Alex Cooper's "5 F's" Framework For Researching Ad Angles transcript

You've probably heard me talk about ad creative and principles for making great ad creative before. If not, then you have not listened to much of my content because I talk about it a lot. But there's actually one part of that process of making new ads that to be honest with you, I kind of suck at, which is why you have never really heard me talk about it. And it's sort of embarrassing what it is because that part of the process is research, angle research, message research.

If I am honest with you, I develop a lot of ad messages basically from my gut feel or my creative strategist from their gut feel. And that's not good enough, especially given the current state of meta ads [music] where you can get so specific and Meta's machine learning is so good at at matching very specific messages to very specific people. I believe that the future of great creative, that actually the present of great creative and the future of great creative really comes down to how good of a job can you do at connecting the right message to the right customer and getting really specific about that because feeds are more personalized all the time.

[music] And so today on the show, I have brought on returning champion, returning guests to the show, one of my favorite people to listen to talk about ads in this space, the great Alex Cooper, who is not in South Africa right now, though he is from South Africa. He's actually in London making his way to the US, but he's on a stopover. Hopefully getting to watch his South African team play some soccer in the World Cup.

We're going to take a break from all of that for a second and instead talk about ad creative research. How do you do great job research? You might know Alex as uh as a co-founder of Ad Crate and and maybe even more so as uh the CEO and co-founder of Parker, a an ad creative tool in Metads. I'll let him explain the fullness of what Parker is right now, but uh they just had a really big announcement about what they're doing and he's got a whole bunch of stuff to say about how you can research ads and of course in 2026, how you can use AI to help make that process not only easier, but also better.

Not just not just easier, but more robust. Okay, super long intro, but this is going to be a great episode. If you want to develop great uh great angles, great messages, you need to hear from Alex right now. Let's get into it with Alex Cooper from Ad Crate and from Parker to tell us how to write better messages by doing better research. >> Wow. >> Sorry. >> Actually, I'm going to be honest. People say that to me sometimes.

They say that was great intro. I think that was one of my best ones ever. I think I >> You were on a heat alone. [laughter] I have to say I feel >> and I also I feel like I didn't talk too fast which is like my constant problem. I'm I'm desperately trying to get more articulate but my mouth is I have such marble mouth so much of the time people are going to laugh. I'm sure I still talk fast but >> uh look hey man it's great to have you on here.

Great to have you back. Um let's let's just let's just get right into it. We we'll get to your sort of bonafides in a little bit but hopefully people know you as like an ad creative guru at this point. Um you you your newsletter is so helpful to me. I read it. It's one of the only couple newsletters that I read really consistently and um and what I just see in so much of your your thinking is this ability and willingness to dig deep into processes that create really good ads and really not just how to think about a good ad but how to think about how to produce lots of good ads at scale all the time and how do you build better operations and process for all of that.

So let's let's really focus on that specifically on the research phase. So I'll just kind of kick it to you broad question to start. How do you think about the role of research in the development of angles and and maybe even more broadly than that like when you think about creative diversity and and sort of u sort of ads working well? How much are you centering that process and that thinking around the message of the ad versus sort of frameworks and and visuals and all that kind of stuff? >> Yeah, I I think that uh I think you nailed the intro for a couple of reasons.

It was a great delivery, but also you said something that is really poignant. I think the idea of uh the creator that you make be able to find the perfect message to match that to the person that you are speaking to on the other side of the screen because if you look at uh you know some of the most successful brands at paid social in their ad library you look at a grooge you look at a hollow you look at Mars men uh and you look at what they're doing so much of it is around specific messages like the traditional advice was like make ads for as many people as possible so that they can you know scale as big as possible.

Now it's like how can you make a specific ad for a specific persona and uh you know look at the greens ad library they'll they'll make an ad for um the the female who's struggling with bloating and you click into the landing page and is a personalized landing page for that persona. So, it's all about like zeroing in into the exact person that you want to speak to um and uh and and producing an experience like all the way throughout the funnel that speaks specifically to them rather than trying to make something uh you know broader and and to apply to more people.

For me, the the the other thing I want to touch on actually that you said is that uh that you have like a bit of a a a gut feel approach right now. And I kind of want to find the middle ground between like that gut feel approach versus like testing with intention cuz I also don't want to, you know, prescribe a like a a full-on if this do if this then that system to everyone listening here because I actually think that like you know part of being a creative strategist or an advertiser is like giving people the freedom to play and like I'm going to go through the system that we use to generate personas and uh angles and and therefore messages to uh like for all of our clients, but at the same time like sometimes I just feel good about an idea.

It's like I don't want to sit down and go, "Okay, I'm going to make it for this person. I'm make it for this angle. I'm like sometimes you just get a gut feel. You want to run it." So I think it's like understanding where to sit like in the middle of those two things like systemize and and here's how we make it out of the scale versus like I have a gut feel. I'm just going to run it. Um but for us it starts like everything starts with the uh persona.

