Hey there,

At the heart of everything Motion is a fundamental belief: the biggest lever in paid ads is creative, therefore, creative strategy is the secret to creating more winning ads.

That’s why I want to spend our first nurture email giving you a crash course on creative strategy. It should be a 3-minute read. 👇

1. Memorize this definition

I’m not big on definitions, but this is one you really need to internalize:

Creative strategy is the process of combining design with data to produce creative that achieves marketing goals. It bridges the art of storytelling with the science of optimization, ensuring every creative delivers maximum impact.

To help you remember:

• Design + data
• Art + science
• Right brain + left brain

2. Learn the creative strategy flywheel

The creative strategy flywheel is the framework that the best advertisers use to create more winning ads.

It looks like this:

Whether you have a formal process in place or not, you likely use a variation of this framework at your company.

I’m not going to walk you through each step, but I want to focus on a couple. 

3. Creative Analysis is probably your bottleneck

The distance between you and your performance goals is likely the same as the gap between your creative analysis and ideation stages.

Ask yourself a few questions:

• When you launch new creatives, do you have clear tests in mind? 
• Are these tests being assessed based on the right metrics (ex. A high thumbstop is good, but a high thumbstop with a high CTR is better). 
• Do these test results translate into clear feedback to inform your next round of creative briefs?
• Are you delivering this feedback to your creative team in a format they can understand?

To master creative analysis, you need to set clear goals for every ad creative and hold yourself to a very high standard when assessing those ads.

4. If not Creative Analysis, then it’s 100% Content Creation

The next biggest issue that advertisers typically face is creative velocity.

The greater the volume of creative you can move, the more data you can funnel back into your creative strategy, and the more likely you are to hit your next winner.

In other words — you need to opt for speed over production quality. Hifi content has a place, but not until you’re putting out a pile of iPhone videos edited with CapCut every week.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We formed a category and built Motion around this advertising challenge. And we’re still learning every day.

If you want to learn more about creative strategy, here are a few resources:

1. Creative Strategy: The Ultimate Guide for Performance Marketers and DTC Brands
2. The Marketing Operators on creative strategy
3. Savannah Sanchez’s Guide to Creative Strategy

In 10 days, I’m gonna explain the evolution of targeting in paid media and how creative has become the biggest lever you can pull to get your message to your audience on Meta.

Again — if you want to get this content sooner, just send a quick reply to this email and I’ll opt you into our express track so you can get each lesson in this plan on three-day intervals.

Reza Khadjavi

Founder & CEO | Motion

reza.khadjavi@motionapp.com

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