What is the Meta Game?
It's generally understood that ad creative is the biggest lever for marketing on the internet. Ironically, there are very few resources teaching folks how to be great at it. Most information on the subject is fluffy marketing collateral from ad agencies or hidden behind the paywall of sketchy get-rich-quick ads.
This lack of information, combined with a desperate need for ad creative, were the driving forces that led me and my teams to test over 5500 ads in a quest to better understand the forces driving ad performance. I've now consolidated this into The Meta Game, to save you the trouble.
In my experience, I have generally seen two problems that prevent teams from becoming good at creating ads.
The first comes from people who have not been empowered to be creative. Many latently creative marketers have been put into a box, and been tricked by the forces around them into thinking they aren't capable of being great at ad creative -- silently being robbed of the joy of participating in the creative process.
The second comes from capable creatives that have not been empowered to understand and look at data, making it impossible for them to optimize to outcomes for the business or develop the necessary guardrails for their creative ideas to be financially viable.
The truth is that creative and analytic skills are not traits that people are born with. Like anything, these skills can be learned with a little practice, and need to be taught in an objective and clear way.
The Meta Game is a collection of the no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts processes, tactics, and exercises used to teach individual marketers and creative teams how to marry analysis and creativity in a step-by-step, first principles approach. Throughout the course of working through The Meta Game, you will discover the secret formula that has fueled over $100,000,000 in profitable ad spend on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and TikTok for individual marketers and teams alike.
Whether you are someone who has never worked in advertising, and wants to learn the basics of selling things on the internet, or an experienced creative leader looking to manage a team and a creative strategy, The Meta Game is the battle-tested roadmap that has been proven to navigate any stage in the creative journey, both within the context of your professional career in direct response marketing, and beyond it.
What to expect
0. Prologue - The Internet is Weird
1. The Skills
- The creative hierarchy of needs - developing as a marketer and as a team from first principles
- The six levels of creative freedom - from direct copies, to total moonshots
- Step-by-step exercises to help you climb the creative hierarchy, and shoot the moon
- Defining your core value props
- Breaking down your competitors and top performing ads to make a “creative menu”
- Your first iterations
- Advanced Iterations
- Building a mind-map of your creative territory
- Using internet trends to inspire new concepts
- Total creative freedom
2. The Team
- Org structure – why creatives should be embedded on the acquisition team
- The creative strategist – why media buyers need to flex on creative
- The power of the circle – why you need to distribute power on your team
3. The Process
- The data
- Building and tracking creative testing KPIs
- Empowering creatives to become data proficient, and optimize to ROI
- The creative process
- Cadence, meeting schedule
- Asana templates, strategy tracking
- Brainstorming together
- Warm-up exercises for creative thinking
- The brainstorm as team building
- Producing on a budget
- Why low cost ads win and how to make them
- Leveraging AI to generate winning creative
4. The Strategy
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Managing the strategy week-to-week
- Managing creative volume
- Managing creative risk
- Developing and tracking creative strategies for common volume/risk combinations
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Managing the team
- Freedom and accountability
- Creating buy-in and organizational alignment
- Teaching the game
5. Beyond the game
- Corporate creativity – the benefits and the limitations
- Taking the Meta Game to develop broader creative practices