How a functional coffee brand used a background image to do more selling than any headline could.

Hey everyone, Chase from CreativeOS here. Let’s analyze this offer ad from Everyday Dose - who is generally focused on UGC Video creative.

Most functional supplement brands make the same mistake.

They put the product front and center. Clinical photography. White backgrounds. Ingredient callouts. A headline about focus or gut health or whatever the benefit is.

And the whole time, the customer is thinking: but does it taste like dirt?

Everyday Dose answered that question before it could be asked — and they did it with a background image.

Here's everything this ad is doing right.

What you'll learn:

• Why the visual is doing more objection handling than the copy

• How 93% converts better than 100% — and why that's not an accident

• The specific reason "no weird earthy taste" is the most important line in the ad

The background image is the headline.

Before you read a word of copy, you're looking at a swirling iced latte with condensation-covered ice cubes.

That's not decoration. That's a positioning statement.

Functional mushroom coffee has a reputation problem. People who've tried competitors know the taste — chalky, earthy, slightly medicinal. That association is the #1 reason someone in the consideration phase doesn't convert.

Everyday Dose solved this with a visual, not a claim. The iced coffee background says this tastes like the thing you already love before a single word of copy loads. By the time you read "93% love the taste," you already half-believe it because the image already told you.

This is the most underused move in supplement advertising. Don't claim the taste is good. Make the ad look like the taste is good.

93% is more credible than 100% — and they know it.

The stat badge says: "93% LOVE the taste."

Not 95. Not "nearly all customers." 93.

That specific, imperfect number is doing something precise. A perfect score reads as marketing. An imperfect score reads as measurement.

If Everyday Dose had said "customers love the taste" or even "95% love the taste," it would have landed as a typical brand claim. 93% reads like someone actually counted. The seven percent who didn't love it make the ninety-three who did believable.

This is the Pratfall Effect applied to statistics. The small imperfection in the number is exactly what makes the number trustworthy. The fine print confirms it: sample sizes over 10,000. That's not a small survey run on existing fans. That's a real data set.

Specific number plus large sample size is as close to bulletproof social proof as a DTC brand can get.

"No weird earthy taste" is the whole sale.

The five-star review in the top right corner: "It actually tastes SO good, no weird earthy taste."

This line is doing more conversion work than anything else in the ad.

Here's why: in a category where the taste objection is the primary barrier to purchase, the most powerful thing you can say isn't a benefit — it's a fear removal. Benefits tell someone why they should want the product. Fear removal tells someone why the reason they've been avoiding it no longer applies.

"No weird earthy taste" speaks directly to the person who's already tried a competitor and been burned. That person isn't waiting to be sold on the benefits of functional mushrooms — they already want those benefits. They're waiting for proof that this one is different.

Pulling that specific phrase from a real customer review and surfacing it as the primary social quote is deliberate creative strategy. It's not the most enthusiastic review. It's the most useful review — the one that addresses the exact objection standing between someone and the purchase.

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he price anchor closes desire that the proof already created.

By the time you get to $45 $29, the ad has already done three things:

Made the product look delicious. Proved 93% of 10,000+ people agree. Removed the taste objection with a specific customer voice.

The discount isn't creating desire — it's converting desire that already exists. That's the right order. Most ads put the price front and center before they've given the customer a reason to want the product. Everyday Dose earns the price reveal.

The strikethrough anchor ($45 crossed out to $29) is a 35% discount. But because you've already been sold by the time you see it, the discount registers as a closing argument, not a desperate plea. Same mechanism, completely different psychological position depending on what came before it.

3 Ways This Ad Could Be Even Stronger

1. Tell me what's in the Starter Kit. The product shot is small and hard to read. The kit includes coffee, supplements, accessories, and an app — but the ad never says that. "Coffee, mushrooms, and a 30-day tracking app" in one line would make the $29 feel even more like a steal. Right now you're buying something called a Starter Kit without knowing what starts.

2. Surface the sample size in the main ad. "93% of 10,000+ customers love the taste" is buried in fine print. Moving that number into the badge — even just "93% (10,000+ reviews)" — would make the stat significantly more impactful. The large sample size is the thing that makes the percentage credible. Right now it's doing its work quietly when it should be loud.

3. The CTA arrow points nowhere specific. "The Starter Kit →" implies a landing page that picks up where this ad left off — but if it drops to a generic homepage, there's a conversion gap. The landing page should open with the same iced coffee visual, the same 93% stat, and the same review quote. The ad made a promise. The landing page has to keep it.

What This Teaches Us About Creative Discipline

Everyday Dose didn't try to out-claim the category.

They out-answered it.

Every functional coffee competitor is talking about nootropics and adaptogens and sustained energy. Everyday Dose looked at their customer data, found the real objection, and built an entire ad around removing it.

The discipline here is restraint. They didn't lead with every benefit the product has. They led with the one fear standing between a customer and the purchase — and they answered it with social proof, a specific stat, and a visual that made the answer feel true before anyone read a word.

Find the objection. Build the ad around removing it. That's the whole brief.

How to Apply This Week

1. Find your category's taste problem. What's the #1 thing people in your space have been burned by before? That's your "no weird earthy taste" moment. Pull reviews from competitors, from Reddit, from your own one-star feedback. The objection is in there. Surface it in your creative.

2. Make your ad look like the answer, not just say it. Everyday Dose didn't write "tastes great." They showed an iced latte. What visual could your ad use to communicate the benefit before the copy loads? Background, format, and aesthetic are all doing persuasion work whether you design them to or not.

3. Audit your social proof for the most useful quote, not the most enthusiastic one. The best review in your bank might not be the five-star raving fan. It might be the person who almost didn't buy, had the objection everyone has, and then got past it. That review converts cold traffic. The raving fan converts people who are already sold.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. - Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

The 10-step system that treats ad creative as an engineering problem — not an art form.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS - and I’m excited to share something I just learned this week.

IMost people treat creative like weather.

Some days the idea hits. Some days it doesn't. Some weeks everything you make converts. Some weeks nothing does. You don't totally know why, and you can't fully control it.

That's the amateur model of creative work. And it's why most teams plateau.

The framework I'm breaking down today treats creative like a machine. Inputs go in. You read the outputs. You adjust the inputs. You do it again.

The real secret, buried at the bottom of this framework: "Creative isn't about coming up with ideas. It's about systematically reducing the chance of failure."

That reframe changes the entire job description.

What you'll learn:

• Why starting with tension instead of ideas changes the quality of everything downstream

• The 70% rule — why your hook is worth more than your entire production budget

• How to turn one winning ad into ten without starting over

Tension is the brief. Everything else is execution.

Step one of this framework isn't "write a hook" or "pick a format." It's find the tension.

Tension is the gap between where your customer is and where they want to be. It exists in three forms: pain (what's wrong right now), desire (what they want), and belief gap (what they're getting wrong that's keeping them stuck).

Here's why this matters: most creative briefs start with the product. We need an ad for X. It should communicate Y. That's a product brief, not a creative brief. It puts the brand at the center.

Tension-first puts the customer at the center. You're not asking "what should we say about our product?" You're asking "what's the thing this person is lying awake thinking about?" The ad is just how you answer that.

No tension, no scroll stop. It's that simple. A beautiful ad about something nobody cares about converts at zero.

The hook is 70% of the outcome. Act like it.

This is the number most creative teams ignore when they budget time and attention.

If the hook fails, the rest of the ad doesn't exist. The visual you spent two days shooting, the offer you negotiated, the copy you revised twelve times — none of it gets seen if the first two seconds don't stop the scroll.

The framework gives you five hook structures to work from:

Pattern interrupt — "Stop making ads like this." Breaks the visual or cognitive pattern of the feed.

Outcome promise — "This one change dropped CPA 42%." Leads with a specific, believable result.

Identity callout — "Ecom founders — this is why you're stuck." Filters the audience and creates instant relevance.

Contrarian — "Creative is not the problem. This is." Takes the opposite position from what the audience expects.

Curiosity gap — "The hidden reason your ads aren't converting." Opens a loop the brain needs to close.

The insight isn't that these are new. It's that you should be testing all five — not picking one and hoping. Different angles work for different audiences, different moments, different channels. The only way to know which one lands is to run them.

You're not testing ads. You're testing angles.

This is the line from step six that changes how you think about creative testing.

Most teams launch an ad and evaluate whether the ad worked. Right creative direction, wrong unit. That's not what you're measuring.

What you're actually measuring is: Does this tension resonate? Does this hook structure land? Does this format fit how this audience consumes content?

The ad is a container. The angle, hook, and format are the variables.

This is why the framework says never launch one version. Launch a minimum of three hooks, two formats, two copy variants. Not because you expect all of them to win — because each one tests a different hypothesis about what your audience actually responds to.

When you lose, you want to know why you lost. Was it the hook? The format? The angle? If you only launched one version, you know nothing.

The two-vendor problem

You're paying a media buyer who can't make creative. And a creative agency that can't see the data. You're the duct tape between them — and your ROAS pays for the gap.

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Identifying the winner is only half the job. Knowing why is the whole thing.

Step eight is where most teams stop. They see the winning ad and they scale the winning ad.

The framework says: before you scale it, diagnose it.

Was it the hook? The creator? The angle? The format?

This is not an academic question. The answer determines what you do next.

If the hook drove performance, write ten variations on that hook. If the creator drove performance, shoot five more pieces with that creator. If the angle drove performance, build your next month of creative around that angle.

The ad you ran was one expression of a variable that worked. Your job is to find every other way to express that variable before the creative fatigues.

This is how you build taste at scale. Not intuition. Not "I think this will work." A documented reason why the last thing worked, applied systematically to the next ten things.

One winner should become ten assets before you touch anything new.

Step nine: multiply the winner.

New hooks from the same angle. Same hook, different creators. Same concept, new formats. Turn one idea into ten assets.

This is the creative efficiency move that most teams miss because it feels less exciting than starting something new. But the data is already telling you something. A winning angle on one format is probably a winning angle on three formats. A winning hook with one creator is probably a winning hook with five creators.

The temptation is to move on. The discipline is to stay.

Every winning ad is a research finding. The question isn't "what's next?" It's "how many ways can we express what we just learned?"

What We Learned

1. Tension is the brief. Great creative doesn't start with a product feature or a brand message. It starts with the gap between where your customer is and where they want to be. Find the tension first. Everything else follows.

2. Your hook is worth more than your production budget. Seventy percent of outcome is determined in the first two seconds. If you're spending more time shooting than writing hooks, your priorities are backwards.

3. You're testing angles, not ads. Launch multiple hooks, formats, and copies every time. When you lose, know why. When you win, know why. That's how intuition becomes a system.

4. The winner is the beginning, not the end. One winning ad should generate ten assets before you start anything new. Multiply what works before you move on.

How to Apply This Week

1. Write the tension before you write the brief. For your next campaign, start with three tension statements: the pain, the desire, the belief gap. Every piece of creative you make this week has to be a response to one of those three things.

2. Audit your hook structure. Pull your last five ads. Which hook type did you use? Have you ever tested all five structures for the same product? If not, that's your creative testing plan for this month.

3. Take your best performing ad and multiply it. Before you brief anything new, write three new hooks for the same angle, brief one format swap, and identify one creator who could deliver the same message to a different audience. Turn one winner into five before you move on.

Keep Creating,

Chase Mohseni

P.S. Callouts:

• Sign up for our events calendar & join us this Tuesday at 11am PST for Creative Playbook - where we work through Ad , Landing Page, and Email Creative, sharing what’s working in market.

How an 8-stud plastic brick became a $9 billion brand - and nearly destroyed itself trying to be something else.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS and we are so BACK! Last time we discussed the magic of Old Spice. Now we’re onto something else, equally as epic and special.

In 2003, LEGO was six months from insolvency.

The company that had been making interlocking plastic bricks since 1949 had posted its worst financial results in history. Revenue was down 30% in a single year.

The company was carrying more than $800 million in debt. Several product lines had failed. The organization had grown so large and complex that nobody had a clear picture of which products were profitable.

And the problem wasn't that the product had gotten worse.

The problem was that LEGO had spent a decade trying to be something other than a toy company that made plastic bricks.

