level view of what we just created. So, for customer research, just as, um, kind of a summary, you're going to look at generational context, you're going to look at micro moments, and you're going to look at the emotions that come out of those micro moments. For your brand reality, you're going to look at cost, can we actually produce what we say we're going to produce? How much is it going to cost us and what do we need to prioritize? And you're going to look at optimization. What are we actually trying to do every single month? For presentation reality, you're basically going to go through trigger, exploration, evaluation, and purchase. And then we're going to take these three stacks, all this information that we just pulled, and that's what we put into our strategic creative briefs.
The Alice in Wonderland image with the Cheshire Cat appears.
[1:02:36] Sarah Levinger: Okay. One question left on here, obviously, is like, how do you put all this together, right? Uh, what am I supposed to do? Like what month, what day, what year? Like how am I supposed to do this every single week to make sure that this kind of doesn't fall apart? I think very, very important that, um, before we go into the workflow here, having a system is not the same as using it. The real kind of work that comes out of the the research that I do is doing it consistently. If you don't take this system and like plug it in to what you're currently using and doing every single week and practice using it, then this entire presentation has just been kind of like a nice 90 minutes off of work and nothing will change, right? You're just going to go back to feeling confused. You got to make all three layers talk to each other as much as possible every single month without skipping steps. That's what we're going after.
Slide titled "STEP ONE: Research your customer". It shows the "Customer Reality" box from the previous flowchart.
[1:03:21] Sarah Levinger: So, first thing I want you to do, build yourself a spreadsheet. If those of you are in Claude, build it in Claude. If you like it on a piece of paper, if you want to do sticky notes, whatever you need to do, we're going to go research our customer. The cadence for this, I like to do big research dumps on customers the first Monday of every single month. I want to see generational stuff, micro moments, and emotions. The goal here is for updated customer profiles by avatar. So once a month, if I have four avatars, I want every single one to have this research done. And some of you are going to ask like, well, I mean, I can only do so much research on the generational side, right? Well, you can always add more to it outside of the stack that I gave you, like we talked about in the very beginning. Adding to the stack is going to make your, um, viewpoint much wider, which will help you get much clearer on your concepts. So, first Monday of every single month, go do some customer research. Get an updated customer profile by avatar. That's the goal for that one.
Slide titled "STEP TWO: Research the brand". It shows the "Brand Reality" box from the previous flowchart.
[1:04:19] Sarah Levinger: Step two is going to be researching this brand. I typically do this the first Monday of the quarter and the first of the month, right? So, and the reason I do this on two different, um, cadences is every quarter is going to be different. I'm trying to understand, okay, holy cow, it's the start of Q4. What the heck are we going to do for Black Friday? Like this is going to be intense. I have to do that, obviously, before I can start doing my weekly strategies as well. So on the first Monday of the quarter, you're going to sit down with the brand and say, what are we doing? What are we trying to go after? First of the month, I'm also going to sit down and be like, okay, here's what we decided about our quarterly goal. Now can you help me understand what we're trying to do every single month so that we can get down to that? Your goal for this research is an updated brand optimization statement so that everybody will agree on that, and then build some sort of a tracker, right? So get yourself that spreadsheet so that you can start to understand. This is going to prevent expensive mistakes, right? This is also going to help our brands grow consistently if we can manage it, right? Because this is really going to focus us in on what are we trying to do. So, once a quarter, once a month.
Slide titled "STEP TWO: Research the presentation". It shows the "Presentation Reality" box from the previous flowchart.
[1:05:24] Sarah Levinger: On this one, oh, it should say step three. Research the presentation. The cadence on this, first Monday of the week. So, I try really hard to understand what's happening out there in the ecosystems. And obviously this is when I do a lot of research on my organic scrolls. So every Monday of the week, I want you to get into the habit of just going through and chunking through like at least 30 minutes to an hour of here's some interesting ads. Here's something I pulled from Motion. Here's the library. Bring it into one spot. I want you to kind of match your chosen concepts to where they fit in this TEEP journey, right? Remember that we're not looking for just format from just like, um, creative preference. We're really kind of looking for more what our customer will probably respond to. So, updated TEEP inspo library is the goal for this one.
