The First Principles of Ads: How to be Creative (even if you're unsure)

“There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.”

― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

After product-market fit is found, monetization is optimized, and attribution is locked in, it's generally understood that ad creative is the biggest lever for growing a business through marketing. 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.

If you have read through some of that material, worked with inefficient ad agencies, taken a few shots at ads without much success, or are generally confused about the black-boxy nature of success in ads, you are in the right place. Perhaps you have stolen ads off competitors and seen initial success, without being able to parlay it into your own wins. This is especially the right place for you.

When I started my creative journey, I was managing a multi-million dollar a month advertising book with no creative resources, or understanding of how the mechanics of ad creative even work. What started as a practical need to keep a steady stream of marketing wins flowing has transformed into a system that has powered teams producing over 5500 ads and $100,000,000 in marketing spend.

When I talk to founders and other marketers, creative success often feels opaque and random, and success is sporadic. They don’t know where to start to find a rhyme or reason for success, or how to hire and develop talent to do the same.

What I’ve found along my journey, and which you will learn inside, is that:

• Making ads, like anything, is a skill
• Data people can be creative
• Creative people can do data
• Success can be taught and sustained through a framework

Marketing is a skill
A common occurrence in marketing is the creative pitch or brainstorm, where someone pitches a lofty and aspirational vision for a creative idea, with airy language, or hefty production budgets and agency requirements, that isn’t rooted in any observable data or point of reference.

What I have found to work best in actual practice has tended to be new spins on fundamental ideas, at gradually higher levels of creative freedom – with very little production cost.

An ungrounded creative pitch is the marketing equivalent to bad abstract art, which skipped to the far ends of expression without mastering the underlying context, and for some unknown reason missed the mark.

In music, people first master the individual notes, scales, rhythm and theory before they can improvise and write songs.

In dance, folks learn the underlying steps, the history and context, and how to dance with a partner before they start taking up room for themselves.

In drawing, folks learn how to perceive, and reproduce both the small details and larger gestalt, before developing a style of abstraction.

If we were musicians, or dancers, we wouldn’t start playing with a new group or step in the middle of a crowded dancehall by first jumping into a vigorous solo. So why do folks venture straight into the unknown when it comes to marketing?

The Creative Gap
I have generally seen two initial blockers that are preventing folks on teams from becoming good at making performing 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 tricked themselves into thinking they aren't “creative”.

The second comes from capable creatives that have not been empowered to understand and look at data, making it impossible for them to optimize toward strong outcomes for the business or develop the necessary guardrails for their creative ideas to be financially viable.

Ironically, a useful framework for high impact marketing ideas is to invert this curve on end.

The goal of the Meta Game is to merge the creative with the analytical, to help folks consistently land on this place of the curve, between the known and the unknown to deliver high performing ads.

The first principles of Creative Strategy, and the mechanics of creativity

Where does creativity come from?
Is it innate?
Is it learned?

While there are many creative purists who will argue that great creative work has no point of reference, comes from a place in the soul, strikes at random, and is not made out of a system, that perspective is not helpful in serving the pressing demands of growth that require consistent performance.

As a result, performance creative is part creative work, part pure market capitalism, and we must always balance on that spectrum between the known and the novel to manage our risk and deliver on performance.

In Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglass Hofstedter argues that consciousness is an illusion that arises from gradual complexity of many lower level, mechanical processes in the brain. At a certain point – like magic – the convergence of those processes make learning, self-awareness and our conscious experience emerge.

I am going to argue that creativity arises from exactly the same mechanics.

In the Meta Game, we close the creative gap and explore the underlying mechanics of performance creative by approaching the creative problem from a first principles, rules based system, and gradually rise through these levels of abstraction until we find ourselves in the mysterious emergence of creative work.

Breaking down the pieces – a first principle is a defined by:

A basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.

In legos, you might think of this as the individual blocks.

Further, Meta is defined by:

referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential

Which is to say, the structures that arise when we combine these individual blocks and then become individual blocks in themselves.

Put together, The Meta Game, learning to make ads from first principles means that I am going to show you how to break down the highest performing creative in your vertical to its most fundamental pieces, and then teach you how to re-compose in gradually more complex, but equally rock-solid structures in order to deliver gradually more divergent concepts. We will refer to this as the “Creative Hierarchy of Needs”.

At first, this will involve directly copying, and then we will gradually introduce larger and larger levels of conceptual freedom.

When moving through the levels, finding effective new creative and moving onto the next level will arrive when a person has found themselves in a territory that is novel enough to be disruptive, but familiar enough to resonate – e.g., on the creative curve.

The Creative Hierarchy of Needs
In his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation", Abraham Maslow proposed a “hierarchy of needs” for psychological development. In this theory, Maslow argued that human development is only possible through a sequential fulfillment of more fundamental, lower level needs, and that self-realization and transcendence are only possible to be achieved by satisfying our more base requirements. In essence, our ability to continue growing is a constant tension between our needs to survive and our needs for growth, and is met by nourishing the fundamental building blocks of our survival.

Similarly, I am going to make the argument that creative self-realization and transcendence can be modeled much the same, and that the various levels of creative freedom can be achieved, ironically, by continuing to flex the most foundational and mechanical aspects of our creativity.

You can think of the Creative Hierarchy of Needs as a belt system, similar to Kung Fu, where each belt must be earned by displaying a mastery of skills in combat. It’s only by sustained generation of winning concepts at the lower levels that we are allowed to move onto the next level and expand our creative freedom.    

This mastery serves us when uncertainty sets in or when creative fatigue demands new winning ads. It guarantees the survival of our creative pipeline in the most dire circumstances, as well as a platform to build upon in our times of flow and mastery.

In Summary
The Creative Hierarchy of needs are the sequential skills that when mastered, reliably create high performing ad creative for individuals and teams alike. It’s a classification of the levels of creative freedom that exist within the direct response advertising discipline, but it is also allegorical to any creative endeavor.

As a result, through the rest of The Meta Game, we are going to focus on building mastery at each successive level, before moving onto the next, by identifying and mastering the underlying skills, then teaching the process and strategies to effectively manage a team. I hope you will not only learn how to be a great direct response marketer through this journey, but also learn the skills and confidence to be a broadly more creative person.

In our next post, we will move past the theory and into the hands-on exercises that will immediately provide you value, by learning to kick start your high performance creative engine by stealing from and building on top of your competitors.

Resources Discussed:
Creativity, Inc
Gerdel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Maslows Hierarchy of Needs
The Creative Curve