This is Part 1 of LEGO — from a carpenter's workshop in Denmark to the near-death experience that almost ended the most famous toy brand in the world.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How LEGO was built on the back of a single patented component

• Why the 1990s expansion strategy almost killed the company

• What happens when a brand tries to escape the thing that made it great

Ole Kirk Christiansen and the wooden toy.

LEGO was founded in 1932 by a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen in the town of Billund.

He'd been making wooden toys for several years when he decided to formalize the operation and give it a name. He combined the Danish words leg and godt - "play well" - and called the company LEGO.

The name was meant as a philosophy as much as a brand. Christiansen believed that play had intrinsic value. That a child deeply engaged in building something was doing something that mattered.

He started with simple wooden figures, pull toys, and building blocks. In the late 1940s, when plastic injection molding became accessible to smaller manufacturers, he bought a machine and started experimenting.

In 1958, his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen patented a specific plastic brick design - the 8-stud interlocking brick that could connect to any other LEGO brick made anywhere, at any time, with a precise clutch mechanism that held firmly and released cleanly.

That patent changed everything.

The brick as a system.

The 1958 patent wasn't just a product. It was a system.

Any brick could connect to any other brick. Any set could be combined with any other set. There was no "correct" way to build. The brick itself was infinitely reconfigurable.

This meant LEGO was never really selling a toy. It was selling a creative medium. The brick was a vocabulary. What you built with it was yours.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, LEGO expanded systematically. Town sets. Train sets. Space sets. Castle sets. Each new theme added context without changing the core product. A kid who had Space LEGO and Castle LEGO had twice the vocabulary to work with.

By the 1980s, LEGO was sold in 125 countries. Godtfred Kirk Christiansen had built one of the most recognizable brands in consumer products without ever deviating from a single core product innovation made in 1958.

Then he retired. And his successors looked at the company and saw a problem.

The expansion decade.

In the 1990s, LEGO faced a competitive threat it had never encountered: video games.

Nintendo and Sega were capturing the attention of the exact 8-14 demographic that LEGO had owned for decades. Research showed that kids were spending more time with screens and less time with physical toys. The toy category was changing.

LEGO's response was to diversify. Aggressively.

They launched LEGO theme parks. A clothing line. LEGO watches. LEGO jewelry. A computer game division. A television production company. Educational product lines for schools. A magazine. A robotics line.

Some of these succeeded modestly. Most were expensive distractions. All of them shared a problem: they weren't bricks.

The company also made changes to the core product that, in retrospect, were exactly wrong. They introduced sets with large, specialized pieces that could only be used for one purpose. This was easier to manufacture and produced more impressive-looking sets in the box — but it reduced the creative possibilities. A specialized piece is the opposite of a system. It's a component with one job.

Kids noticed. Not consciously, and not immediately. But the thing that made LEGO feel like a creative medium started to fade when the pieces stopped being infinitely reconfigurable.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work

You’re probably wondering why there is a keyboard above you - it’s just a vibe.

CreativeOS takes your ideas - whether you have them before you sign in or find them after and turns them into idea. And not just ads - emails and landers too.

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The moment it collapsed.

In 2003, LEGO posted a net loss of $188 million. Its debt had grown to over $800 million. The company had missed its revenue forecast by 30%.

The executive team had lost track of which products were profitable. The product line had expanded to over 11,000 individual components - up from roughly 6,000 a decade earlier. Manufacturing complexity had exploded. The organization was too large for the revenues it was generating.

And in the middle of this crisis, a 35-year-old MBA named Jørgen Vig Knudstorp - who had been at the company for only two years as a strategic consultant — told the board what they needed to hear.

The brand wasn't broken. The strategy was broken.

LEGO had spent a decade trying to be a media company, a theme park operator, a clothing brand, and an electronics manufacturer. In doing so, it had taken its eye off the one thing that had made it irreplaceable: the brick.

Knudstorp was given the job of fixing it.

Next week: how Knudstorp rebuilt LEGO by saying no to almost everything — and why the most constrained creative medium on earth became the most powerful brand in the world.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. - Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

After "I'm on a horse" - the improvised follow-up that changed what brands could do on the internet.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS. Last week we covered the brief, the insight, and the campaign.

By the summer of 2010, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" had become one of the most-watched ads in internet history. Old Spice body wash was #1 in the United States🤯!

W+Kennedy could have stopped there.

Instead, they did something that had never been done at scale: they put Isaiah Mustafa in front of a camera for 48 hours and had him personally respond to people on the internet.

Not with pre-scripted replies. With videos.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How a two-day social stunt generated more press than the original campaign

• Why the improvised response campaign worked when planned content usually doesn't

• What the Old Spice playbook teaches about the relationship between authority and humor

The setup.

In July 2010, W+Kennedy proposed an experiment.

Old Spice was still the conversation on the internet. People were tweeting at the brand, leaving YouTube comments, posting parodies. The cultural moment hadn't expired — but it would, if the brand didn't do something to extend it.

The idea: find the most interesting, funny, weird, or emotionally compelling @mentions directed at Old Spice and have Isaiah Mustafa respond to them. On video. In character.

They set up a simple production environment — good lighting, a camera, a director. Mustafa would read a tweet, improvise a response in character, shoot it in one or two takes, and move on. Then upload immediately.

No scripts. No approval rounds. No legal review. No waiting.

The agency and brand had agreed in advance: the whole thing would move fast enough that traditional brand approval processes couldn't touch it.

The 48 hours.

Over two days, they produced 186 personalized video responses.

The targets weren't random. The team monitored Twitter and YouTube in real time and selected responses strategically — choosing tweets from celebrities, from journalists, from accounts with large followings, and occasionally from ordinary people whose tweets were just extremely funny.

Alyssa Milano got a response. Ellen DeGeneres got a response. Demi Moore, Kevin Rose, and several prominent tech bloggers got responses.

The response to Perez Hilton: "We heard you like diamonds, Perez. So we put some diamonds in your video about diamonds so you can bling while you bling."

Each video was roughly 30-60 seconds. Each was done in Mustafa's fully committed, absolutely confident character. The jokes landed because the commitment never broke — the same quality that made the original spot work was present in every one of the 186 follow-ups.

Within 24 hours, Old Spice had the #1, #2, and #3 most-watched videos on YouTube.

Total views in the first 36 hours: over 20 million.

Press coverage arrived immediately. AdAge, Mashable, The New York Times, Fast Company. Every major marketing publication covered it. Most of them in terms of: this changes what brands can do on the internet.

Why improvised worked where planned usually doesn't.

Brands attempt "real-time marketing" constantly. It almost always fails, or at best produces polished content that nobody cares about.

The Old Spice response campaign worked for three specific reasons.

Speed was genuine, not performed. Most real-time marketing takes days of approvals and looks like real-time marketing. These videos were shot and uploaded in under an hour. The authenticity came from the actual pace — there was no way to make something that looked that rough and immediate unless it actually was.

The character was established. Mustafa wasn't improvising as himself. He was improvising as the character. That character had context, stakes, and an established voice from the original spot. The responses landed because the viewer already understood who was talking.

The brief was freedom. The agency had bought enough goodwill with the client through the success of the original campaign that P&G trusted them to move without approval gates. Without that trust, the experiment couldn't have happened. Speed was the product — and speed requires trust.

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What it did to Old Spice long-term.

Old Spice sales had increased 107% after the original spot. After the response campaign, sales increased another 55% — a total of 125% growth in six months against the same period the previous year.

More importantly, the brand's age demographic shifted measurably. The 18-34 male segment that had associated Old Spice with their grandfathers was now buying it for themselves.

The campaign won 19 advertising awards. It's still studied in marketing programs.

But the longer legacy was what it demonstrated was possible: that a brand with deep roots and a stuffy reputation could completely reposition itself through a single creative decision, then sustain that repositioning through creative courage in the follow-through.

Old Spice didn't run better ads. They made a fundamentally different choice about what kind of brand they wanted to be — and then committed to it all the way.

The Old Spice Creative Playbook

• Reframe the audience before you write the creative. The insight that women buy men's body wash unlocked the entire campaign. Knowing who actually influences the purchase — not just who uses the product — changed the brief entirely.

• Absurdity requires commitment. The joke in Old Spice was fully committed delivery of impossible claims. Half-committed absurdity is just confusing. Full commitment is comedy.

• Establish the character before you use the character. The response campaign worked because Mustafa's persona was already understood. You can't improvise at scale until the audience knows who's improvising.

• Speed is a creative decision. The response campaign's impact came directly from its pace. Approval gates would have killed it. The trust to move without approval was built over months of successful work — creative courage is earned before it's exercised.

• Cultural heat has a short window. The response campaign happened at exactly the right moment — when the original spot was still the cultural conversation. Waiting another month would have meant responding to a moment that had passed. Reading the window is a skill.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

Your ads bring them in. Your website closes the deal.

We have something good lined up for you tomorrow. We're sitting down with our friends Shaun Brandt and Taylor Davies from Oddit on Creative Playbook to get into what actually makes a website convert - less pain, less guessing, more discipline.

AND MORE CONVERSIONS! 🔥

📅 5/8 @ 11am PST on Zoom

What you'll walk away with:

• The anatomy of a landing page that actually converts (not just looks good)

• Where most brands lose the sale - and how to fix it in under an hour

• How to structure your page so it does the selling for you

• And live teardowns of your brand and others - where you can steal and reuse our POV for your website.

Bring your questions. Bring your URLs. We're fixing sites live.

Reserve your seat →

See you there,

Chase

Framework Sunday w/ Alex Greifeld!

Hey everyone welcome back to Creative Discipline - and I’m excited to share this guest post from Alex Greifeld of No Best Practices.

She’s an eCommerce growth strategist who has worked with brands like Coach, Jones Road Beauty and Johnston & Murphy. You can subscribe to her weekly newsletter here, where you’ll get more insights like this one:

“How do I scale up my Meta ads?”

“Our ads were growing all year. Then we hit a plateau, and we’ve been stuck for the past 6 months.”

“I can’t get my ads past $500 per day.”

When I speak with brands, these are common themes. It doesn’t matter how big or small the brand is. I’ve heard this from one-man startups, and I’ve heard it from brands that run Superbowl ads.

It’s a question I’ve been grappling with for…basically my entire career (going on 12+ years now). Because the answer is almost never as straightforward as it appears.

Almost anyone with Meta ads expertise can log into a brand’s ad account and list the three tactics that are most likely to bust a plateau. Usually, this comes down to the industry platitude: “just make better ads”.

If it’s that simple, why isn’t everyone doing it? Why do brands struggle with growth? Why do agencies exist?

Because it’s NOT that simple. I’ll give you three examples (composites from my work with dozens of brands) that illustrate exactly WHY:

Brand A is dealing with the classic “failure to launch”. They had a hot streak on Meta six months ago–spending $1k/day on ads at their target ROAS for close to a month. But they haven’t been able to scale past $300/day since then.

If you take a look at the ad account, a few issues stand out: there is a lack of consolidation and clear structure, and they haven’t refreshed the ad creative since the “hot streak”.

But if you corrected those issues, this brand would NOT scale because…the product they scaled with during the hot streak is backordered, half the styles on their website have broken size runs, the website is hard to use, and their Meta ROAS target is 4.5x.

If this brand wants to scale, they need “better ads”, but they also need to raise their prices, rework their KPIs, plan sufficient inventory into the right products, and then develop new ad creatives to support those products.

Fix those issues, and then fix media buying, and the brand has a shot at hitting $1k/day or more.

Brand B wants to grow fast. They 3x’ed their annual revenues last year, and they want to do it again this year. This means tripling daily Meta ad spend, at a minimum.

They have proven product-market fit. They have solid media buying and a solid ad creative pipeline. They are targeting a 2.5 ROAS (high, but reasonable).

So, all they have to do to scale is “make better ads”, right? Well, kind of.

This brand scaled with polished, high production ad creative. They’ve tried some more “platform native” formats in the past, and they’re not willing to go in that direction. It’s too “brand dilutive”.

They are also unwilling to accept a lower ROAS, experiment with pricing or run any new promotions or introductory offers.