So that's the first thing that we will do when a uh when a brand comes on board. We will go through all the voice of customer and obviously we can go into that that system first. It go like it starts from the persona. Every ad that we make is track that persona level so that we can do retros at the end of sprints. So our sprints like we have smaller sprints that are weekly and we have monthly sprints as well. At the end of those months, we can then look at the uh spend by persona, do a retro, work out what persona is spending, what ones are not, and then that will affect the uh analysis and then the uh angles that we run for the next sprint.

Obviously, we can go to that system uh in detail in a moment. But it it starts a personal level. We do a deep process on mining VFC, voice of customer from comments, reviews, Reddit, all that good stuff. Uh, and then downstream of that, you can pick up your angles. You can pick up your messages from those um from those different persona documents that we produce. >> Okay. There's so much there. That's good. I first of all agree with you about the the gut thing.

We we still make good creative to be honest with you and and a lot of that is driven by gut, right? that can get you far just thinking about the product and the customer and like another thing that we do a lot we just talk to the client a lot of cases you know just like the client has lived in the brand for a long time and so they've read countless reviews they have an idea of what people like about their products they've talked to customers even if they haven't been you know processoriented about this they they typically have that so a lot of times our our weekly meetings we do a little bit of performance review and here's how your media buying's going and here's how your performance relative to forecast but I spend a lot of time in weekly meetings with clients and my team does too just saying like, hey, here's the product we want to focus on.

Let's just talk about it a little bit. What do you see there? What do you not? So, anyway, so there's a place for all of that. But I especially think that one of the things that happens in those conversations is there becomes this limitation, which is like, okay, if I'm trying to get to the really specific entry point into into this, right? Um, that notion of a category entrance point. I I believe Zach talked about this on the marketing operators podcast, uh, Zack Stuck.

Um, I I saw some tweets about this. We're trying to develop some some language around this. The idea that there is a specific place where maybe you say this product is really good for for you know X use case. All right. But even X use case is kind of too broad like for who in X situation and for is it a man? Is it a woman? How old are they? Do they have money? Do they not like do they have kids involved? like is it uh is it in in is X use case you know in their house or is it at their job or is it like you when you start doing this and you start think about X use case it turns out there's like a lot of different places where these are happening in the actual experience of their lives and and the idea of being able to you know some of the examples you just cited of able to find the actual ways customers are utilizing the product in their lives and talk to that there there is a gap there I think is if you're just kind of going on gut and sort of general type of customers and so so much of what I'm interested in is how do you close that gap between me and the customer and you just you said part of that is sort of persona and voice of customer type thinking.

So, can we press into that a little bit more? Like what are you doing to get a feel for who that customer is so that you can sort of get specific because um because I think if you could do that then maybe maybe that becomes the entry point into into how you sort of understand those details a little bit more maybe. >> Yeah. Uh, I want to start by defining what I believe a persona to be and and what I believe it not to be because I actually think this is one of the most uh, you know, misunderstood things that at least I see with creative strategies and brands at the moment.

You know, a lot of a lot of brands if you put them on the spot and said, "Give me your give me your persona right now." Uh, they would give you exclusively demographic information. It is a male 35 to 55 from >> the suburbs uh who makes $100,000 a year. That is not a persona. A persona I mean can include that but a persona is more so the psychographics and the demographics is what they believe, what they fear, what they value.

Like what actually makes that person who lives who's about to survive like live in the suburbs? what makes them pull out their credit card. So for me it's like yeah can we answer those questions like what do they believe? What have they tried and failed? What they what do they fear? Uh and and what exact words they use. If you don't know that from what you think your persona is then I don't think it's a persona. So so you want to start off by actually defining what your different personas are and then it's then it's about like how can we dig deep into those?

We actually produce a report and we on board a client where we go like we identify the different personas. That's step one. And then step two is like, okay, now we've got our three to five personas. Uh let's click into each one of those and go deep and really understand um about that person and about like what they believe and what they fear. So for us, and again, you know, there are there are many ways to skin a cat.

Uh but this is the way that we do it. >> Have you ever you ever wondered who came up with that phrase? It's a really weird phrase. >> Yeah. There are some things I say a lot and I'm like I don't know I said that or like who came up with that phrase origally >> who figured out that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat like [laughter] who started skinning a cat and started thinking well you could start from the top instead of the bottom anyway.

[laughter] >> Um okay sorry I'm so sorry every time I hear that brand new I think about that. >> Okay so yes you were saying so yeah getting into that specific persona. Keep going. >> Yeah. Yeah. So let's say that we've got our our three to five personas that we've identified the like psychraphics of what we you know believe the overall persona is. Then for us okay it's about think about what are the different components that make up that persona.

So the three core things for me are the and these are kind of like nested so I'm trying to like summarize them but the five Fs the trigger moment and the awareness and sophistication level. So I would literally have this in my document. and have them as different titled sections. What fears, failures, fantasies, >> uh false solutions >> and uh and failed solutions. So just basically going through the voice of customer and you can have you can have cord uh do this or or parker regardless of which one you're using and go through the customer reviews go through the ad comments go through all the all the different data sources and say like go and find specific uh voice of customer about people who are mentioning fears about people who are mentioning false like false solutions.