Slide titled "STEP FOUR: Write the brief", showing a sample ad creative brief.
[1:06:13] Sarah Levinger: And last one on here is to get all this into a digestible format, right? We got to write the brief, which is what Dara Denny's going to help us with. Um, she's going to help us kind of take everything that we just learned from our research and actually apply it to our concepts. But we need to specify obviously, okay, now that we understand all this stuff, how do we want to put this into an ad? Now that we understand all these things about the brand, how can I use this in my ads? Now that we understand our TEEP structure, how do I want to put this into my ads?
The "Psychology-Based Research" flowchart slide reappears.
[1:06:39] Sarah Levinger: So, in general, I think it's important to just kind of end on this. If this seems like a lot and you're like, holy God, how am I going to do this? All I want you to do is take this, take a screenshot, like put it on your phone, wherever it is, and look at each one of these and say, do I understand this? Do I have enough information about this specific piece? If you answer yes, cool, keep going. Don't need to change anything, just add that to your stack, right? Every single week. If you don't have enough context for it, if something in here is missing for you, take time to do one piece at a time and go get yourself some data on this.
The Alice in Wonderland image with the Cheshire Cat appears.
[1:07:16] Sarah Levinger: Specifically because I truly believe Cheshire Cat was 100% right for creative strategists in particular. When it comes to research, if you don't know where you're going, any direction is going to do and you're just going to wander and wander and wander, gathering more information but not knowing how to use it, right? You're going to build beautiful swipe files, but if you have a very distinct structure to your research stack and you understand where to go and when to use it, this is how we build good creative strategies for the brands that we're actually trying to grow. You'll have a destination, right? A map to align to in particular, and that is the difference between good psychological research and just wandering around. So, don't be Alice is the goal of all of this.
A two-person video call view returns, showing Sarah Levinger on the left and Evan Lee on the right.
[1:07:58] Sarah Levinger: Questions, comments. Evan, do you want to come back on here? Oh, let me go wait, stop sharing. I got it.
[1:08:06] Evan Lee: You're a pro.
[1:08:07] Sarah Levinger: It was so much.
[1:08:08] Evan Lee: You crushed it. I don't know if you saw any of the chat in Slack while this was going on. I didn't get a chance to look.
[1:08:16] Sarah Levinger: So you're going to go in and you're going to see about 50,000 messages that you're behind on.
[1:08:21] Sarah Levinger: I will try to do my best.
[1:08:23] Evan Lee: 50,000 incredible. Everybody.
[1:08:25] Sarah Levinger: Thank you. Research is tough. Like full transparency, I redid this deck like six times because I was like, oh my God, what do I need to teach? But I mean, really, it comes down to basically three things, guys. And there's buckets, there's systems, and you do it over and over and over and get good practice with it. Honestly, is like half the game.
[1:08:43] Evan Lee: And that's the, I love that level of craft. Like it's just like, it needed to be good. People needed to walk away with really great insights. Sarah, I I'll kick us off while everyone's just starting to dive in a little bit more. You talked about organic and organic is such a big part of this. There's a lot of people, we have creators here, we have people who work for brands, they're single person teams. The main thing that I'm curious about is should people be thinking about building out individual creator pages or is it building out that brand page when you're talking about testing top of funnel? What do you think?
[1:09:13] Sarah Levinger: Whoa. Organic is such an interesting beast because, and I have weird view on this because my entire business is organic. Like I don't run ads for my own business. Mostly because I enjoy organic craft and like part of my testing structure is trying to understand how to win at the organic game. Organic, I find is best suited to somebody who really loves to create content. And this is tough to find, I think, if you've been searching for a while. Most people want to put it on the founder. They're like, well, it should be founder content. The founder should just go out and create whatever at the organic side. I personally would rather have somebody who just loves to create content. So the difference between should we start a brand owned channel or should we just like start testing like white listing or you know, creator, what should we do? It it all depends on do you want to own it? Do you want to own that role? And if you do, 100%, start your own channel because, I mean, personal brands, like all these, we we've seen this for years and years that like people who post a lot of content generate a lot of trust and relatability and they just they do really well with the audiences that they grow. So, do you want to own it? Yes? Okay, go do it.
