Closing the loop between performance and strategy

Hey guys,

The number one question I get in consulting calls is how to close the loop between the performance and strategy team.

As a creative agency of 40+ people with 8 on the strategy team and 5 on the performance team we have a structure in place for sharing learnings across the two teams and I’m going to be sharing it today.

But first, here's what I've found interesting this week:

• DTC Midas wrote a great tweet on what it means to be a top creative strategist. See my response here

• Seedance 2 released and it’s CRAZY - here’s someone recreating Hollywood style movie scenes with just a single prompt. This might be best generative AI model out there today.

• GeoSpy AI dropped and it can pinpoint exact locations from just a single image…kinda scary lol

How we close the loop between the performance and strategy team

I’m going to break this down into 3 sections:

• Calls

• Reporting

• Channels

So let’s get started…

Calls

We have two weekly calls, and we rotate between a list of five sessions:

1) Creative Brainstorms

These are purely vibes driven.

Everyone brainstorms for one specific client with ideas for concepts, hook, headlines, visuals building off each other.

The only rules: No looking at ad accounts and no idea is stupid.

This is often where we do the post it note exercise:

2) Performance Syncs

We spend this one reactively looking at an ad account looking for things that are working.

That means asking:

• What's working and what’s not?

• What should we do more/less of?

• How do take action ASAP on this data to iterate faster?

3) Show and Tell

Everyone brings one piece of organic content they’ve found and explains why they like it.

We get so many ideas from doing this - just recently we had a TikTok that was surfaced on one of these calls in August go on to do over $300k in adspend in Q4.

4) External Expert Sessions

We get experts to come in and teach us a specific topic.

We ask the team to vote on a topic of their choice, we then go out and find the best people and ask to pay for their time.

This pic was taken from a session with my friend Sarah on ad psychology (she did a GREAT job).

I would encourage anyone to try this if they haven't already.

5) Internal Training

Internal training calls hosted by execs/senior leadership.

Some recent topics include: AI, static headlines, VSLs, ugly ads.

Someone will volunteer to deep dive on a topic for a few days, then presents their findings to the team.

And we don’t limit this to leadership - anyone on the team can take the initiative and bring back valuable information for the entire agency.

This structure has been super beneficial for us at Adcrate and ultimately keep the strategists and the performance team on the same page.

Async Reporting

Media buyers deliver one report weekly to the strategy team that covers:

1. Performance review - rundown on last week’s performance

2. Strategic actions - what’s working, what’s not, what we should do more of

Tip: You can now do this reporting inside of Parker. Just pick the reports that you want to generate, select the schedule, and have them delivered to your Slack every week.

They also fill in a daily audit log, but that’s only shared with the team if there’s something urgent to flag.

Slack channels

Here are some Slack channels we have to share learnings across the team:

1. #winners-circle - sharing ads that are ripping and what we can learn from them

2. #ad-inspo - sharing organic inspiration for cool concepts people find online

3. #ai - anything AI-related

4. #ad-reviews - when anyone wants a second pair of eyes on an ad edit

I also get a folder of all the ads we've created in the last 7 days sent to me every Monday (as mentioned here). I'll record a Loom video and send it into our strategy channel with common mistakes or things that we can generally improve on.

I’d be interested to hear if you guys have anything similar in place or if you’ve tried any of these with your team already. Let me know by hitting reply to this email!

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See you next week,

Alex