I'm Addicted to Creative Strategy

Different issue this week. No category debrief, no Particl numbers.

I want to talk about creative strategy itself, and the one thing nobody tells you about getting good at it.

I've been posting on YouTube for one month. Three videos in & we crossed 100k views.

If you are subscribed or even just watched one millisecond….. thank you for real!!!!

100k in a month is insane and its funny to think that first video almost never got made.

I procrastinated for MONTHS to make a long form video and then my first time filming, the audio and production were so horrible the editors needed me to re-do it all.

Wanted to quit on the spot.

But the YouTube God’s rewarded my overcoming of The Resistance** with immediate success in the algorithm. Forever grateful!

**Read the book War of Art by Steven Pressfield and your life will change

Starting to think marketing & creative strategy is a drug.

Have a product. Dissect a customer. Peel back the layers for the pain points.

Then you mix that info, with your product, into different combinations of creative assets to test which one works in convincing people to give money to you.

And once you see the data showing what works, it is literally like crack.

And you want to crack the code as many times as possible.

Stop reading about creative strategy. Stop saving IG carousels with 50 hooks. Stop watching tutorials you'll never apply.

Pick a tool. Open it. Click around and make something ugly today.

Open it again and make something a little less ugly tomorrow.

Play until you get a result that flips the switch and gets you hooked!!!

The reason most creatives stay stuck is not lack of talent. It's that they're over strategizing a game they haven't actually played yet.

You learn creative strategy by deploying creative. You learn AI tools by horribly prompting AI tools. You learn YouTube by posting on YouTube.

Here's the part I want creatives to hear. The only real edge I have right now is that I'm pathologically obsessed with learning every tool I can get my hands on.

Claude Code. Higgsfield. Fal AI, and just got into Kive.ai … i cant keep up. But im trying.

I'm in these tools every single day, tinkering, making things, watching what spits out the other side.

I've generated probably a thousand static ad images in the last month just messing around.

It was extremely frustrating in the beginning BUT there are signs I’m getting dangerous.

A small static image generator app (see image) Built on top of a vibe coded app. It spits out on-brand ad creative without the prompt gymnastics. Persona in, hook in, format in, ad out. Still kinda rough but already saving me hours a week. More on this soon!

A Claude artifact for claymation ads. You feed it the brief (product, persona, angle, emotion) and it hands back a full claymation-style ad treatment ready to drop into image gen. Almost dialed. I'll send the link in a future issue once it's bulletproof.

These are private for now but if there seems to be enough interest or asks about it, I may package it up in a beta for people to try and use themselves!

If you want to build the ship-it-Friday habit, you need a steady drip of references. These are the six places I rotate through every week.

1. Meta Ad Library Plug in any brand you admire and see every active Meta ad they're running, free and instant. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

2. TikTok Creative Center TikTok's own top-performing ads library, filterable by industry and region. Catch what's working this week, not last quarter. https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/inspiration/

3. Foreplay The cleanest swipe file tool in the game. Save ads from anywhere into organized boards. Free tier covers most people. https://www.foreplay.co

4. Adspo Daily-updated feed of top Meta and TikTok ads. Faster than the official libraries when you just want a quick hit of references. https://adspo.com

5. Motion Creative analytics with a built-in inspiration feed. See not just what's running, but what's actually winning by spend and engagement. https://motionapp.com

Open one today. Save five ads. Start your file.

And to take us out this week another quote by Steven Pressfield:

Till next time soldier,

Carson

P.S. If you made it this far, here is my weekly beg to subscribe to my brand new YouTube channel. !!!!!

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