[1:20:23] Evan Lee: Amazing. Got to start with if you're fired up about it. Like do you have the conviction? Take it from there. Are you good at it? Bring it to life. That's so good.
A screenshot of a question from "Cake Douglas" is displayed: "Any reccs for books/articles that could supplement this presentation? This is GREAT! I'd love to dive deeper."
[1:20:29] Evan Lee: One of the thing that's popping up quite frequently is they want to understand how you're learning. So, Cake Douglas, any recs for books, articles that I could supplement this presentation with? And then there's another question about like what podcasts are you listening to? So just resources to help fuel your mind.
[1:20:43] Sarah Levinger: Ah, I, oh, this is such a tough one because creative strategy is at such a baby stage. I'm so surprised it took us so long to get over to education over here. Um, outside, honestly, again, shameless plug. Outside of what Motion produces just because you guys have like unlimited resources for learning. Um, some of the places that I like to go, I have a podcast that I do with Nate Lagos. I learn a lot from Nate, honestly, because he applies it in a couple different ways that I just don't think about. So, shameless plug for my podcast. Creative strategy though, Dara Denny, a lot of the people that are already on all of this particular like training, they all have fantastic content in their own right and they all have like a very different lens. So Dara's, um, content, I really focus a lot of content on her stuff. Barry Hott does a ton of really, really technical stuff that's interesting. Podcast wise, I'm going to have to lean on you. Do you know of any creative strategy podcasts? I don't know any.
[1:21:37] Evan Lee: Specifically? Yeah, it's so interesting. Like there are episodes. There are episodes that you can pop out across like Barry, Andrew Ferris, so on and so forth.
[1:21:49] Sarah Levinger: Yes, yes.
[1:21:50] Evan Lee: Yeah, yeah, for real, for real. We should just turn these into into podcasts that people can listen to. Jeez.
[1:21:53] Sarah Levinger: I know. I think in my office too much. That's my problem. And I have opinions that I'm like, I don't know that I'm ready to share that yet. Um, my my opinion on this is avatars are helpful, but they are a crutch. They are a crutch for marketers. I think we got so sucked into this idea that there's one person that I need to be optimizing for and that's not how business works. My content is psychology, paid advertising and brands in e-com and that's it. And I draw in people from B2B. I've worked with service providers, I've worked with tech, I've worked with SAS. And this is the weirdest part about business is there is no avatar that will help you scale to the moon, right? What's actually going to help you scale is having a distinct point of view for the brand, a distinct point of view that I can apply to any avatar. So you can come up with 25 of these if you want and we can have them like all structured and we can have big spreadsheets for them and all kinds of different things. But if it's not going to help me communicate,
[1:28:07] Evan Lee: How deep? I don't know.
[1:28:09] Sarah Levinger: There's something
[1:28:10] Evan Lee: there's something so grounding about like you are still in what's real and always living in what's real, right? Because I'm even thinking back to when you were talking about the volume of of, okay, this is our spend, how many ads should we make? But it's like, what can we actually do? Like let's be honest at this point.
[1:28:26] Sarah Levinger: Reality, yeah.
[1:28:27] Evan Lee: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[1:28:28] Sarah Levinger: This is so tough for me because I'm just like, I this is coming from a very emotional like very like, ooh, type person like what's happening there. I also like I have to bring it back to reality because half the time we want to skip that part as marketers because we love thinking in like creativity and all these different things. And that's what we're best suited for. But most of the time I find it to be debilitating and honestly restricts growth when we do not look at it from like, we want to be creative, but can we fit that in the box that we're still in? Got to do both.
[1:28:59] Evan Lee: And Sarah, there is a question that I can't quite find anymore, but it was related to the spend and the the creative quantity there. How are you typically thinking about that relationship of based on spend, how many creatives should you be making?