This brand runs on a razor/blade model where the “razor” has some problem/solution attributes, but the “blade” is purely aesthetic (think: colors, flavors, scents). 

This organization loves the blade–they invest all their energy in marketing the blade. They’re not willing to lean into direct response for the razor, or over-invest energy there.

They’re ruling out all the obvious solutions based on “brand concerns”, but they’re unwilling to budge on the aggressive growth target. Media buying won’t fix this, even if the leadership team wishes it would.

Brand C also wants to grow really fast. From the outside, they have everything it takes to make this happen: cash flow coming from a solid repeat customer base, ability to be flexible with the ROAS target, and a willingness to embrace direct response marketing.

But this brand also has a really specific vision for how they want things done. They rule out specific agencies and content formats, seemingly at random. Leadership gets distracted easily, so new growth pilots rarely make it from ideation to launch. 

And they like to restructure the team and the resource set a lot, so new programs rarely have a chance to reach their full potential.

New agencies or team members are forced to spend a lot of time sorting through the chaos in order to execute. When they can’t deliver that big win in 30-45 days, leadership writes them off and energy shifts to the next shiny object.

This creates a long list of “things that just don’t work for us”–things that probably would work if given adequate time and resourcing.

Here is what all three brands have in common: they fail to realize (or refuse to admit) that growth is a process of compromise.

If you have aggressive growth goals, you need to employ aggressive tactics.

In 2018, you could slap media buying on this sort of problem. Ad creative, offers and inventory planning mattered a lot less. Just find the right micro-audience pocket and rip.

In 2026 (8 years later!!) this just isn’t the case anymore. If you want to increase your ad spend on Meta, there are four levers you can pull:

1. Ad Creative: which products and offers you’re promoting in the ad account, which segments of the market you are speaking to, and how effectively you are communicating

2. Path To Purchase: the products, bundles and offers that exist, the landing pages you’re using, and your overall site experience (this includes merchandising strategy) 

3. Media Buying: how your ad account is structured, how/why you break out separate campaigns, your testing and scaling procedure, how you decide to increase/decrease daily budgets (and how that cascades down the ad account)

4. Financials: the ROAS (or aMER) you are willing to accept from Meta. This is partially driven by your unit economics, and partially driven by your retention curve and risk appetite

There is also a fifth lever: generating awareness outside of Meta. That’s outside the scope of this newsletter. But it’s not a “hack”–in fact, this is the riskiest option of all.

When you hit a point where you can’t increase ad spend at an acceptable ROAS, no matter what you try, and the problem persists for weeks–you need to pull different levers.

Let’s use Brand A as an example.

Current (blocked) scaling setup:

• Ad Creative: a set of 15 photos and videos promoting 5 different products that has been running in the ad account for six months. Two of these assets are “winners”, but the featured product sold out and is now on “preorder”

• Path To Purchase: product photography on the website is inconsistent, web merchandising is suboptimal, PDPs are missing key info, most products have incomplete size runs, ad landing pages are suboptimized

• Media Buying: brand is currently using a “hacky” strategy, the budget is fractured over a lot of different campaigns, ad creatives are running in duplicate ad sets for no discernible reason

• Financials: brand must achieve a 4.5x ROAS on Meta; product margin is 58%, compared to 75-85% for most brands in this category, who are seeking a 2-2.5x ROAS

To have any chance of scaling, this brand must change the following things:

1. Raise prices or cut product costs so that a 2-2.5x ROAS is first order profitable (this is not a consumables brand).

2. Carry at least 50-100 pieces of inventory for at least 3-5 products. (no more preorder)

3. Clean up and consolidate media buying.

4. Get some fresh ad creative into the account, focusing on best selling products.

To maximize the scaling opportunity, this brand should consider the following changes:

1. Build the next product drop around products that have good product-channel fit on Meta

2. Develop “merch” items priced $85-150 with no size break, designed to suit the preferences of Meta’s audience

3. Create a structured ad creative development plan based on test & learn, so they can test a wider variety of assets featuring the best products

4. Develop more “platform native” ad creative for the best selling styles.

5. Improve the UX of the website, shoot better product photos and ensure key product details are easy to find on the PDPs

6. Shoot founder ads and whitelist through the founder’s socials.

7. Build out a gifting/partnership ads program.

If this brand’s leadership team is unwilling to do any of the “musts”, they have to accept that Meta is not a great growth channel for the brand.

If they ignore the “musts” and go out shopping for media buyers or creative agencies, they’re going to be disappointed. And when most reputable media buyers hear “4.5x ROAS”, they’re going to run for the hills.

Layering on the “shoulds” will help accelerate the path to growth, and increase the odds of sustainable growth. If the brand wants to spend $1k/day consistently, they should move forward with at least one or two “shoulds”.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy–and for most brands, the enemy is limited time and resources. 

The “shoulds” are often tactics and strategies that:

• The brand wrote off because “we tried it before”–but that attempt didn’t set the brand up for success

• Someone in leadership is unwilling to consider because “it’s not on brand”, or “it’s not our customer”

• Require capabilities that the brand does not currently possess in-house

• Require cross-functional buy-in, which can take months to achieve, if ever. This is especially challenging if eCom isn’t the brand’s top sales channel.

The first step is mapping out the problem. But a lot of brands skip this step in their haste to find a solution. They’ll skip straight to hiring agencies, bringing on new team members, etc.

When you reach out to service providers–media buying agencies, creative agencies, etc–they assume that you’ve validated that their tools are the right fit for your issue. (And good ones will vet for this, and turn you down if it’s a bad fit).

If that’s not the case, it leads to frustration on both sides. The brand feels like the agency overpromised and underdelivered. The agency feels like the situation was misrepresented. 

The growth plateau remains, and both parties retreat to their industry-only Slack groups to trash talk each other in vague terms (I see you!)

[note to Chase: in my own email send, I am transitioning to a sales pitch here. You can use the copy between this highlighted section and the next one]

This is one of the main problems that I help brands solve: 

• Mapping out the current growth configuration across all five levers

• Laying out all the reasonable options for breaking the plateau

• Helping you pick your next best move(s), given your resources and goals

• And when it makes sense…assisting with the implementation of those moves

If you want to learn more about how I’ve helped brands navigate this, book a call with me here. I will use the time to give you an honest assessment of your brand’s growth program and answer any questions you have–no sales pitch.

I have a limited number of these calls available. You can email me at hello@nobestpractices.com if they’re all booked up.

[close to Alex’s version of the newsletter starts here]

This is one of the main problems that I help brands solve: 

• Mapping out the current growth configuration across all five levers

• Laying out all the reasonable options for breaking the plateau

• Helping you pick your next best move(s), given your resources and goals

• And sometimes…assisting with the implementation of those moves

I’ve directly helped two DTC brands 5x their annual sales in under two years. I’ve helped multiple brands build successful Meta GTM strategies. And I’ve helped more than a dozen others assess their “best next move” and escape 6+ growth plateaus.

I am shifting away from Stars + Honey and ramping up client work again. To kick this off, I am offering four brands Growth Levers Audits for the month of May.

If your ad spend is stuck–whether it’s at $1k/day or $20k/day–or your sales have plateaued, I will find the root cause, outline all your potential solutions, and help you land on the best one.

What this project covers:

• Growth momentum & media investment: I review your historical sales & media investment data to identify what is driving growth in your business, threats on the horizon, and what needs to change in your media mix

• Unit economics & KPIs: I benchmark your costs & KPIs against your category to determine if this is holding you back from achieving scale

• Meta ads performance & media buying: I audit your account structure, KPI performance and test/scale strategy to find opportunities for greater efficiency and scale

• Creative diversity & creative opportunities: I flag any creative diversity issues and local maxima, then highlight opportunities for iteration and net-new audiences

• Assortment, offers & funnels: I review your main paths to purchase (products, offers, landing pages) and overall web experience for simple shifts that can unlock scale

I’ll deliver a full growth roadmap–everything you can optimize across all five of these areas–along with the 2-3 highest impact changes you should prioritize.

This comes in the form of a writeup, a loom video where I walk through your growth roadmap and a 60 minute call to help you prioritize and implement the next steps.

This project takes roughly 10 days to complete, and is priced at $3,250 for the first four brands to book it.

Click here for the full scope & data requirements and a link to book.

If you’re interested, but wondering if this is a good fit, click here to book a 20 minute call and we can talk about it. 

If the call slots have booked up, reply to this email and I’ll find you another time.

If this project doesn’t seem like a fit for you, don’t worry–I will have more info on all the ways you can work with me soon.

THAT WAS INCREDIBLE (this is Chase again) I am so happy you got to experience even a little bit of Alex’s magic.

Hit reply and tell me which brand you want me to teardown next - I read everything.

Keep Creating,

Chase Mohseni

P.S. Callouts:

• Tired of the blank-canvas Monday? CreativeOS gives you the brief, the references, and the first draft. Try it free →

• Sign up for our events calendar & join us this Thuesday at 11am PST for Creative Playbook - where we work through Ad, Landing Page, and Email Creative, sharing what’s working in market.

• A few friends have been working with Automatic — an AI integration consultancy — on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive.

  • Most AI tooling ends up as another tab you feel guilty about not using. Automatic builds the opposite: systems that disappear into how your team actually works and make everything faster. Custom integrations, internal infrastructure, real operational leverage.

  • Worth a look if you're done shopping and ready to build.

The brief, the copywriter, and the campaign that nobody at the agency thought would get approved.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS. I’m excited to show you how Old Spice took a fresh angle with creative and made themselves cultural staple. Then you can use their frameworks on your own business. In 2009, Old Spice was a brand your grandfather used.

That's not a metaphor. It's a demographic reality. The brand had been owned by Procter & Gamble since 1990, and while it was profitable, it was quietly aging. Its core customer was getting older. Younger men - the critical 18-34 demographic — associated Old Spice with their fathers and their fathers' medicine cabinets.

P&G gave the brand's agency, Wieden+Kennedy, a brief: reverse the trend.

What came back was a campaign so unexpected that multiple people inside the agency assumed it would never be approved.

It was approved. Then it went further than anyone at the table had imagined.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How a copywriter rewrote the brief before writing a single line

• Why the campaign's absurdity was actually its most strategic quality

• What "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" reveals about brand permission and creative courage

The brief nobody wanted.

W+Kennedy's assignment was straightforward in the worst way: make Old Spice relevant to young men.

Brands in this situation usually do one of two things. They update the packaging and run lifestyle advertising with younger models. Or they hire an athlete, run a celebrity campaign, and hope borrowed equity transfers.

P&G had a specific problem that made both of those approaches harder: the launch of a new body wash line. Old Spice was trying to expand beyond aftershave — into a category dominated by Axe, which had spent the previous decade building an almost pathologically effective ad campaign around the promise of sexual attraction.

Going up against Axe's appeal-to-insecurity playbook head-to-head would mean competing on their terrain, with their logic, against a decade of established positioning.

Copywriter Jason Bagley and director Tom Kuntz proposed something different.

Don't compete on Axe's terms. Don't try to make Old Spice cool. Make Old Spice funny - but funny in a way that made the target customer feel smart for getting the joke.

And target women.

The insight: women buy men's body wash.

This is one of those creative insights that seems obvious in retrospect and is somehow never acted on.

Research showed that a significant percentage of men's body wash purchases were made by women - partners, mothers, girlfriends — either shopping for the men in their lives or influencing the purchase decision. The actual end user wasn't the one standing in the aisle.

Bagley and the team used this insight to flip the entire ad format. Instead of speaking to men about confidence and attraction, they would speak directly to women. About their men. In the most absurdly confident, hyperbolic way possible.

The pitch: a spokesperson speaks directly into camera, addressing women, making increasingly impossible promises about what Old Spice could do for the man in their life.

Everything in the spot would be delivered with complete, unblinking conviction. The comedy would come from the gap between the absurdity of the claims and the total seriousness of the delivery.

They needed to cast someone who could hold that tone for thirty seconds without breaking.

They found Isaiah Mustafa.

The shoot.

Isaiah Mustafa was a former NFL practice squad wide receiver who had been working as an actor without much traction.

