The ad creative landscape is changing...

Hey guys,

A few weeks ago I sat down with two of my good friends Loukas and Olly (from For You Advertising) and we caught up on how the world of ad creative landscape is changing.

By the way, if you want to listen to our full conversations, you can find the D2C Diaries pod here and the one on my YouTube channel here.

And today, I'm breaking down 5 of the biggest shifts we discussed and seeing exactly how to apply them to your creative process.

But first, here’s what I’ve come across in AI this week:

• Someone on LinkedIn built a free Frame alternative with AI feedback that handles technical QA so you can focus on actual creative direction

• Claude Sonnet 4 now has 1M tokens (up from 200k) - this will be a game changer for workflows building with Claude

• This guy shared a pretty cool GPT prompt to make ChatGPT your prompt engineer

5 things I’m seeing in the ad creative landscape right now

Meta is favoring partnership ads

Whitelisting ads are crushing in ad accounts right now. And it makes sense, Meta have openly come out and said they’re pushing them in 2025.

You can start simple with founder ads - and the founder doesn't need an existing presence. I'm seeing people create completely new identities with zero following and finding success just by running through different Instagram accounts.

The progression is: founder ads → expert partnerships → creator collaborations → larger influencer partnerships.

I audited a major brand recently and all their top spenders were whitelisted celebrity partnerships. Nothing else came close.

Longer ads are winning

This is probably the biggest shift I'm seeing across accounts right now. Many of our best performers don't introduce the solution for 20-30 seconds, with some top spenders being 4-5 minutes long.

We’ve literally taken multiple top performers and stitched them together to create these mini-VSL style stories.

There's no such thing as an ad that's too long, just an ad that's too boring.

Understanding storytelling makes you indispensable

Storytelling is not an easy skill to acquire, but it does make producing great ads a HECK of a lot easier.

The biggest mistake I see is surface-level problem identification. If you're selling skincare for acne, don't just talk about spots. Go deeper into core human desires - confidence, relationships, status.

One technique I love is the "5-year-old test" - instead of "optimizes your microbiome," say "it's like a traffic light in your gut - green lets the good stuff through, red stops the bad stuff."

Or instead of "My acne got so bad," try "I canceled dinner with my friends because I couldn't cover my spots." Then close the loop at the end of the ad: "Now I go out without even wearing makeup."

Another good example Loukas brought up was instead of talking about joint pain, a top performer said "my knees used to go snap, crackle, and pop like Rice Krispies." That visual, emotive language is what separates good ads from great ones.

Here’s a great YouTube video from my friend Loukas about this.

You’ll find way better inspiration on the organic feed than you will in ad libraries

Instead of just copying competitors (who are copying their competitors, who are copying their competitors), I’ve found way better inspiration on the organic feed recently.

All we're trying to do with our ads is replicate what prospects see on the organic feed. So it makes sense that we look here first to give us ideas for content we can create that blends in to stand out.

I can't tell you how many times we've done this, sent it to a creator, got it recreated, and it goes and becomes a top-performing ad.

TikTok is great, but I actually also love YouTube Shorts. I think it's highly underrated for ad inspiration.

Pro Tip: Use the Foreplay Instagram, DM integration. Whenever I see something I want to save, I just send it to the Foreplay business account and it saves straight to my Foreplay account. I use this literally every day.

There is no one way to brief creators

This is something that I see brands and agencies get wrong all the time. They have a set template for every single ad they make with creators.

And that makes sense operationally, but it ends up with all of your ads looking the same.

We have brief templates at Adcrate, but I tell our strategists “just do whatever you think most clearly communicates the vision you have in your head for the ad across to the creator on the other side”.

Whether that’s a fully scripted brief, complete freedom, a Loom video, a Foreplay board, whatever.

And that also varies by industry and by creator.

For supplements, we almost never give complete freedom because creators will say something they shouldn't. For food brands, we rarely give full scripts because authenticity matters more.

Generally, I think that the top 10% of creators are better without scripts and the bottom 90% are better with scripts.

Making footage work harder

Too many brands use footage once and discard it. But winning footage is being thrown away because the story wasn't told right.

Tools like Frame 4.0 now have AI that auto-labels content based on what it sees and transcribes. You can search by keywords and find specific clips instantly.

This allows us to reuse footage and make it go further by turning it into more ads.

And if you look at some of the most successful brands on paid social, it’s literally how they make most of their ads.

• DR script

• Great B-roll (being reused)

• AI voiceover

It’s not fancy. It doesn’t look that creative. But it does work.

Announcements:

We’re hiring! I’m currently looking for 2 key roles for experienced killers to join Adcrate:

• Creative Strategist (on the client side team)

• Creative Strategist Researcher (on my content team)

Click on the links to find out more. We’re looking for people who are hungry to work with some of the best of the best.

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See you next week,

Alex

P.S. If you're spending $100k+ monthly on paid social and want help implementing systems like these, my team at Adcrate is accepting applications to work with us. Check out our case studies at adcrate.co.