[1:29:10] Sarah Levinger: Oh my gosh. Everybody always wants like a distinct number. You need 20 or you need 700 or whatever it is. In my view, it comes down to how many can we make uh at quality. That's why I keep using that. Like I know that's not a term. I'm going to make it a term. We're coining it. At quality. Just like at scale is a thing. I'm like at quality is also a metric that Sarah looks at because some of the ads I've seen in these ad accounts are like, oh my God, that's a horrible ad. I'm so sorry. It's just not interesting to watch at all. So how many ads can we make? That comes down to let's try for a specific number. Let's try to make 25 ads this week and all of them have to meet a QA standard of XYZ. Did we hit it? Yes. Cool. Let's try for 30. Let's try for 35. like let's do five extra a week. If we try for 25 and we hit seven, I'm like, okay, seven is the benchmark now until we can upgrade our skills or specifically our systems seems to be the biggest problem when it comes to quality. If you could upgrade your system, you can hit as many as you want. Like there is no number that you need to hit. It all comes down to how well can you produce.
[1:30:19] Evan Lee: Poetry snaps, everybody. I think this is so interesting because at Motion, we do a ton of our own ads and like our own creative strategy and it is that. Like if we looked at an equation that said take X amount of budget, it would have said we needed 500 ads. And it's like, hold on a second. Hold on a second. Like can we actually do that? Like what's real? What's real inside there?
[1:30:38] Sarah Levinger: Yes.
[1:30:39] Evan Lee: Yes.
[1:30:39] Sarah Levinger: I see too many brands who are just like, you need volume and volume to everybody seems to mean 500. And I'm like, where did why did we get that? Like, who said it was 500? I never said it was that. Like, who said that? It volume to me literally just means can we produce consistently? That's what volume should mean. Volume is consistent. Can you do 25 consistently every week and have them meet quality standards? Great. Do it. Can you meet two? I'm happy with that. If you can produce two movie level amazing like freaking Marvel movies every single week. Oh, you could crush in the ad account. It the number doesn't matter. The number doesn't matter.
[1:31:19] Evan Lee: Oh, poetry snaps all around. Sarah, we probably got time for a couple more questions. I'm going to pull one up, but I'm also going to extend it based on what I'm seeing here.
[1:31:26] Sarah Levinger: Ready.
[1:31:27] Evan Lee: So Tahira, I hope I pronounced that correctly. Let me know in the chat if that's incorrect.
On-screen text overlay shows a comment from Tahira Davis at 6:00 PM: "What if you don't have a physical product? Like events, community, etc."
[1:31:31] Evan Lee: But what if you don't have a physical product like events and community? And I'm also seeing this, so there's like the service offering, there's like B2B service offering. So people have asked about software and there's also like government and nonprofit folks. So with these different industries, how should people be thinking about what you what you've gone through?
[1:31:47] Sarah Levinger: Non-physical products, if you're in B2B, there's a different strategy that we need to use uh for communicating our ads, obviously, because you're more in like lead gen. The research though, in my experience is almost the same. Specifically because in business you're working with humans and especially if you're targeting somebody who's like 45 to 55, they're a Gen Xer. Possibly this person really likes nostalgic kind of products. They don't like a lot of hype. They still want a lot of information. They also want to be given a whole lot of like autonomy, right? If I understand that about this generation, then the ads that I produce are going to be so much more focused on you're a smart, capable XYZ, right? CEO or whoever we're targeting. You don't need us to tell you what you need, but we're going to give the information and you can make the decision. Come call us if you need more information on the industry. We're an expert, whatever you need to say, right? So does it apply to B2B? Yes. And how is this a little bit different for like service-based or or B2B industries? The research is similar or almost the same. The only difference is output is different.
[1:32:51] Evan Lee: It's so because we're rooting it we're rooting it in this is this is human psychology and human behavior at the end of the day, no matter what you're offering, it's to a human. Right?
[1:33:02] Sarah Levinger: Humans, yes.
[1:33:03] Evan Lee: That consistency, that consistency.
[1:33:07] Sarah Levinger: That's the nice part about psychology. It applies everywhere. So I still want to know like who are they? What did they do? What did they grow up with? All these different things. Now I just need to understand, okay, what are they focused on and how can I get in front of that? So yeah.