His audition for Old Spice lasted less than a minute.

The spot they were producing was technically demanding: thirty seconds, almost entirely one continuous take, with several scene changes accomplished through camera tricks and set manipulation.

Mustafa would be on a boat. Then a horse. Then delivering oysters. The whole sequence was designed to be physically disorienting - the joke was that the transitions made no sense, and Mustafa's complete composure in the face of the nonsense was the punchline.

He nailed it in a handful of takes.

The finished spot opened with Mustafa looking directly into the camera: "Hello, ladies."

Thirty seconds later, on a horse, he ended it: "I'm on a horse."

In between, he made promises about tickets to the thing you love, diamonds, and a man who smelled like adventure.

It was the most confident ad for a men's body wash anyone had ever seen. It was also completely, deliberately insane.

We rebuilt the CreativeOS interface…

Not because the old one was broken - because the work you're making with it outgrew it.

Faster. Cleaner. Built around the way creative operators actually work - in systems, not sessions.

AI Lab. Iteration Engine. Teams & Projects. 20,000+ templates.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

Try it free → (50% off this month only)

The approval.

The spot was presented to P&G. There was internal debate. An ad this strange, for a brand with this much history, carried real risk.

It was approved.

"The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" launched in February 2010 during the Super Bowl pre-show — not during the game itself, where a 30-second slot would have cost millions. P&G bought cheaper pre-game inventory and then seeded the video online simultaneously.

In the first 24 hours, the video got 6 million views.

In the first week, it had 23 million.

Old Spice body wash sales increased 107% in the month following the launch. By the end of the year, Old Spice had become the #1 selling men's body wash brand in the United States — a position it had never held.

And the campaign was just getting started.

Next week: the 48-hour social media experiment that nobody planned, how 186 personalized videos were filmed in two days, and what W+Kennedy did that every agency still talks about.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

The air fryer ad that got the aesthetic right and the strategy backwards.

Hey everyone, Chase from CreativeOS here. Let’s dig into this ad creative from Our Place together.

Our Place makes the most beautiful cookware on the internet.

Their ads look like editorial spreads. Their color palette is something a creative director would actually be proud of. The product photography is exceptional.

And this ad buries the one thing that would actually make someone switch air fryers in a subhead that most people won't read.

Here's what's happening — and what should have led.

What you'll learn:

• Why urgency only works when the desire already exists

• How "non-toxic" is the real headline Our Place is sitting on

• What happens when you let aesthetics lead instead of argument

Grab your favorite color" sells to people who already want this. It doesn't create want.

The headline: "GRAB YOUR FAVORITE COLOR BEFORE IT SELLS OUT."

This is a retention play dressed as an acquisition play. It works great for people already in the consideration phase — warm audiences who've been to the website, who follow the brand, who've been going back and forth on the decision.

For cold traffic, it skips the most important step: giving someone a reason to care.

Scarcity is a closer, not an opener. It converts desire that already exists. It doesn't generate new desire. For a product most people already own in a cheaper version, you need to create the desire first.

"Non-toxic" is the headline. Everything else is decoration.

Look at what this ad is actually selling.

There are millions of air fryers on the market. Most cost $50-80. Our Place's starts at over $100 and goes up.

The reason someone pays a premium for a new air fryer when they already own one: they learn their current one is coated in Teflon, which releases chemicals when overheated. It's a health concern that's been spreading through the wellness and food community for years.

"Non-toxic 6-in-1 air fryer" is buried as a subhead under the color urgency play.

That is the entire brief. Not color. Not scarcity. I found out my air fryer is toxic and now I need to replace it.

The headline that writes itself: "Your air fryer is probably coated in chemicals. Ours isn't."

That's the curiosity gap. That's the reframe. That's the reason to pay $150 for a product you already own.

The aesthetic is doing work — just not the right work.

The color swatches, the editorial photography, the beautiful blues and terra cottas — all of this signals that this is a design object, not just an appliance.

That's smart for brand building. It's the right visual language for Our Place's audience.

But aesthetics earn aspiration, not urgency. And this ad is trying to do both at once without completing either.

The product photography at the bottom — fries crisping, the terracotta colorway detail, the oven in use — is doing the right job. Real use cases. Real results. That section is stronger than the headline it sits under.

The ad that worked, working harder.

Not because you need more ads — because the one that worked deserves a second life.

Faster. Sharper. Built around how winners actually compound — in loops, not launches.

Feed it your best-performing ad. Get the next generation. Same DNA, new angles, ready to test.

Iteration Engine. Image-to-image. Built-in brand memory. The ad that worked, working harder.

CreativeOS is where winners become systems.

Try CreativeOS free → 

3 Ways This Ad Could Be Even Stronger

1. Lead with the reframe, not the color. "Your air fryer is probably coated in chemicals. Ours isn't." or "The first air fryer you don't have to Google the safety of." These lead with the problem — the Teflon concern — which creates desire from scratch on cold traffic. Color becomes the reward for staying through the argument, not the argument itself.

2. The scarcity play needs a reason to be real. "Before it sells out" lands as a generic urgency tactic when it's not tied to something specific. "The [color] colorway is almost gone — we're not restocking it until fall" is specific scarcity that feels real. Vague scarcity gets ignored. Specific scarcity converts.

3. Add one testimonial to the bottom grid. The lifestyle photography grid is good but it's all brand-generated. One customer photo or review snippet — "switched from my old Cuisinart and can't believe I waited this long" — would add social proof to a section that's currently all brand voice. The bottom of this ad is the end moment (Peak-End Rule). Make it do more work.

What This Teaches Us About Creative Discipline

Our Place knows their product is beautiful. So every creative instinct tells them to show the beauty.

But beauty is the differentiator on the shelf, not in the feed.

In a feed where someone isn't looking for an air fryer, beauty creates aspiration at best. The thing that stops a scroll and creates a genuine "I need to reconsider my current appliance" moment is information — specifically, the kind of information that reframes something the person thought was fine.

"Non-toxic" is that information. It's sitting in this ad. It just needs to be first.

How to Apply This Week

1. Find your "non-toxic" line. What does your product solve that your customer doesn't yet know is a problem? That's your cold traffic headline. The aesthetic is for after they care, not before.

2. Audit every scarcity CTA in your account. Is it specific or generic? "Limited stock" is noise. "Only 47 units left in [specific variant]" is real. Specificity is what separates urgency that converts from urgency that gets ignored.

3. Identify your real competitor. Our Place isn't competing with other premium air fryers — they're competing with the $60 unit someone already owns and doesn't think about. Know what you're actually asking someone to replace and write your creative to justify that switch.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. - Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

The sports events, the TV channel, the record label, and the man who fell from space — all to sell a 250ml can.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS. I’m excited to show you how Red Bull really took things to the next level and what it might mean for you in 2026!

Last week we covered Red Bull's launch: the pricing paradox, the sampling strategy, the focus groups that said no market existed.

By the mid-1990s, Red Bull was profitable and expanding across Europe. The product worked. The word of mouth was real.

But Mateschitz had a problem that's hard to imagine now: nobody in traditional media would take Red Bull's advertising seriously.

TV networks didn't want it. Print publications weren't sure what category to put it in. The mainstream advertising establishment had no framework for an energy drink that cost more than beer.

So Mateschitz decided to build his own media.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How Red Bull's event strategy created marketing content before "content marketing" was a phrase

• Why owning media properties gave Red Bull an advantage that ad spend couldn't buy

• What the Felix Baumgartner space jump reveals about brand as story

The event strategy.

In 1991, Red Bull launched the Red Bull Flugtag — a competition where amateur teams built homemade flying machines and launched them off a platform above water.

It was ridiculous. That was the point.

The event generated local press, crowd photos, and the kind of genuine human spectacle that money can't manufacture. It was also branded entirely by Red Bull without a single traditional ad unit being purchased.

Then came cliff diving. Motorcycle racing. Air racing. Snowboarding competitions in locations a helicopter could barely reach. Each event was designed to be visually spectacular, sharable before social media made sharing easy, and completely owned by Red Bull.

Mateschitz's insight: don't buy attention from media companies. Create events that are the media.

By the time Red Bull had its own Formula One team in 2004, this logic was fully developed. F1 cars are moving billboards doing 200+ mph. Every podium finish is a press moment. Every race is content. Red Bull didn't sponsor an F1 team — they built one, and then won four consecutive world championships with it between 2010 and 2013.

The logo wasn't on someone else's car. The car was Red Bull's.

Red Bull Media House.

In 2007, Mateschitz formalized what had been building for fifteen years and launched Red Bull Media House.

It was a fully functioning media company. Television production. Magazine publishing. A record label. A digital content studio.

The Red Bulletin — the lifestyle magazine — was distributed in 14 countries and available on newsstands. Not as a brand publication mailed to subscribers. As an actual magazine that competed for rack space with GQ and Wired.

Red Bull TV broadcast original programming: documentaries, live sports coverage, adventure content. Not ads. Programming.

The logic sounds insane until you trace it. By owning the media, Red Bull controlled every context in which its brand appeared. There was no negotiating with a network over placement. No risk of your 30-second spot running next to a competitor's. No editorial voice that might frame your brand in a way you didn't choose.

Every piece of content Red Bull published made the drink make more sense. You watched a Red Bull documentary about a base jumper and you understood — viscerally, without being told — why someone might want a product called "wings."

The content didn't describe the brand. It embodied it.

The man who fell from space.

On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule 128,000 feet above the earth — roughly 24 miles up — and jumped.

He broke the sound barrier on the way down. He landed safely in New Mexico. Eight million people watched on YouTube simultaneously, making it the most-watched live stream in YouTube's history at the time.

The project was called Red Bull Stratos. It had taken five years of planning, partnerships with NASA scientists and aerospace engineers, and approximately $65 million to execute.

It generated approximately $500 million in media coverage.

Every piece of that coverage included two words: Red Bull.

This is the endpoint of the media company strategy. Not a product placement, not a sponsorship, not an ad. An actual world record human achievement that happened to be sponsored by an energy drink — and because of how completely Red Bull had built its brand around human performance, nobody questioned the connection.

A bank can't own a space jump. A software company can't own a space jump. But an energy drink called Red Bull, whose tagline is "gives you wings," whose entire brand is built around pushing physical limits? A man jumping from space is the most literal expression of that brand identity possible.

We rebuilt the CreativeOS interface…

Not because the old one was broken - because the work you're making with it outgrew it.

Faster. Cleaner. Built around the way creative operators actually work - in systems, not sessions.

AI Lab. Iteration Engine. Teams & Projects. 20,000+ templates.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

Try it free → (50% off this month only)

The Red Bull Creative Playbook

• Create the category before you compete in it. There was no energy drink market in 1987. Mateschitz didn't enter a market — he created one. Category creation requires ignoring research that measures existing demand.

• Price is positioning. Red Bull's premium price wasn't a margin decision — it was a brand statement. Higher price creates separation from commodity alternatives and signals that this product does something others don't.

• Own the context, not just the content. Buying media placements means renting someone else's audience. Building media properties means owning the context in which your brand appears. Over time, owned context compounds in ways that paid reach doesn't.

• Let the brand story be a literal expression of the brand promise. "Wings" is a metaphor for energy and possibility. A man jumping from space with a Red Bull logo is not a metaphor — it's the metaphor made real. The most powerful brand moments are when the literal and the symbolic collapse into one thing.

• Events are content before content marketing existed. The Flugtag, the cliff diving series, the F1 team — all of these were marketing strategies before "content strategy" was a job description. Mateschitz understood that spectacular experiences generate press, conversation, and memory in ways that ad units can't.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

The hydration ad that leads with price instead of the one thing competitors can't copy.

Hey everyone, Chase from CreativeOS here. Let’s dig into this ad creative from Mars Men together.

Cadence is in one of the most competitive categories in DTC.

Electrolytes. LMNT is there. Liquid IV is there. Nuun. Hydrant. DripDrop. They all have athletes. They all have lifestyle photography. They all have some version of "complete electrolytes."

And Cadence's answer to that competition is: Bundle & Save — $135 crossed out, $86.07.

That's not a strategy. That's a white flag.