What do they what do they believe uh about your product and the me the mech mechanism you have to disprove? What fail solutions have they used? you can literally turn the fail solutions into an ad script. And like when I'm going through this, I I think something that a lot of people tend to do when they're like looking at like a persona document or looking at voice of customer is um uh is they will start to paraphrase customers copy.

Like you you don't you generally don't want to paraphrase what people are saying because that is how your customers speak and your customers are your best copyriters. So if it says, and this is an example of a real ad that did well, like hubby looks freaking hot, like you can say hubby looks freaking hot rather than my husband is great. It's like those that is the exact reason why it's going to resonate with the person on the other side of that screen.

It's like using the actual words and phrases. >> Hey, if you want to extend your creative team, you should look at doing it in the Philippines with my friends at Behindsthesen Studio, btsstudio.co. So, Behind the Scenes Studio is a creative agency that is really built to be an extension of your team. So, they can do a combo of helping you if you've got creative strategists internally who need meta ad specific creative using the same kind of formats and frameworks and message focus as I have at AJF Growth.

They are sort of connected to me. I staff my team, my my entire creative team from BTS. And so, they're working really closely handin-hand with me thinking a lot about the things the same way that I am. And then they also can actually supply for you, you know, creative strategists who can really take on more of the the lion share of developing messages, doing the kind of things Alex and I are talking about in this episode, all at a reasonable cost because they are built in the Philippines.

I think if you're in somewhere around either that $50,000 per month in spend phase, you're trying to extend your team because it's getting harder, it's a great option for you. Or if you have more spend and you just want more creative, you've got ideas and you need great designers and editors at a reasonable price to keep generating more more with more diversity, a great option for you there as well. Go to btsstudio.co, get on a call with their team, see if they can be a good solution for you.

I'm a big fan. I've worked with them for forever and we're going to keep working with them. So they they've got a lot of my material and they're [music] helping me. Goes both ways. Thanks so much. btsstudio.co. This is so this is so helpful. So, I want to do two things here and and I just I'm going to voice this now so we make sure to come back to it. I want to actually come back to that specific phrase for a couple reasons.

But, um, so hobby looks freaking hot. Footnote that. We'll come back to it. Okay. First though, I want to talk about your your voice of customers and your five apps. Five apps is so helpful. Just easy to grab on to. I love that. So, let me just ask in the specifics of your process then. Are you using maybe it's Parker for you guys? Okay. Uh, and and maybe tell people what Parker is when you answer this question just in case they don't know.

Um, so they don't think you're you're uh you're you're not the uh failed uh e-commerce debt company. Um, okay. But uh but you you um lender, sorry, that's what they're called. Debt company. That's what it's called. It's called lender. Um you you are actually pursuing you're saying like, "Okay, I have a sense of who this customer is. I see them in their reviews talking about a a fear they had. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna like I'm gonna ask Claude or Parker or whatever to analyze their reviews to give me what does what do their reviews say that were the fears they had before using this product either about the product or about their experience or whatever.

And then I'm going to pull those fears and those fears then become the launching points for my ads. like is is do you have that written into a sort of clear process in a way that is used like that that specifically? >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, I actually did a YouTube video recently going through this process for a brand. >> Okay, let's Yeah. >> Can Can you send me the link afterwards? We'll put it in the show notes. >> Yeah, like literally I would do exactly that.

Like we're using AI um to categorize and rank the fears, girl solutions, fantasies, etc. um and actually like categorize it and then surface the voice of customs. So it's like fears uh fear of um fear of not spending enough time with her family, fear of you know what the different fears are and then there's supporting evidence below each fear and below each failed solution just so I can I really easily see as I'm going through this persona document um exactly where everything is and then then I can pick my launcher points.

If you do this well and if you got especially if you got a lot of, you know, information from comments, customer reviews, etc., you should be able to look at that document and read it for a few minutes and then you you have a ton of different launching off points uh that you can go and use for ads. >> Um, okay, that's great. So, so you're you're building up that way and again, we'll have a link for that full process in the in the show notes.

Um, just uh go ahead. Go ahead. >> But yeah, but I I forgot to ask the second part of the question like what is it done through? Um, so, oh yeah, there's a couple things I want to want to say on this. Um, first of all, you know, you can you should be doing it through I mean, the way that I do it, I actually use Claude, Parker, and and No AI. Like, I I I don't think that I it's you should just use Claude. You should just use Parkour, you should just do it on your own.

I think there's merits to all three. Claude is great at uh at reasoning and summarizing data. Parker is great at servicing your actual voice of customer. Basically, for those of you who don't know, Parker is is the tool that we built that that allows you to connect to all your different data sources like customer reviews, ad comments are pulled in there. Uh post-purchase surveys, all the different parts of the research process and, you know, give you one-click connections.

It syncs every day, so you don't have to worry about uploading CSVs into claude or connecting APIs. Uh and you can query it in the chat or like through the MCP now um in Claude. Um, Parker is really, really good at surfacing, you know, the voice of customer, which is why I use it for the, you know, the most of the persona process, but you could also you could also clar and the other thing is I I don't want people to to like hear this process or or or hear us talking about research and think that you should only just like, you know, in that YouTube video, I do share the exact prompts that we use to go through this process.