[1:33:21] Evan Lee: Sarah and I tried this live dial-in show, everybody, for a little while and it was so freaking cool. Like there's so many people who called us. I just I couldn't figure out the tech. I'm like so dumb. Like this wasn't working.
[1:33:32] Sarah Levinger: It was awesome. You did great. The tech is hard these days, man. Has one job.
[1:33:36] Evan Lee: My gosh. But we got into all of this with the human psychology and like lights up, I think both of our brains. Sarah's like a lot more advanced with it, but it's just so fun to talk about ultimately.
[1:33:45] Sarah Levinger: It's so interesting. Humans are bonkers and I love them. They're so interesting to listen to.
[1:33:51] Evan Lee: 100%. It's fascinating stuff. Sarah, we got one final question up here. The questions are going crazy around AI. Everybody, I'm going to talk more about AI after Sarah Jams too. But let's pull this one up from Juan.
On-screen text overlay shows a comment from Juan Sanchez at 5:30 PM: "Are you now using AI to quickly gather these insights to cut on time spent researching?"
[1:34:03] Evan Lee: So Juan asks, are you now using AI to collect uh to quickly gather these insights to cut time spent on researching? What's your approach?
[1:34:12] Sarah Levinger: Oh. Yes, but not in the way I used to. So I used to go to Claude or Gemini or any of these and have it conduct large scale research for me. My problem with that is it only gives me a snapshot based upon what I love. Cuz that's how LLMs work, right? How you prompt will bring back something entirely different. So it would bring back a lot of psychology and a lot of emotions that it found from all these different research things, but it would skip all of the other things that I asked it to do because it's like, Sarah loves psychology. So it was like, here, more psychology. And I was like, great. Oh, crap, like you missed all of this. So nowadays, I am using uh AI agents to go scrape for real conversations. So I'll have my agents go out and actually take a look at TikTok, like Twitter, Instagram, all these different platforms and specifically look for keywords so that I can understand overall, bring in this information for me and help me analyze what are the conversations that are happening now compared to something that happened 18 months ago or five years ago or 10 years ago. Then I will take that data and put it into whatever and just be like, what do you see in here? I try not to have the AIs just go assume because then they just bring back a lot of psychology. So, yeah. I'm using it different than I used to these days. Condensing the information down though, I still use a lot of AI for that. So yeah.
[1:35:34] Evan Lee: Such a good thought partner, but now you're being strategic. I love it.
[1:35:37] Sarah Levinger: I'm trying. It's so hard sometimes. I'm like, okay, think. What's the best way to do this? Yeah.
[1:35:44] Evan Lee: Takes time, practice. Sarah, you you went from like downing a couple quick coffees to being like, holy crap, do I have it? To come into the stage to absolutely slaying it. Do you have any final words to leave with the 5,000 people who have been hanging out for the past like hour and a half, hour 45?
[1:35:59] Sarah Levinger: Oh. So much pressure. I'm so glad I didn't know that number coming into this. I'd be like, oh my God. Um, if you're a creative strategist in this industry, whether you're just starting or you're an intermediate or you're like expert level just trying to upgrade your skill set, I think one of the best things that you could possibly do is just try something, practice and oh, try your hardest to not absorb too much of this like AI's taking my job and everything's going awful. Mostly because again, this is just a new tool for us to use to like do cool things. And our jobs are going to are rapidly becoming one of the most important roles in the industry and we need more of us in here. So, oh, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for just being interested and just being like curious. Stay that way because you'll go far. Yeah.
[1:36:43] Evan Lee: Everybody, you have to show love in the chat. Large round of applause, poetry snaps, it all, all that good stuff. But Sarah, you were the best. Thank you for so much. Thank you so much for coming on. You absolutely crushed it.
[1:36:54] Sarah Levinger: Thank you. So fun. Thank you, Evan. I love this stuff.
[1:36:57] Evan Lee: Appreciate it. I'm going to talk to you soon, Sarah. I'll see you.
[1:37:00] Sarah Levinger: Bye.
[1:37:01] Evan Lee: Bye.