Here's what went wrong — and what the real ad is hiding in this one.

What you'll learn:

• Why leading with price puts you in a race you can't win

• What the Lululemon collab in this photo is doing wrong

• The one differentiator Cadence has that the ad never uses

Discounting on cold traffic tells new customers your product isn't worth full price.

The price is the second thing in this ad. Right after the question hook.

"Bundle & Save $135 $86.07" is a value signal — and value signals attract value buyers. Those are the customers most likely to churn the second LMNT runs a sale.

Price-leading works for warm audiences who've already decided they want the product and just need a reason to act. For cold traffic, it answers a question nobody asked yet. The customer doesn't know if they want Cadence.

Telling them it's 36% off doesn't solve that — it just tells them the brand is willing to compete on margin.

The electrolyte category leader doesn't discount on cold traffic. They justify the price.

"Complete Electrolytes. Naturally Flavored." is not a differentiator — it's a category description.

The feature list: Complete Electrolytes. Naturally Flavored. Support Recovery. Reduce Fatigue.

LMNT could run this list. So could Liquid IV. So could the store brand at Whole Foods.

Features only convert when they're genuinely unique to your product or when the category norm is the opposite of what you're claiming. "Non-toxic" works for Our Place because most air fryers are Teflon-coated. "Naturally Flavored" doesn't move the needle for electrolytes because the whole category has moved there.

The list is there because the product needs claims. But none of these claims are reasons to choose Cadence specifically.

There's a Lululemon logo on the shirt and nobody's talking about it.

Look at the model's shirt. Lululemon collab — the logo is right there.

That's a brand signal with real cultural weight. Lululemon's audience overlaps significantly with the performance wellness customer Cadence is targeting. An endorsement or partnership with Lululemon would be the most credible thing in this ad.

Instead it's a detail in a dark lifestyle photo that most people won't notice.

If Cadence has a Lululemon partnership, that needs to be the headline. Not a design choice. Not a subtle Easter egg. The headline.

"The electrolyte LMNT users switch to when they actually start training with Lululemon" — that's a community signal that no feature list can replicate.

The ad that worked, working harder.

Not because you need more ads — because the one that worked deserves a second life.

Faster. Sharper. Built around how winners actually compound — in loops, not launches.

Feed it your best-performing ad. Get the next generation. Same DNA, new angles, ready to test.

Iteration Engine. Image-to-image. Built-in brand memory. The ad that worked, working harder.

CreativeOS is where winners become systems.

Try CreativeOS free → 

3 Ways This Ad Could Be Even Stronger

1. Move the price to the CTA, not the headline. The discount belongs at the bottom, as the reason to act after desire is created. A stronger structure: problem hook → what makes Cadence different → "and right now you can bundle and save." The bundle offer becomes the closer, not the opener. Same information, completely different psychological position.

2. The feature list needs one specific differentiator. "Complete Electrolytes" means nothing. "The only electrolyte without [specific ingredient that LMNT or others use]" or "X mg of sodium per packet — more than [competitor]" means something. Find the one specific, provable thing Cadence does differently and put it in the list. The rest of the features can stay — but one anchor claim that creates genuine contrast would make the whole list land harder.

3. Make the partnership the point. If there's a Lululemon relationship here, it needs to be front and center. A logo on a shirt is a hint. A partnership should be a proof point: "Official hydration partner of Lululemon" or "The electrolyte the Lululemon community trusts." Third-party credibility from a brand people already love converts better than any feature claim.

What This Teaches Us About Creative Discipline

Cadence is competing with a discount when the electrolyte category doesn't buy on price.

LMNT built market share with zero discounting, ever. Their positioning was "real athletes don't drink sugar water" — a specific claim about a specific customer with a specific reason to pay more.

The discipline Cadence is missing here isn't creative. It's strategic. Before you can make a great ad, you have to know what you're actually selling and to whom. "36% off electrolytes" is not that answer.

When you lead with price, you tell the market you don't have a better argument.

Find the better argument first. The price can close it.

How to Apply This Week

1. Pull any ad in your account leading with a discount and ask: what's the argument this discount is replacing? Whatever you find is the real ad waiting to be written. The discount becomes the CTA, not the hook.

2. Audit your feature list for real differentiators. Cross off anything a competitor could also claim. What's left is your actual creative brief.

3. Look for your hidden Lululemon. Is there a partnership, a community endorsement, or a third-party signal in your brand that's being treated as a detail instead of a headline? Borrowed credibility is often the strongest claim in your entire arsenal — and it's easy to bury.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. - Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

P.P.S. — A few friends have been working with Automatic, an AI integration agency, on custom automations and internal systems. What they've built is genuinely impressive. Worth a look if you're trying to turn AI into real operational leverage instead of another tab open in your browser.

How a Thai energy tonic became the most counterintuitive product launch in marketing history.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS. This is an iconic brand with an iconic founder.

In 1982, a 38-year-old Austrian marketing executive named Dietrich Mateschitz was in Bangkok on a business trip. (Listen to the founders podcast about him here - it’s excellent).

He was exhausted. Jet-lagged beyond functioning.

His colleague handed him a small bottle of something called Krating Daeng — Thai for "red bull." It was a sweet, slightly medicinal energy tonic popular with truck drivers and factory workers across Southeast Asia.

Mateschitz drank it. His jet lag disappeared.

He spent the rest of that trip figuring out how to buy the rights to sell it in Europe.

It took him three years and nearly everything he had.

And when he finally launched, he did something that made every marketing professional who heard about it say he was going to fail.

He priced it higher than Coca-Cola. Higher than beer. Higher than almost any beverage on the market.

And then he gave it away for free.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How Mateschitz found a product nobody believed in and turned it into a category

• The pricing paradox that became Red Bull's first competitive advantage

• Why giving the product away for free was the smartest launch strategy in beverage history

The formula nobody wanted.

Mateschitz didn't invent the product. Krating Daeng had been sold in Thailand since 1976, developed by a businessman named Chaleo Yoovidhya.

But Krating Daeng was sweet and thick — formulated for the Thai palate. Mateschitz knew it needed to be modified for Western tastes. He commissioned reformulation work and spent years getting the carbonation, sweetness, and flavor profile right.

He also needed a business partner. He went back to Yoovidhya and proposed a joint venture: each would put in $500,000 and own 49% of the new company. The remaining 2% would go to Yoovidhya's son.

Mateschitz took out a personal loan to fund his half. He had effectively bet his entire net worth on a carbonated energy drink that no regulatory agency in Europe had yet approved.

Market research did not help his confidence.

Focus groups across Austria and Germany came back negative. Participants found the taste medicinal. The branding was strange. The concept — buying a caffeinated beverage for energy rather than drinking coffee — didn't make sense to them.

One research report concluded: "No market exists for this product."

Mateschitz kept going.

The pricing decision.

Red Bull finally received Austrian regulatory approval and launched in 1987.

Mateschitz priced a 250ml can at 5 Austrian schillings — roughly equivalent to $0.35 at the time, but significantly higher than a comparable volume of Coke, beer, or any other beverage in the same cooler.

Every distributor he spoke to told him this was wrong.

He didn't change the price.

His reasoning was precise: a premium price signals a premium product. If Red Bull was priced like a soft drink, it would be evaluated like a soft drink. It would sit on the shelf next to Coke and lose.

But if it was priced higher — if there was a visible gap between Red Bull and everything around it — that price itself became a communication. It told the customer that this was different. That you were getting something Coke couldn't give you.

The price wasn't a function of cost-plus margin. It was a brand signal.

And it meant Red Bull could never be positioned as an everyday beverage. Which is exactly the positioning Mateschitz wanted.

The sampling strategy that looked like waste.

Red Bull launched with essentially no traditional advertising budget.

Instead, Mateschitz hired students — the young, social, aspirational demographic he was targeting — and gave them Red Bull cases to drive around in branded Mini Coopers. Their job: go where young people were and give the drink away.

Ski resorts. University libraries during finals week. Outside clubs at 2am. Anywhere someone might need energy and might be surrounded by other people who would see them drinking something unusual.

The economics looked terrible. You're giving away product that costs money to manufacture, ship, and store, and you're not collecting a cent.

But Mateschitz understood something about how categories get created.

You can't advertise your way into a category that doesn't exist yet. You have to let people discover it. Word of mouth from a genuine experience is more credible than any media buy. And a student driving a Mini Cooper full of free Red Bulls is a far more interesting story than a TV spot.

The sampling program didn't just give away drinks. It created a network of people who'd had a real experience with the product and would talk about it because it was unusual enough to be worth talking about.

We rebuild the CreativeOS interface…

Not because the old one was broken — because the work you're making with it outgrew it.

Faster. Cleaner. Built around the way creative operators actually work - in systems, not sessions.

AI Lab. Iteration Engine. Teams & Projects. 20,000+ templates.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

Try free → use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

Try it free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

What this tells us about Creative Discipline

By 1992, Red Bull had expanded into Germany, Hungary, and Slovenia. The sampling program had seeded the market. Word of mouth was building.

The two-bulls logo — designed to convey competition and energy — was on every can. The tagline "Red Bull gives you wings" had been introduced and immediately became the entire brand platform.

Mateschitz had built a beverage company with no advertising, a price that made distributors nervous, and a product that focus groups said nobody wanted.

He'd done it by making three counterintuitive decisions in a row:

1. Trust the product over the research

2. Use price as a quality signal instead of a volume driver

3. Give the product away to create experiences instead of buying awareness

Each decision required ignoring conventional wisdom. Each decision turned out to be right.

The category Mateschitz entered in 1987 didn't exist. He had to create it before he could lead it.

Next week: how Red Bull stopped being a beverage company and became a media empire — and what Felix Baumgartner jumping from space has to do with selling a can of caffeine.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

Framework Sunday: Kahneman's discovery about how people actually remember experiences — and what it means for your creative.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS - and I’m excited to share something I just learned this week.

In the early 1990s, researchers ran a study that sounds more like a prank than a psychology experiment.

They asked participants to submerge one hand in 57°F water for 60 seconds. Painful.

Then they asked them to do it again — but this time for 90 seconds. The last 30 seconds, the water was warmed very slightly. Still cold. Still uncomfortable. But less so.

Then they asked participants which trial they'd prefer to repeat.

Most people chose the 90-second trial.

Sixty seconds of identical pain, plus 30 additional seconds of discomfort. But because it ended better, people remembered it as less painful overall.

This is the Peak-End Rule. And it changes how you think about every piece of creative you make.

What you'll learn:

• The research behind how people remember experiences (it's not what you'd expect)

• Why your final frame matters more than anything that came before it

• How to apply Peak-End thinking to ads, landing pages, and email sequences

The Research: Kahneman's Experiencing vs. Remembering Self

Daniel Kahneman — the same researcher behind Loss Aversion — spent years studying a specific paradox: the way we experience something in the moment is almost completely disconnected from how we remember it later.

His conclusion: We don't evaluate experiences. We evaluate memories of experiences.

And memories aren't averages. They're summaries built from two moments:

The peak — the most intense point of the experience, positive or negative.

The end — how it concluded.

Everything in between is largely discarded.

The colonoscopy study made this painfully clear. Patients who had a slightly extended procedure — but with the scope held still at the end to reduce discomfort — rated the entire experience as less unpleasant than patients who had a shorter but more abruptly ended procedure.

More total discomfort. Better memory.

The lesson: Duration doesn't determine perception. The peak and the end do.

What This Means for Ad Creative

Most creative is built to maximize the middle.

Strong visual throughout. Good copy throughout. Consistent product shots throughout.

But the Peak-End Rule says your audience is doing math on two specific moments:

Peak: What was the most emotionally intense frame? The most surprising visual? The most resonant line?

End: What was the last thing they saw or heard? Where did the creative leave them emotionally?

If your ad ends with a logo lockup and a phone number, that's what they'll remember about you.

If it ends with the feeling you want them to carry into their day, that's what sticks.

The Two Creative Questions You're Not Asking

Before you ship any piece of creative, ask:

"What is the peak moment?" Where does the ad hit hardest? Is it designed, or is it accidental? Most brands have peaks by accident — a line that happened to land, a visual that happened to resonate. Peak-End thinking makes this intentional.