Don't just do that because like if you do that and you you're just relying on the AI research. I mean yeah there are multiple reasons why you want to do it but like you know first of all to know your customer better like if you go through and do this research manually especially the components that um that AI can't do like the consumption analysis on Tik Tok, Instagram etc. um you will get a really really good understanding of your you just spend five minutes reading through like sort the reviews by length and just start reading through the longest reviews that gives you a huge amount of context that would be difficult to get from just scanning AI report and the other thing is if you're going to do this through AI uh you want to have the ability to discern whether the AI output is good or not um you know my friend Barry had a had a good tweet recently that was like regard regardless of whether AI is right or wrong, it answers you really confidently.

Uh, and it's like, yeah, if you don't if you don't do the research manually first, >> you're not going to know what is right and what is wrong when it comes to the ear output. So, my my genuine research process is a combination of the three of them, Claude. I I actually feed the the outputs to and and from Parker and Claude, which might not be the best process, but I I like it cuz they start poking holes in each other.

And then I do that alongside of actual like manual like reading through some of the longest reviews, going on to Amazon, reading the reviews there, looking on Tik Tok, Instagram, looking at the comments, seeing what people are talking about in threads. Uh, and it's just a combination of all those that allows me to put together this persona document for each persona that we have. I think it's a great point both for not only evaluating the the AI output, but something that people miss about this whole process.

And part of the reason it should matter is that you're you're actually not just trying to think about an ad. You're trying to surface insights about your customer and think about the whole company. You know, you want to think about like the product development and the messaging angles and email and like and and and marketing moments that you want to hit and like and what your customers are doing at different times of year like it matters so much more than the ad.

What you're ultimately talking about here is who the customer so so the notion of just reading an AI output and trying to skirt around the mental friction required to read and think about the customer and try to glean insights and all that is a bad idea. like you you you should you should uh you should purposefully pursue that mental friction and lean into it, right? Uh and and make yourself think a little bit and then when you go to the AI notes and you're going to have better context to work with.

So, um I think all that matters a lot. Uh okay. So, uh so did we get enough Parker plug in there? This is a good spot for it. Alex, do you want to say anything else about Parker in this process? Uh yeah, I actually like we can go on talk about the brain and and how you can kind of synthesize it together which we think be could be a good point to talk about now like where I get really jazzed about this stuff is where you can build kind of a um a document that updates itself and is self-improving.

So for example, we still do this. The the process for our strategists when they go and do research on an account is they will conduct this initial audit which has our our five Fs like we just spoke about the trigger moment, awareness levels and sophistication levels. We have that purpose owner in a document and that document gets done like once through an onboarding and then actually gets like relooked at every single month as we do a retro on the previous month's creative and look forward to the next sprint and then start to allocate uh and rank um rank and allocate the different uh like splits between personas.

So that this is why I have to work like when I'm I think about being intentional with creative and again we don't always follow this process to a tea but we go um okay in the next sprint whether that be week two weeks month 50% of our creative is going to be persona one because that's our core persona 30% is going to be persona 2 because that is an up up and cominging um persona that we're trying to hit. And then 20% is just going to be we're just going to like kind of throw stuff against the wall and and see what happens based on what we're seeing in in invoice of customer.

And then that informs the next sprint and then the next retro, the next sprint etc. Um and then so that gets done like that document gets updated every single month for us. Now what we've started to do is take that document and move it into claude code. And again you can do this v uh with cord like through pull in a bunch of different MCPS or you can just pull in the Parker MCP to do it all for you. Now we have a system where claude code for via the Parker MCP will pull in our customer reviews basically pull in all that voice of customer uh like in in real time.

So it's a living breathing uh well that was stupid living it's just a living uh [laughter] kind of file system uh that every day it gets smarter because it's looking at the new customer reviews that come in the new ad comments the new uh threads on Reddit because it's looking at those data sources constantly. So now when the strategists are using cord and they're doing inside inside of the the uh the file structure they are working off of something that's getting smarter as new voice of customer comes in.

That's when I really get pumped up by this stuff because then the more you use that, the more your team use that, the the sharper the personas get and like the the smarter that overall brain gets. And that actually would be the the main reason that I would use Parker because it's so easy to pull in that MTP and then set up that brain for your team and and set up that like flow of having something that self-improves. >> Um, but yeah, you can also use the web app, but that's just, you know, this is why I get a bunch of other stuff because this is literally what we built for.

Yeah, I it's a a great use of like if the if the use of AI that you want to have is just like output ad copy like probably not that helpful if you want to use it to actually make it so that your access to information is easier and better and learning faster and you've just got sort of like this ability to generate more research etc. Like I think that's it makes sense to me that's the thing that you're jazzed about. There's just so much more you can do than just uh the sort of baseline level of like here give me some copy you know.

