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Howdy readers 🥰

In this newsletter, you’ll find:

💥 Why Your Ads Are Failing Before You Hit Record

🛍️ Pinterest Supercharges Shopping with LTK Collabs & Smart Collages

🎥 Ad of the Day

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💥 Creative Strategy ≠ Format Strategy: Why Your Ads Are Failing Before You Hit Record

Every DTC brand wants scalable ad creatives. But most are chasing the wrong variable.

Switching from UGC to testimonials to explainers isn’t a strategy, it’s roulette. True creative strategy starts with emotional congruence, not format experiments. If the core buying moment isn’t nailed, no hook, camera angle, or script tweak will save you.

🎭 The Format Testing Fallacy

More formats ≠ more insight.

You see it everywhere: “We tested 4 styles, UGC, founder-led, explainer, and product demo.” But if every format is built on a different emotional idea, you’re not testing formats. You’re testing four unrelated campaigns.

The result? Zero learnings. Every data point is noise because nothing is structurally comparable. True testing isolates one moment, one trigger, and runs it across formats for signal, not scatter.

🧠 Creative POV Scripting

Your best ads don’t come from personas, they come from lived moments.

We don’t write to “moms aged 30–45.” We write to this exact moment:

“You haven’t slept in 3 nights. The toddler’s teething. You just Googled ‘organic pain relief’ at 2:17 am.”

When scripting, start with the clearest POV in the highest-friction moment. Not who the person is demographically, but what emotional loop they’re trapped in. That becomes the script spine. Then layer the format on top.

📱 Platform-First Fragmentation

Platform ≠ Strategy. It’s a lens.

Here’s the trap: “This works on TikTok,” so we force everything into that mold. The result? DTC brands develop fractured personalities: YouTube sounds like a lecture, Instagram’s a catalog, TikTok’s a personality crisis.

Instead, anchor your strategy in the customer moment. Let structure flex per platform:

• Meta: Compressed emotional payoff.
• TikTok: Native pattern disruption.
• YouTube: Depth and drama sequencing.

But the moment? Always the same. That’s what scales.

Most DTC ad teams are building in Canva and testing in chaos. But real creative leverage isn’t in how it looks, it’s in how consistently it hits the same moment from different angles. Structure over format isn’t a hot take. It’s the only path to scalable, predictable, compounding performance.

🛍️ Pinterest Supercharges Shopping with LTK Collabs & Smart Collages

Pinterest just announced a major LTK partnership and AI-powered discovery features, pushing deeper into influencer-led and automated product shopping across its 570 M+ user base.

The Breakdown:

• LTK Image Posts Now on Pinterest: Top influencer image posts from LTK will auto-publish to Pinterest, with affiliate links and profile tags included for added exposure and earnings.
  
• Auto-Collages Powered by AI: Pinterest’s AI can now instantly turn catalogs into themed shoppable collages, based on trends like outfit combos, similar items, or top user saves.
  
• New Trends Dashboard for Marketers: Brands can explore top trends, shopping intent by demo, and curated cultural picks, all surfaced via Pinterest’s updated Trends tool.
  
• Bigger Push into Affiliate Discovery: With LTK joining Shopify, Amazon, and WooCommerce integrations, Pinterest is building a massive product catalog designed for creator-led commerce.

Why it matters: Pinterest is quietly building the smartest discovery engine in social commerce. With AI automation, influencer reach, and new shopping insights, it’s becoming a must-use growth platform for product-led brands.

🎥 Ad of the Day

What Works:

Calling chefs “culinary athletes” is a bold, empowering reframing. It elevates kitchen work from routine labor to high-performance physical endurance, instantly upgrading product value. 

The hero message, “ALL-DAY SUPPORT,” is short, loud, and unmistakable. It’s not trying to sell fashion or style; it’s solving one very specific problem: sore, tired feet from long shifts. This kind of clarity is key in environments like Instagram, where attention spans are razor-thin.

The kitchen-floor setting adds instant context. You can feel the long hours, hot stoves, and non-stop motion, which makes the value of the shoes more believable. There’s no need for a long testimonial when the environment says it all visually.

Broader Insights:

This is a perfect example of job-to-be-done marketing. It doesn’t sell shoes, it sells relief, stamina, and pride for people who grind in back-of-house roles. Simple, focused, and emotionally intelligent.

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