"What is the final emotional state?" Not the final frame. The final feeling. After someone watches this ad, what are they left with? Curiosity? Warmth? Urgency? Confidence? Vague awareness that a product exists?

If you can't answer both questions clearly, the creative isn't finished.

Every week I break down what makes ads convert. CreativeOS is where you go to actually test it.

Score your copy in real-time. Turn customer reviews into hooks. Catch the funnel leaks killing your ROAS. Then build it — from 20,000+ templates, in minutes.

The newsletter tells you what works. The platform tells you why yours doesn't.

Try it free → Creativeos.com Code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE = 25% off month one.

Peak-End Applied: Format by Format

Video ads Design your hook to create the peak in the first three seconds. Then end on an emotional resolution — not a product shot. The customer who remembers feeling something at the end of your video is more likely to convert than the one who just saw your logo.

Static ads The headline is the peak. The subhead or CTA is the end. Most brands write the headline well and then throw away the end with generic CTAs like "Shop Now." Write toward a feeling: "Start Monday different." "Finally, a solution that lasts."

Email sequences The final email in a welcome sequence shapes how a subscriber remembers joining your list. Most brands waste it with a promotional push. A better last email: a story, a value piece, something that makes the reader feel good about being there.

Landing pages The testimonial section at the bottom of your page is the end of the experience for most visitors who scroll. The quality of that section — the specificity, the emotion, the before/after — determines how your brand is remembered by everyone who doesn't convert on the first visit.

What We Learned

1. People remember peaks and endings, not averages. Duration doesn't determine perception. The most intense moment and the final moment do.

2. Most creative wastes its ending. A logo lockup and a tagline is a missed opportunity. The last frame should do emotional work.

3. Peaks should be designed, not accidental. Identify where your creative hits hardest and build toward it deliberately.

How to Apply This Week

1. Watch your last three video ads with one question: What is the peak moment? Is it intentional? What's the final frame? How does it leave someone feeling?

2. Rewrite your CTAs as emotional endpoints. Instead of "Shop Now," write toward the feeling on the other side of the click. "Start Monday different." "Get the version of this that actually works."

3. Audit the bottom of your landing page. The last thing a visitor sees before they scroll back up or leave is your end moment. Is it doing Peak-End work? It should be your best testimonial, not your fine print.

Keep Creating,

Chase Mohseni

P.S. Callouts:

• Sign up for our events calendar & join us this Tuesday at 11am PST for Creative Playbook - where we work through Ad , Landing Page, and Email Creative, sharing what’s working in market.

After the video that broke the internet — how Dollar Shave Club built a business that Gillette couldn't copy fast enough.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS.

Last week we covered the $4,500 video that crashed Dollar Shave Club's website and kicked off one of the most studied brand moments in DTC history.

Today we're covering what happened after.

Because the video wasn't the business. It was the door. What Dubin built behind that door is why Unilever paid $1 billion in 2016 to own it.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• Why Dollar Shave Club's real advantage had nothing to do with razors

• How they built a content engine that kept subscribers engaged long enough to matter

• What the Unilever acquisition actually says about what was worth $1 billion

The subscription insight.

Most people think Dollar Shave Club succeeded because it was cheap.

It wasn't. A four-blade razor from DSC cost roughly the same as a comparable Gillette refill.

The actual advantage was convenience paired with entertainment.

Dubin understood something most razor companies didn't: men don't think about razors. They don't enjoy buying razors. They don't want to stand in a CVS aisle comparing blade counts and debating which one is worth the price.

Dollar Shave Club removed that decision entirely. You sign up once. Razors show up every month. You never think about it again.

That's the Job To Be Done. Not cheap razors. Never having to think about razors again.

The subscription model was the product. The razor was just what showed up in the box.

The Bathroom Minutes.

In 2014, Dollar Shave Club launched a free print magazine called Bathroom Minutes.

It was designed to be read in exactly one place.

The magazine covered exactly the kind of content a man in his 30s might read while sitting somewhere private — short essays, jokes, health tips, pop culture. It had no ads. It wasn't trying to sell anything.

Dubin called it "content that people actually want."

This sounds obvious in retrospect. It wasn't obvious then.

At a time when branded content meant blog posts with product links, Dollar Shave Club was printing a physical magazine and mailing it to their subscribers for free. The magazine had no direct conversion mechanism. It didn't push upgrades or cross-sells.

It just made people happy they were subscribers.

That happiness showed up in one number: churn. Dollar Shave Club's monthly churn rate was around 5% — significantly lower than the category average. Men who had no strong feeling about their razor company before subscribing developed genuine brand loyalty because of a magazine they read while brushing their teeth.

The lesson: retention isn't about the product. It's about the relationship you build around the product.

Building the content engine.

After Bathroom Minutes, Dubin expanded the content operation.

One Wipe Charlies — a line of flushable wipes — was launched not through an ad, but through a video. The video cost more than the original DSC ad. It was just as funny. It generated another wave of press coverage and a new product line.

Dollar Shave Club had figured something out: their marketing was the product experience. The videos, the magazine, the email newsletter, the irreverent packaging copy — all of it was part of what subscribers were paying for.

By 2015, DSC had 3.2 million subscribers. Gillette had watched all of this happen and spent two years trying to catch up with their own direct-to-consumer subscription service. It never worked. Gillette's brand was built on retail dominance and professional authority. It couldn't suddenly be funny and casual. The persona was locked.

Dollar Shave Club had a different persona problem: they needed to expand beyond razors without losing the brand voice that made people loyal.

Dubin launched Dr. Carver's Easy Shave Butter, Post Shave Dew, and a full men's grooming line. Each extension came with its own content — its own way of explaining why a man should care about something he'd never thought about before.

The formula was always the same: entertainment first, product second. The joke opens the door. The product is what you find inside.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. AI that learns your taste. A creative engine that gets smarter every time you use it.

It's the platform behind the newsletter.

Try CreativeOS free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

New produc

What Unilever actually bought.

In July 2016, Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in cash.

Analysts immediately pointed to the subscriber base — 3.2 million paying customers. But subscriber bases can churn. What Unilever was actually paying for was something harder to replicate.

They were buying a content playbook that Gillette couldn't copy.

They were buying a direct-to-consumer infrastructure that bypassed retail entirely — no shelf space negotiations, no margin sharing, no dependence on Walmart's buying decisions.

They were buying a brand that had genuine cultural affinity with a demographic that traditionally didn't care about brand loyalty.

And they were buying the proof of concept: that a brand could be built entirely on creative discipline. That funny, honest, consistent content could create a $1 billion consumer goods company from a warehouse full of Korean razor cartridges and a guy who studied improv.

Gillette had spent $200 million on athlete sponsorships. Dollar Shave Club spent $4,500 on one video and built a better relationship.

The Dollar Shave Club Creative Playbook

• The job is never the product. Men didn't subscribe to Dollar Shave Club for razors. They subscribed to never think about razors again. Know the real job before you brief the creative.

• Entertainment earns attention; the product has to keep it. The video got them in the door. The product, the magazine, and the packaging copy kept them subscribed. Both halves have to work.

• Brand voice is a competitive moat. Gillette couldn't be funny because Gillette had spent decades being authoritative. Dollar Shave Club's irreverence wasn't a tactic — it was a structural advantage their biggest competitor couldn't replicate.

• Content is retention strategy. Every piece of content Dollar Shave Club published was ultimately about reducing churn. The Bathroom Minutes didn't have a conversion mechanism — it built emotional loyalty that showed up when subscribers had a reason to cancel.

• Persona coherence beats budget. The video that started everything cost less than most brands spend on a single photo shoot. It worked because the voice was consistent, confident, and specific. That's a creative discipline problem, not a budget problem.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

Your ads bring them in. Your website closes the deal.

We have something good lined up for you tomorrow. We're sitting down with our friends Shaun Brandt and Taylor Davies from Oddit on Creative Playbook to get into what actually makes a website convert — less pain, less guessing, more discipline.

📅 4/7 @ 11am PST on Zoom

What you'll walk away with:

• The anatomy of a landing page that actually converts (not just looks good)

• Where most brands lose the sale — and how to fix it in under an hour

• How to structure your page so it does the selling for you

• A live teardown framework you can steal and reuse on every page you build

Bring your questions. Bring your URLs. We're fixing sites live.

Reserve your seat →

See you there,

Chase

Framework Sunday: The Harvard theory that explains why features don't sell — and what actually does.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS.

In 2011, Clayton Christensen walked into a McDonald's and changed how we think about marketing forever.

He wasn't there for lunch. He was there because McDonald's had a problem.

They'd spent months improving their milkshakes. Thicker. More flavors. Better ingredients. Sales barely moved.

Christensen and his team watched customers for hours. Then they asked the right question.

Not: "What do you want in a milkshake?"

But: "What job are you hiring this milkshake to do?"

The answers changed everything.

What you'll learn:

• The research behind Jobs To Be Done and why it upended product development

• The two types of jobs every product is hired for

• How to use JTBD to write briefs, hooks, and creative that converts

The Research: Clayton Christensen's Milkshake Study

Most people buying milkshakes at 8am weren't hungry.

They had a long, boring commute. They needed something to do with their hand. Something that would last the whole drive, not make a mess, and feel like a small act of self-care before a long day of other people's problems.

The milkshake wasn't the product. It was the solution to a specific job: make my commute less miserable.

Christensen called this Jobs To Be Done — the idea that customers don't buy products. They hire products to get a job done. When a better solution comes along that does the same job, they fire your product and hire the new one.

The reframe changes everything.

You're not selling a protein powder. You're selling the ability to show up to the gym tomorrow. You're not selling a project management tool. You're selling the feeling that things are under control. You're not selling a skincare product. You're selling the version of yourself you want to be by summer.

The job is emotional. The product is the mechanism.

The Two Types of Jobs

Every product gets hired for two kinds of jobs at once.

Functional jobs: What the customer actually needs to accomplish.

"I need energy for my afternoon." "I need to finish this report." "I need my skin to stop breaking out."

Emotional jobs: How the customer wants to feel while doing it.

"I want to feel like I have my health together." "I want to feel like a competent professional." "I want to feel confident without thinking about my skin."

Most advertising addresses the functional job. Brands that win address the emotional one.

Red Bull doesn't sell caffeine. It sells "wings." The functional job is energy. The emotional job is the feeling of being the kind of person who pushes through.

Apple doesn't sell computers. It sells creative identity. The functional job is a powerful machine. The emotional job is belonging to a tribe of people who see things differently.

When creative only speaks to the functional job, you're competing on features. Features get copied. Feelings don't.

The 3 JTBD Questions Before Any Brief

Before briefing a single piece of creative, answer these:

1. What is the customer doing right now to get this job done? This is your real competition. Not other brands — whatever behavior your customer is using as a substitute. For a meditation app, the competition isn't Headspace. It's scrolling Instagram before bed.

2. What's frustrating about their current solution? The friction is the opening. "I can never stick to it." "It takes too long." "I feel guilty every time I open it." That frustration is your hook.

3. How do they want to feel when the job is done? This is the emotional payoff. Write your creative toward the feeling, not the feature.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

The rewrite:

Every week I break down what makes ads work. CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. An algorithm that learns your creative DNA. Start with intelligence - finish anywhere. Native editor, Canva, or Figma. Your tools. Our thinking.

It's the platform I use to run my own creative. Try it free — code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off.

Try CreativeOS free →

 JTBD in Ad Creative

The fastest application: rewrite your current hooks through the job lens.

Feature-led hook: "Our protein bar has 20g of protein and only 5g of sugar." Job-led hook: "You're not tired because you didn't sleep enough. You're tired because you ate garbage."

Feature-led hook: "500+ integrations. Automate your workflow." Job-led hook: "The feeling of opening your laptop Monday morning knowing exactly what you're doing."

Feature-led hook: "Dermatologist-tested SPF 50 moisturizer." Job-led hook: "Five minutes in the morning. Never think about your skin again."

Same product. Different job. Different resonance.

The job-led version earns the next second. The feature-led version earns a comparison chart.