Um, so, okay. I want to come back over now to, by the way, is the video that you desri that you did called the real reason your Facebook ads won't scale. >> Yeah, that's it. Okay, great. All right. I I clandestinly found it while we were talking, so we don't even have to send a DM afterwards. It's in the show notes, everybody. Go get it. Uh, there you go. All right. Um, let's go back to your phrase that you talked about earlier.

So, uh, so hubby looks freaking hot. Is that right? >> That's correct. Okay. What uh can you say what the product was or or who the customer was or can you can tell me anything else about that phrase? >> Yeah. Uh the product was for a pair of jeans. It was for a brand that has like a very playful, slightly edgy tone um for uh you know the average guy I would say that jeans are for. >> Okay. So uh I have a number of questions about this.

One of them is do you remember was the customer clicking and buying that ad a man or a woman? uh June the first three quarters of the year it's a guy um and then in Q4 it switches to gifting and if people >> Okay. So that that ad worked uh that ad worked uh with men though, right? >> Yes. Yeah. During that time it was guys buying that. >> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting. Um, the thing I think about that phrase that is striking to me is that it it does the job like by maintaining that language, it sounds like a specific person to me, a person of a specific age uh, and a a person of a specific demographic and all of that in a way that I think is very effective.

And I I think that's part of the my my guess. It's always it's always hard to sort of reccon this sort of thing, but like or or or to not reccon, but just said to analyze in retrospect why something is working because it's not always this simple. But I've just been thinking about this notion so much of the personalized feed recently. And what that one of the things that phrase feels like I don't know like the use of the word freaking the use of the word hot the use of the word hubby the ph everything about it sounds like a millennial woman to me you know and uh in a way that like in a way that other phrasing wouldn't quite capture.

And so, so when you think about the notion of of of the of an ad performing because the message reaches a specific audience, that ad feels like a homing missile. That copy feels like a homing missile for millennial men, you know, and maybe for millennial women in gifting period as well who are married or or or or maybe even not married, but just who Yeah. But it it's just something about the way those words work. And so by and the thing that's interesting is like you said it's like it's an actual customer's comments.

Uh and one of the things I sort of believe is that uh is that the the people fear I think sometimes to use actual customer phrasing because it's so specific sometimes to a specific customer that it feels like it will leave too many too many other customers on the table, right? by saying hubby looks freaking hot, like are we going to leave all the single guys on the table or whatever it is? But in fact, I think that almost nobody is actually that unique and that if one person is saying the phrase hubby looks freaking hot, uh then that person actually stands for and reflects a whole bunch like they they stand on behalf of a whole bunch of other people, you know, um who would also use the word hubby like that, who would also use the phrase freaking hot like that.

And therefore, by capturing that real person's way of talking, that person's not actually unique. and that and and you you're actually speaking to a very specific group of people, but also a lot of them all at once. That that's my like that's my sort of backwards looking analysis of why that phrase works better and why it helps to use the actual customer phrase. React to that however you want. Yeah, I uh I agree and we have pretty high compass in that one because uh like we had seen a lot of variations of that and this is how you can kind of take customer language and and work out which ones to pick cuz you know there there is so much in our customer reviews that actually wouldn't be good for an ad.

But we had a lot of people saying my husband looks great in these jeans. So we go okay this is definitely a pattern. A lot of people saying this in in many different ways. what is the most emotive like striking piece of copy that we can find to represent this specific person? And you're right, like every other brand in your prospect's feed is writing the same generic copy, >> you're going to have more energy, you're going to decrease like you're going to all all that kind of stuff.

And it's like when you can find words like that, phrases like that that like >> Yes. Yeah, >> it's like that that's what like like strikes a nerve and and and they innately feel, oh wow, this is not there's no way this can be like a a brand trying to sell me something like they really understand me. You've heard me talk about Intell for a long time and that's because it is the testing tool of record in e-commerce. Intelligence is for great operators who want to find a way to drive more value to their brands to their bottom line with testing and then testing that goes way beyond the basics.

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And so when you find out that test that your variant cell beat your control cell at the level of conversion rate, you can actually see if it also generated more profit or not. Uh because of course that matters a lot when you're testing things like price and offer and all the rest. It's just really robust, really awesome, easy use to install, and they have great help. Go check it out for yourself. Go see, go see what recommendations it has for you, for your site, completely free.

Intelligjs.io/ audit. Most of my clients have Intelligjs at this point, and most of them will continue to because it's just a great tool and should be in your e-commerce tech stack. Intellgeems.io. Use the code fair 20% off your first three months. Go check it out today. I want to also though take this down to the deeper level of the original question of the episode which is sort of research and and continue to pick apart sort of how you get there because because if the goal here is to connect to a really specific persona and that is the goal I think the sort of the the foundational thesis underneath all of this is this idea that the feed is hyper specific and ads are hyperspecific now right this is sort of the postandra reality uh I've used this example a million times I'm going to use it again just because I think it's helpful uh I coach little league baseball this year for the first time.

My kids are four and six and uh and so we started getting in my wife's feed in particular started getting a lot of content about coaching tips for coaching little league baseball, but very specifically it was for coaching four and six-year-olds. They didn't call it that. They called it t-ball and coach pitch or something, right? Which is the levels they're at. And and so the the the the feed was full of coaching tips from sort of creator coach creators who were specifically talking about the challenges of teaching a four and six-year-old to play baseball, which is very different than the challenge of teaching a six a 10-year-old to play baseball.