What We Learned

1. Customers hire products, they don't buy them. The framing changes what you compete on. Features are easily compared. Jobs are emotionally sticky.

2. Your real competition is behavior, not brands. What is your customer doing right now instead of buying from you? That substitute is your real enemy.

3. Emotional jobs outlast functional ones. Features get copied. The feeling of being the kind of person who does this — that's much harder to replicate.

How to Apply This Week

1. Pick your best-performing ad. Ask: what job is this hiring for? If it's only functional, write a version that addresses the emotional job and test it.

2. Write three JTBD statements for your product. "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can feel [outcome]." Build your next hook from the feeling, not the feature.

3. Audit your competitor's creative. What job are they addressing? If they're going functional, your opening is emotional. If everyone's emotional, find the unclaimed functional angle.

Keep Creating,

Chase Mohseni

P.S. Callouts:

• Sign up for our events calendar & join us this Tuesday at 11am PST for Creative Playbook - where we work through Ad , Landing Page, and Email Creative, sharing what’s working in market.

The improv comedian, the warehouse full of razors, and the three-minute ad that broke the interne

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS.

On March 6, 2012, a 33-year-old former advertising copywriter named Michael Dubin uploaded a video to YouTube.

Budget: $4,500. Location: A warehouse in Venice, California. Runtime: 1 minute and 33 seconds.

Twelve hours later, his website crashed.

In two days, Dollar Shave Club had received 12,000 orders.

By the end of the week, the video had been viewed over 4 million times.

Dubin had spent almost nothing. He had no media budget. He had no distribution deal. He had a camera, a warehouse, a case of razors, and a script he wrote himself.

This is Part 1 of Dollar Shave Club - from a conversation at a party to the ad that invented DTC marketing.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• How Dubin's improv background became the brand's biggest competitive advantage

• Why the ad worked when no one expected it to

• What the video actually says about creative discipline — and why its lessons don't go where you think

The party where it started.

In 2010, Michael Dubin met a man named Mark Levine at a holiday party in Los Angeles.

Levine's family owned a warehouse full of Korean-manufactured razor cartridges that weren't moving. He'd been trying to figure out what to do with them for months.

Dubin had been working in digital media and advertising. He'd also spent years doing improv comedy at Upright Citizens Brigade - a training ground known for producing writers for SNL, The Daily Show, and The Office.

The idea came together in a conversation that probably lasted twenty minutes.

Dubin would build a subscription razor company. Levine would supply the product. The pitch was simple: men were overpaying for razors. Gillette had spent decades using patent protection and retail dominance to keep prices artificially high. A direct-to-consumer model could undercut them significantly and go straight to the customer.

It wasn't a new observation. But Dubin had something most entrepreneurs don't.

He knew how to be funny on camera.

Building the video.

Dollar Shave Club launched officially in January 2012. For the first two months, Dubin focused on building inventory and the subscription infrastructure.

Then he made the video.

The script took him two weeks to write. He rehearsed it obsessively — his improv background meant he understood the difference between a line that looks good on paper and a line that actually lands when delivered.

The production was chaotic. They shot in a working warehouse. The bear costume they'd rented didn't fit. A baby woke up and started crying mid-take. The forklift scene was improvised on set.

Dubin kept most of it in.

The line that made the video: "Our blades are f**ing great."*

It wasn't an accident. It was a deliberate decision to say the thing that brand voice guidelines would normally kill. The kind of line a person says to a friend, not the kind of line a company says in an ad.

And that distinction is the entire creative lesson.

Why the ad worked.

By 2012, YouTube pre-roll ads had trained an entire generation to hit "skip" after five seconds. Branded content was polished, produced, and trusted approximately as much as a cold call.

The Dollar Shave Club video violated every implicit rule.

It was clearly low-budget. The warehouse was unglamorous. The jokes were loose and slightly unhinged. Dubin walked through a wall of hanging envelopes and nobody cleaned it up before the shot.

But it was genuinely funny. Not marketing-funny, where the brand winks at you and you groan. Actually funny. The kind of funny that makes you send something to a friend.

Here's the mechanism everyone misses: the video spread not because it was entertaining, but because sharing it said something about the person sharing it.

Forwarding a funny video in 2012 was a social signal. It meant: I have good taste. I find this stuff before other people do. The video made the sharer look smart for discovering it.

This is what separates content that gets watched from content that gets shared. Watched content is good enough to finish. Shared content carries social currency — something the person forwarding it gets to claim.

Dubin didn't design the video to go viral. He designed it to explain a subscription model to people who didn't understand why they needed it. The viral spread was a byproduct of making something genuinely worth sharing.

"Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a back-scratcher, and ten blades? Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade and polio. He did just fine."

That's not marketing. That's a point of view. And a point of view is always more shareable than a product claim.

These are comments from the original YouTube video from 2012

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. AI that learns your taste. A creative engine that gets smarter every time you use it. Don’t start from scratch - your taste can now scale.

It's the platform behind the newsletter.

Try CreativeOS free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

Why Gillette couldn't copy it.

Here's the part that gets overlooked in every Dollar Shave Club case study.

Gillette had more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, and more engineering talent. They had every resource that should have made competing easy.

What they couldn't do was be funny.

Gillette's brand had been built for thirty years on masculine authority. "The best a man can get." Professional athletes. Serious product claims. The entire identity was built on the premise that Gillette was a serious brand for serious men.

You can't pivot from "The best a man can get" to "Our blades are f***ing great" without destroying the authority you spent decades building. The voice would be incoherent. Customers wouldn't trust it.

This is why brand voice is a competitive moat that money can't solve. The DSC video worked because Dubin had no legacy positioning to protect. He could say anything. Gillette had to protect what they'd already said.

When your competitor's biggest strength — decades of brand equity — becomes the thing that prevents them from responding to you, you've found a structural advantage. Dubin didn't outspend Gillette. He built something Gillette couldn't copy without contradicting itself.

What the video didn't tell you.

Here's the part of the Dollar Shave Club story that gets left out.

The video got the orders. But orders aren't a business.

In the first 48 hours after the video went live, Dubin received 12,000 orders for a product his warehouse could barely fulfill. The site crashed. Customer service didn't exist yet. Shipping was chaos.

He stayed up for days processing orders manually. He hired anyone he could find. He called in favors. He printed labels by hand.

The creative was perfect. The operational reality was a full-scale emergency.

Dollar Shave Club survived that emergency. But the real story of how it went from a viral video to a $1 billion acquisition was never about the ad.

It was about what Dubin built while everyone was talking about the ad.

Next week: how Dollar Shave Club turned a one-time video hit into a subscription machine — and what Unilever paid $1 billion to buy.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

The taped-paper ad running for a men's testosterone brand - and why it's one of the sharpest pieces of direct response I've seen this month.

Hey everyone, Chase from CreativeOS here. Let’s dig into this ad creative from Mars Men together.

This ad looks like it cost nothing to make.

Piece of paper. Tape. Concrete wall. Bold type. Six checkboxes - already checked.

It's running for Mars Men, a men's testosterone supplement brand.

It shouldn't work this hard. But it does.

Here's everything it's doing right.

What you'll learn:

• Why lo-fi formats earn attention that polished ads can't buy

• How pre-checked boxes change the psychology of a symptom checklist

• The one reframe that turns "nothing I can do" into "I need to fix this now"

Lo-fi isn't a budget decision. It's a targeting decision.

Your audience has seen tens of thousands of polished health ads. Their brain auto-filters them. The moment something looks like an ad, the scroll continues.

Mars Men made something that looks like it wasn't made — like you stumbled onto a flyer someone taped up by hand.

That's the Von Restorff Effect in action. One thing that stands out from everything else in the feed gets remembered. The taped paper is red in a green forest.

Lo-fi, when it's intentional, earns attention that hi-fi can't buy.

Four words that filter out everyone who isn't the customer.

"MEN OVER 35 NOTICE THESE?"

"Men" eliminates everyone else. "Over 35" pins it to the specific life moment when these symptoms start appearing. "Notice these?" creates curiosity without answering anything.

It doesn't try to reach everyone. It reaches exactly one person, at exactly the right age, in exactly the right moment.

Specificity repels the wrong audience. That's not a bug — it's the feature.

Pre-checking the boxes removes the question, and that's the whole conversion.

Every other symptom checklist asks: Do you have this?

This one doesn't ask. The boxes are already checked.

You're not evaluating whether these apply to you. You're just looking at your life, listed out.

No Energy. Dad Bod. Lost Drive. Brain Fog. No Gains. Dead Snake.

That last one deserves a mention. Most brands in this category hide behind clinical language — "decreased libido," "erectile concerns." Mars Men wrote dead snake and moved on without flinching. That bluntness earns trust because it signals: we know you, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Compare this to ARMRA's "Constipated? We got you." Same principle. Say the thing everyone else is dancing around. The directness IS the pattern interrupt.

One sentence moves the cause from inevitable to fixable.

"IT'S NOT JUST AGING. IT'S YOUR TESTOSTERONE."

This is the conversion line. Everything before it gets you here.

The biggest objection for a man in his late 30s isn't what is this product. It's why bother — this is just what happens. If aging is the cause, there's nothing to buy. You're just declining.

This line removes the dead end. It moves the cause from inevitable to fixable. The moment something is fixable, you have a buyer.

That's what a good reframe does: it doesn't create new desire. It removes the reason not to act on desire that already exists.

A quiz CTA works because it promises the reader something, not asks something.

"TAKE THE 2-MIN QUIZ" is not a purchase CTA. It's a curiosity fulfillment mechanism.

A quiz promises you'll find out something about yourself. That's genuinely compelling. And it sets up a personalized recommendation on the back end — your results become the proof point for the exact product they want to sell you.

The ad creates anxiety (am I one of these guys?). The quiz promises resolution. The product waits on the other side.

The CTA is the right door for the right room.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. AI that learns your taste. A creative engine that gets smarter every time you use it.

It's the platform behind the newsletter.

Try CreativeOS free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

3 Ways This Ad Could Be Even Stronger

1. Add a social proof line above the CTA. "14,000 men found out their score this month" turns individual anxiety into a movement. Right now there's no proof anyone else is taking this step — which leaves a small gap just before the click. The timeline format ARMRA uses solves a similar problem: it proves the product works before the CTA fires.

2. Outcome-led CTAs outperform action-led ones. "TAKE THE 2-MIN QUIZ" is solid. "FIND OUT YOUR TESTOSTERONE LEVEL" is better. One is an action. The other is a promised result. Test the swap.

3. Test a single-symptom version. Six checked boxes hit everyone a little. One checked box — whichever symptom tests highest — might hit someone hard. "Men Over 35. Still feel like yourself?" with just one box checked could outperform the grid by trading breadth for depth.

What This Teaches Us About Creative Discipline

Mars Men didn't make a beautiful ad.

They made a precise one.

Every choice — the taped paper, the pre-checks, the blunt language, the reframe — serves one person reading this at exactly the right moment. Nothing in the ad is for the brand. All of it is for him.

That's the discipline. Not aesthetic restraint. Not budget efficiency.

The discipline of building an ad that does one job, for one person, with zero wasted energy on anything that isn't that job.

Most ads try to impress. This one just tries to be right.

There's a lesson in that for whatever you're running right now.

How to Apply This Week

1. Find your "already checked" moment. What does your customer already believe about their situation? Stop asking them to confirm it. Show them you already know. Pre-loaded agreement converts harder than a question every time.

2. Write the reframe line. Take your customer's most common "why bother" objection — the one that makes them feel nothing can be done — and move the cause from inevitable to fixable in one sentence. Put it above your CTA.

3. Say the thing your category dances around. Whatever the euphemism is in your space, there's a version of "Constipated?" or "Dead Snake" waiting to be written. The brand that says it directly earns attention no polished ad can buy.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

Join us for our first office hours - where we will answer questions, unblock your creative flow and be awesome together.

This is an open forum - we are excited to see you there!

📅 3/31 @ 11am PST on Zoom.

👉 Reserve your seat now 👈

Excited to see you there,

Chase

PS - might even build an ad in real time for a lucky someone.

Hook rate tells you if your ad worked. Scroll rate tells you if your site deserved the click.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS.

Everyone talks about hook rate.

Every media buyer. Every "performance creative" account. Every brand celebrating a 3-second thumb stop.

Congrats. You got the click.

What happened after is where you're losing money.

No one's talking about that. And that silence is burning more budget than your worst ad set ever did.

What you'll learn:

• The unnamed metric that separates a bounce from a buyer (and how to track it)

• Why the ad platforms will never build this for you

• How to use scroll rate to fix your retargeting and stop treating all clicks as equal

There's a metric nobody's naming. So I'll name it.

Scroll Rate.

Hook rate tells you if your ad worked. Scroll rate tells you if your site deserved the click.

They're not opposites. They're sequential.

One gets attention. The other earns intent.

Most brands optimize the first and completely ignore the second.

Here's what scroll rate actually is. A visitor:

• Scrolls below the fold

• Stays longer than ~30 seconds

• Clicks to another page

If they hit all three? That's not a click. That's intent.

Clicks are cheap. Sessions are noisy. But someone who scrolls, stays, and explores — that's a buyer in motion.

And most of you aren't even tracking it.

The data that should make you uncomfortable.

57% of viewing time happens above the fold. Sounds like above the fold is king.

Except Chartbeat found that 66% of actual attention — real engagement, not passive eyeballs — happens below it.

The majority of meaningful interaction on your site is happening in the section you haven't touched since your dev shipped the page six months ago.

And people are scrolling. 90% of mobile users scroll within 14 seconds of page load. E-commerce scroll depth averages 40-60%. Product pages hit 70%.

The behavior is already there. You just haven't given them anything worth scrolling to.

On time: Average e-commerce session is ~2 minutes 17 seconds. Sites that push that to 3-4 minutes see dramatically higher conversion. Improving product page engagement by just 30 seconds lifts conversion 3-5%.

Thirty seconds. That's what separates a bounce from a buyer.

On depth: Average e-commerce pages per session is 3.27. Top performers hit 4.7-5.6. Each additional page viewed increases purchase probability 5-8%.

Users who actually completed a purchase viewed an average of 26 pages.

And you're celebrating a click that bounced in 4 seconds because the hook rate was strong.

Why isn't anyone measuring scroll rate?

Because the tools don't package it. You can pull scroll depth from Hotjar. Time on site from GA4. Pages per session from your analytics. But no platform composites them into one number. Hook rate is one metric in one dashboard. Scroll rate lives in fragments across three tools and requires you to build it yourself.

Because the ad platforms have zero incentive for you to look at it. Meta, TikTok, Google — their optimization frameworks keep your eyes inside their ecosystem. Hook rate, thumbstop ratio, hold rate, outbound CTR — every metric they surface keeps you spending in the ad account. The moment you measure what happens on your site after the click, you might discover the problem isn't your ad. It's your page. That realization doesn't sell more impressions. So they'll never build this metric for you.

Because scroll rate lives in the gap between disciplines. The media buyer doesn't think about the page. The web designer doesn't think about the ad. The brand strategist thinks both are beneath them. The person who would naturally track scroll rate is the creative operator who owns the full funnel — who understands the ad and the page are one piece of content, not two deliverables from two teams that never talk.

There are maybe a few hundred of those people right now.

If you're one of them, you already know this even if you haven't named it.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. AI that learns your taste. A creative engine that gets smarter every time you use it.

It's the platform behind the newsletter.

Try CreativeOS free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

How scroll rate changes what you actually make.

Your ad can no longer just stop the scroll. It has to set up what's below the fold.

The hook needs to create an expectation that the landing page fulfills as they scroll. Right now most ads make a promise and the landing page tells a different story.

That disconnect is where conversion dies. Not because the product is bad. Because the story broke.

Your above-the-fold should feel like the next frame of the ad.

Not a corporate homepage. Not a design refresh. The next scene.

If your ad is high-energy UGC and your landing page is a sterile hero shot, you killed your scroll rate before it started.

Below the fold isn't "more info." It's the second act.

This is where objections get handled. Where proof shows up. Where belief gets built. If there's nothing worth discovering, why would anyone keep scrolling?

People do scroll. They just don't scroll for you.

This is where it gets expensive.

Most brands retarget everyone who clicked.

But not all clicks are equal.

Someone who bounced in 4 seconds? Noise.

Someone who scrolled 60% of the page, stayed 90 seconds, and clicked through to a product page? That person was genuinely considering buying from you.

And you're treating them the same.

Scroll rate lets you segment by intent, not just activity.

Better retargeting. Higher ROAS. Less wasted spend.

You stop chasing attention. You start closing it.

What We Learned

1. Hook rate is half the conversation. Everyone optimizes the first 3 seconds — the ad — and ignores the next 90 that determine whether the click becomes revenue.

2. Scroll rate is a leading indicator. It identifies visitors who are actually considering buying before they convert. That's actionable intel, not hindsight.

3. The ad and the page are one piece of content. Treating them as separate deliverables from separate teams is why your funnel breaks. The story has to flow.

How to Apply This Week

1. Build the dashboard. Pull scroll depth from Hotjar (or your heatmap tool), time on site from GA4, and pages per session from your analytics. Composite them manually until you have a scroll rate number.

2. Segment your retargeting by intent. Create an audience of visitors who scrolled 50%+, stayed 60+ seconds, and viewed 2+ pages. Retarget them differently than 4-second bouncers.

3. Audit your ad-to-page story. Watch your top-performing ad, then land on its destination page. Does above-the-fold feel like the next frame? If not, that's your scroll rate problem.

4. Design below the fold like it matters. Because it does. Objections, proof, belief — all of it lives there. Stop treating it as "more info."

Hook rate is what media buyers brag about.

Scroll rate is what actually drives revenue.

Stop optimizing the door. Build a room worth staying in.

Keep Creating,

Chase Mohseni

P.S. Callouts:

• Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.

Three stripes, a home Olympics, and the athlete seeding strategy that Nike would later steal.

Hey everyone, Chase here from CreativeOS.

Last week I told you how Adi Dassler built shoes in his mother's laundry room, put them on Jesse Owens at the Nazi Olympics, and then watched his family tear itself apart.

By 1949, Adidas existed. The thesis was proven: win on the podium, win in the market.

But Adi had a new problem. His shoes were on champions. People knew his name. But from fifty feet away in a stadium, nobody could tell an Adidas shoe from any other brand.

This is the story of how three stripes fixed that — and how a home Olympics turned Adidas into the most dominant force in sports.

In this issue, you'll learn:

• Why Adi Dassler bought a trademark from a Finnish company for a symbol that had nothing to do with performance

• The "pyramid" system that got Adidas on 80% of athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics

• How the three stripes became more valuable than any advertisement

The problem with winning.

After the 1948 London Olympics, Adidas-equipped athletes had won medals in track and field, soccer, and multiple other sports.

The strategy was working. But Adi noticed a problem.

When you watched the Games on television — or saw a photograph in the newspaper — you couldn't tell what shoes the athletes were wearing. From any distance, they all looked the same.

The wins were invisible.

Adi needed a mark. Something you could see from the stands. Something that would show up in photographs. Something that made every winner into a walking billboard.

In 1949, he found it.

A Finnish sports brand called Karhu had been using three parallel stripes on their shoes. They owned the trademark.

Adi bought it from them for the equivalent of $1,600 and two bottles of whiskey.

It might be the best deal in branding history.

The three stripes weren't about style.

Here's what people get wrong about the three stripes.

They weren't a design choice. They weren't about aesthetics or fashion.

They were a visibility system.

Three diagonal stripes running up the side of a shoe are visible from 100 meters away. They show up in grainy newspaper photographs. They're recognizable on a fuzzy television broadcast.

Adi added them to every product. Running shoes. Soccer cleats. Boxing boots. The stripes were always in the same position, always the same angle.

Within a decade, the three stripes didn't mean "Adidas." They meant "winner."

When you saw those stripes on the medal stand, you didn't need to read a logo. The mark did the work.

The pyramid seeding system.

By the 1960s, Adi Dassler had formalized his approach into something the company called the "pyramid" system.

At the top: elite athletes. Gold medalists. World record holders. These athletes got free custom equipment, personal attention from Adi himself, and — eventually — cash payments for wearing the brand.

In the middle: national team athletes and promising amateurs. They got free shoes and equipment.

At the base: youth athletes, local clubs, and school teams. They got discounted products and Adidas presence at their events.

The logic was simple: athletic talent flows upward. Today's youth club player is tomorrow's national team member. Today's national team member is tomorrow's Olympic champion.

If you could lock in athletes early, you owned the pipeline.

Every competitor was playing catchup — signing established stars after they'd already won. Adidas was signing them before anyone else knew their names.

Every week I break down what makes ads & creative work.

CreativeOS is where you go to actually build them.

20,000+ templates. AI that learns your taste. A creative engine that gets smarter every time you use it. Don’t start from scratch - your taste can now scale.

It's the platform behind the newsletter.

Try CreativeOS free → — use code CREATIVEDISCIPLINE for 25% off your first month.

Munich, 1972.

In 1972, the Olympics came to Munich. Germany was hosting for the first time since 1936.

For Adidas, this was home turf. Adi Dassler wasn't just going to sponsor some athletes.

He was going to own the Games.

The numbers are staggering: over 80% of all athletes at the Munich Olympics wore Adidas equipment.

Track and field. Soccer. Boxing. Handball. Volleyball. Swimming. Wrestling.

Adidas was everywhere.

The three stripes were in every photograph. Every broadcast. Every medal ceremony. The company didn't buy a single television ad. They didn't need to.

The Games were the ad.

Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in swimming — an all-time record — wearing Adidas. The entire West German national soccer team wore Adidas. Even athletes from Soviet Bloc countries, who weren't supposed to have Western sponsors, found ways to wear the three stripes.

By the end of the Munich Games, Adidas wasn't just the leading sports brand in Europe.

It was the leading sports brand in the world.

Proof beats persuasion.

Here's what Adi Dassler understood that traditional advertisers didn't:

A champion wearing your product is worth more than any advertisement telling people your product is good.

Think about what an ad does: it makes a claim. "Our shoes are faster." "Our gear is better." The customer has to trust the claim.

Think about what the podium does: it provides proof. The athlete already won. The shoes already performed. There's nothing to trust — there's evidence.

Adi never advertised features. He never ran comparison ads. He never talked about technology or materials in consumer-facing marketing.

He just put his shoes on winners and let the results do the talking.

"If you have a good product, the athlete is the best advertisement," he said.

Every competitor who tried to out-advertise Adidas failed. You can't out-talk proof.

Adidas's Creative Playbook

From a laundry room to 80% market share at the Olympics — without traditional advertising.

Here's what Adidas teaches us about creative discipline:

Make your mark visible. The three stripes weren't decoration. They were a visibility system designed to show up in photographs and broadcasts. Your brand needs distinctive assets that communicate before words do.

Own the pipeline. Adidas didn't chase established stars. They signed promising athletes early and rode them to the top. Invest in talent before your competitors realize it's valuable.

Proof beats persuasion. An athlete winning in your shoes is worth more than any claim about your shoes. The podium doesn't make an argument — it provides evidence.

Let the stage do the work. Adi didn't buy ads at the Olympics. He made the Olympics into his ad by equipping 80% of athletes. Find the stage where your audience is already paying attention.

Trade up the chain. Youth athletes become amateur athletes become professionals become champions. If you own the base of the pyramid, you eventually own the top.

The lesson for the rest of us

Adi Dassler died in 1978, one year after handing control of the company to his son Horst.

He never saw Nike overtake Adidas. He never saw the Michael Jordan endorsement deal that would change sports marketing forever.

But Nike's playbook? It was Adi's playbook.

Athlete seeding. Distinctive marks. Letting performance do the persuading. Phil Knight and Nike didn't invent athlete marketing — they studied Adidas and executed it better in the American market.

The three stripes are still on billions of products. The company is still worth over $40 billion.

And it all started with a cobbler in a laundry room who understood one thing:

You don't need to tell people you're the best. You need to show them.

Keep Creating,

Chase

P.S. — Sign up for our events calendar so you can get access to all the experts we work with helping you build your creative intelligence in real time.