And so my actual life experience and my wife's life experience was about how to teach a four-year-old to catch, not about how to teach a a 10-year-old to catch better, right? Uh because that four-year-old can't catch. So, so um that resonates down to the level of the specific customer in a specific way in a way that I think is is so personalized and that that is I think what the feed is and the max the way to maximize reach in the present moment of ads is to find as many of those specific scenarios as possible because it turns out lots of people are trying to teach four-year-olds how to how to how to uh how to catch right uh during you know three months a year basically.

Uh so so the way to maximize reach is to find those people and speak really specific to them because all the other content on their feed is extremely specific and so how do you so hubby looks freaking hot now jeans is a broad tam product right so so it's not super surprising to me that like you don't have to get that specific when you're selling a pair of jeans to a married guy. Okay. But but still you've actually moved you've actually moved from these jeans make you look good to something a little more specific of a husband and wife which implies a certain age.

The phrase hubby probably implies I don't know a certain like age demographic also might imply a a racial demographic. I'm not totally sure there how everybody talks. Um the phrase freaking hot seems to do that. So, like what I'm trying to think of is like how do you continue to uncover more of those really specific ways people talk? Now, you talked about the idea of personas earlier. You talked about the five Fs, but I'm wondering if there's anything else that you do or you think about and maybe maybe you I mean maybe this is not where you would take it, Alex.

Maybe this is not your process, but um what are some other ways to what other inroads can you find to go find those specific ways of talking to those specific customers? Whether you want to use that example more or or something different. Um, yeah. So, another way that you can uncover these sort of entry points is by prompting for trigger events. So, what was the what was the specific moment that this person said, "Oh, this is a problem I need to solve." Or like, "Oh, I need to go and find a a solution for this." Because you see that example, hubby, uh, hubby looks freaking hot.

The the persona for that would not have been wives of, you know, 35 to 55 year old guys. Like that would not have been the person we use. Like the persona or the trigger event may have been uh the the um wife who fell in love with her husband when they got married at 30 years old and now he's let himself go a bit and he just really wants him to like look like himself again and look like the man that she fell in love with. like that is a trigger event for her then going to purchase like something that she would believe that would make him look better.

That would could also be a trigger trigger event for him like that conversation of the wife saying like hey you know you know uh so um you can prompt for trigger events. People will tell you these again in in your uh customers customer reviews in your posturch surveys. You can literally, you know, if you ask it in a in a clever and respectful way, you can you can ask that as a question in your in your postbudget surveys and you'd be surprised how much information people are willing to give.

Some of the longer reviews, some of the longer surveys, even sometimes in ad comments, they will give you like preurchasing, they will give you uh these trigger events. They can be great for helping you set up the scene. Whether it be like you actually setting up that scene visually in the ad. Or whether it just be someone starting the ad by saying like by by going through that that exact scenario and and saying, "Hey, I I was like I was like this and and then and then I decided to buy him these jeans." So that's another way that you can get in and and if you can find specific trigger moments again that is how you're going to create or not create uncover these uh kind of golden pieces of copy because you are tapping into moments that feel extremely relatable to them rather than just give them service level copy. >> I'm thinking about an example here to your point.

Um, I'm going to show you I'm going to show you a client of mine. Okay, these guys specifically said they want they were they were down to get shouted out on the uh on the podcast. So, it's a it's a brand that has just started really embracing Facebook ads as part of their growth. They have a really really great brand. They've been around for a while. Um, but they're called um Solstice Watersports. Okay. Solstice Watersports.

They are uh they sell a bunch of different inflatable products for like especially for Sols is for like for sort of related to boats and docks like lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake lake like lake lake fun right so they have these dock products it's it's a really clever product you can see there's a whole bunch of them here I'm sharing my screen for for those who are listening a whole bunch of different ones there's ones that have like your dog can climb up into it really easily there's ones with mesh in it so you can kind of sit in the water in the lake it's really really really clever other ones that are just are sort of standard docks Okay.

Um uh and and I'm looking at the reviews trying to think through this a little bit. Um and and here's one of them, right? Carl Carl says, "I've just used this for the first time for business. I use it to inspect a 30-foot power boat that was on a mechanical lift over the water. It worked perfectly." So that that thing uh oh it very firm to walk on and easy to maneuver. So there's like a fear there. People are nervous that an inflatable thing is not going to be firm enough for them to walk on it, even though they want to use it to do this very specific thing, which is inspecting the power boat.

If you were to go through all the reviews, I can just tell you because I've looked at it. Um, there's another one here primarily used to clean sides of the boat, opposite side of the dock. Um, so like there's definitely one of the use cases of this product, you know, it's it's all the product images and stuff are like showing people um showing people having [clears throat] fun on the dock, right? But actually when you look at the customers, one of the major use cases here is people cleaning their boats because it's really annoying to try to clean the side of a boat in the water.

Okay? So instead they can inflate their dock. They can move it around the boat really easily and they can inflate it. So but now you've got this very specific situations in which people can talk. So there's a fear listed there which is like it's not going to be it's not going to be firm enough when I when I walk on it. It's it's inflatable. So it's going to be like a pool float. Okay. Uh and you could can't stand on that.

But then also like there's this really specific scenario of inspecting a 30-foot power boat on a mechanical lift over the water. Now I I don't know how many customers are out there who are inspecting power boats on lifts over the water as part of their job. Like and and it makes me nervous to go write an ad that says something like that because I feel like I'm going to that the TAM of that ad is like 100 people. Now it's probably you know I'm being hyperbolic a little bit but like it feels so small but like I I don't know.

I don't know. I just see something here where you can go like are can you see the specific setting that the product is in for this person and begin to write towards that in a way that is going to feel like this because maybe that person on their feed is getting a bunch of I don't know powerboat related material or something like that you know like um so I don't I don't know where your mind goes with that Alex if you see anything in those reviews and if it if it sort of triggers anything and maybe it's not the best example but but yeah no that that's such a great point and you know use cases another is another entry point and and you know as you just identified there sometimes customers will use your use your products in not in the way that you that you thought they would and that can be a huge unlock in ads.

I remember I've given this example before we have a anti-dandruff shampoo brand and um you know all of their ads were about you know uh dandruff and and how to get rid of it. Uh, and then we found in like deep in a in a Reddit thread, um, one day we saw people like not talking about this specific brand, but saying like a similar ant dandruff shampoo brand. Uh, I I've been using this on my beard and it gets rid of my beard dandruff and were like, "Oh, interesting." So again, that was something that we had that was really not validated in the same I don't know how validated that example you just gave was, but like if I'm sitting there going, okay, like this is pretty I mean yours was more specific than mine, but like this is a pretty specific use case or or trigger event.

Um, I'm really not sure if this the TAM here is is too small to actually make an ad that scales, then like you can just go and test it with statics cuz if that copy is good enough, I believe that will get through to them even if it's a static ad. >> Um, so that's what we went and did with this beard dandruff angle. We tested it in statics. The statics did really well and then we went and turned it into a bunch of videos ended up doing really well as well.

Now that's that's a legitimate angle um in inside their ad account. Uh the other thing that I would say on this earlier uh this as well to go back to what we were saying earlier is that's why like I would encourage people to um to do some form of retro or planning after every sprint or after every whatever whatever you consider a batch of creative a week or two weeks a month. And I'm not saying you have to do this exactly, but like have some form of, you know, okay, in this in this next sprint, in this next week, in this next month, we are going to make X% of our creative towards this persona and Y% towards this one and and and Z from American uh and Zed for this persona.

Um, and you know, then generally you can go, okay, this is this is not validated. I'm not sure if this is going to work. I'm not sure the town is big enough. let's put 10% of our creative volume towards this next month and then we can you have a control and see uh see if that persona is something that we want to invest more time into. But yeah, I mean as well as show use cases are are you when you can find a new use case for your product and tap into that again you're going to create copy that uh you're going to write copy that uh really strikes a nerve in people. >> Yeah.

Let's jump over to uh other forms of research outside of reviews and things like that. Are you guys what are you doing? Are you checking Reddit? Are you reading other places, watching videos? Like, where else are you looking for for help with this sort of thing? >> Yeah. Uh, so outside of ad comments, I think, are great. I think comments in general are just incredible. Like ad comments I I find them very useful. We pull them into Parker.

We uh pull in more ad comments than any other tool. I think there only other handful of other tools that do it in general, but we pull in way more than any other tool. So, I love to query them inside of Parker. Um, but in general comments, I think you can there's so much gold in like going and typing in, you know, your brand into YouTube, uh, into Tik Tok, into Instagram, and and or if you're not big enough, typing competitors and seeing what the comments and responses are, uh, in the threads.

That's not something that AI is very good at scraping, or at least I found it to be very good at scraping at the moment. But again, going back to what we were saying earlier with the manual research, you will learn so much by seeing how people interact, what words they use, what phrases they use, what questions they have, what objections they have um when talking about your product or your problem. Um, outside of that, support tickets I find to be very good.

Reddit obviously, although I will say I haven't been using Reddit as much recently because I feel like the content is becoming more bot generated. Um, so I'm trying to lean into, you know, more um >> more data sources that are directly from customers if we can. Uh, and then like how are people consuming content online is the other is the other huge part of this. It's not just a like what they're saying, but like what kind of content they consuming on YouTube, on Instagram, on Tik Tok.

A cool like thing that you can do to like start to understand that is just when you do that when you do the five Fs uh for each persona just start to type in like their pain points or their fears into Tik Tok or into YouTube. So it could be for that brand uh how to get rid of dandruff and then just look at what comes up because that is what the people in this persona are uh are consuming and look at you know what like what kind of creators are being used uh what kind of you know how is it shot is it high production is it low production uh you know what like what the setting is how are they speaking what's their tone how are they addressing the problem how they then transition into solution if there is one and these are all the kind of things that we're trying to understand sometimes If I'm doing strategy on account, I I will go and create burner accounts and literally just um consume like I just really try and like and I know obviously someone wouldn't just have a whole feed of dandruff uh content, but you know, you can trade it pretty quickly um and uh and really get a good idea for the type of content that they're seeing.

Uh so that's something you can do too. And >> how do you do that? How do you train it? What do you do? Like let's say you want the dandruff content like just just search for uh the content. And so going back to the example, if you searched in in Tik Tok how to get rid of dandruff, go and watch every video that you can see that you think would that would be viewed by uh someone from that audience, save it, send it to your personal account if you want.

Just like it, give as many signals to the algorithm as possible that this [laughter] is a piece of content that you want. And then it's just going to very quickly it's just it's such a hyper relevant feed. Very quickly you'll find that your feed is full of that stuff. And that's great because as an advertiser I can just find a bunch of organic content that I can either swipe myself or or or or just um or just un like understand what's working uh about that uh piece of content such that it goes and does a million views or you know whatever it is.

So let's summarize here. I I hear you saying you don't find a lot of things like Reddit to be really that helpful. that the most helpful thing overwhelmingly for you is really just digging into the information that you can get from your specific customers uh from reading reviews, reading comments on your ads as another source of this thing. Um and maybe even sort of putting on your customer suit by by creating a burner account and trying to behave like them and see what else they're getting. use all of that.

A mix of a processoriented thing like um the five Fs that you gave earlier, some tools like Parker and Claude and and a few things together to help you uh coalesce that information into one place, make it more usable. Use the summaries from the tools, but also read the reviews yourself. Um and then in midst of all of that, sprinkle in a little bit of gut feel and about sort of ideas and things like that. all while uh wherever possible leveraging your customer's actual voice in the copy.

Don't paraphrase their voice, just use their voice. Uh hobby looks freaking hot and and run that as an ad. And you have the the solid beginnings of a really good research process that's going to get you ideas that will create entry points into specific categories, help you form personas, help you get ideas of sort of the trigger events in their lives and start speaking to those things. And then of course, you know, I think probably you'd agree with this.

We haven't really talked about it, but as you see ads start to spend, we sort of referenced a little, you get a sense of which ones of these messages are sort of floating up to the top of your of your mix of ads and and then you can use that as jumping off points for more. Did I miss anything? >> That was a really good summary. I think that, you know, sometimes it can sound a little bit rahrh when people say, "Oh, it's all in the research.

You have to keep going back to the research." And like you know if you're not someone who if you if you work in another f business or you just don't make ads or or this is new to you can go ah yeah I I I hear you. But when when you really do go deep on personas you really go deep on understanding the the the different types of avatars on the other side of that screen. There's no way if you go through that full process and or like anything that we spoke about today and extensively mine your different personas uh voice of customer uh there's no way that you get the document end of it and you won't start to have a bunch of different ideas to to go and create ads and um yeah that's what it will come back to.

Your customers are the best copyrighters. So just listen to them. They'll give you the winning ads. >> All right, Alex, tell people where to go to follow up with you. >> Um best place to buy me is X. Uh, I am Alex Goff Cooper. Terrible for >> links to the show notes. It's all right. It's all right. You don't have to remember how to spell that. Just go just go just open up the show notes or look the description on YouTube.

You got the link. >> Um, if you want to use Parker, it's hey Parker.ai. Literally everything we spoke about today, we've made it easy for you to bring it into one place. You can also do a bunch of other things in there. There's AI tag in. There's, you know, ads sorted by impressions. You can swipe uh other ad libraries. You can save it your own um swipe file. You can connect it via the MCP. ly you can do everything in cord code and build that living brain that I get so jazzed about because it just it's just so cool to see it auto update with your voice of customer and it just gets smarter every time the team uses it.

So yeah, I'm also going to make a YouTube video on that soon. So subscribe so YouTube if you if you want to see that too. >> Cool. And that that uh all the links for all those things uh are all in the show notes. Uh Alex, thanks so much man. I appreciate your time. >> Thank you Andrew. [music] Thanks so much for watching or for listening. subscribe wherever you're doing that. Leave a comment on this video. I read and reply to every one of them.

So, make sure you do that. And uh and of course, if you want to work with AJF Growth and our team on your ads, go to ajfgrowth.com, fill out the intake form, tell me a little bit about your business. We'll get a conversation started. Even if we are not the right fit for you, we might have a recommendation for who the right fit for [music] you actually is. You can also just email me. podcastfgrowth.com is an easy way to get a hold of me as well.

And big thanks to my sponsors for this episode's behindthe-scenes studio. BTSO.co Co and Intelliggeems, both great sponsors that I've worked with for a long time. Go check both of those out. The links for everything as always are in the show notes. And I have a bunch of great episodes coming up, including more about angle development at the level of landers and offers with a key team member at Grunes and talking about how they did that there and are still doing that there for maximizing reach.

That's going to be a really good episode. Just a whole bunch of really good stuff. Don't [music] miss any of it. Thanks so much for watching or listening. Like I said, I'll talk to you