Where do you find inspiration for your brand’s organic and paid ad content? And once you find a reference, what’s your process for producing and editing the content? 

If this is your first time reading the New Edition Newsletter, I’m Brandon Blum, Founder and Managing Partner at New Edition - a boutique creative agency based in New York City that helps seven and eight figure eCommerce brands create content.

Typically, for clients, we lead creative end-to-end; from ideation to final production. When we onboard a client, we always do some variation of the same thing. 

• Identify “expander brands”

• Confirm target audience(s)

• Begin a folder of inspiration

• Organize raw content  

In this week's newsletter, I’m giving a little peek behind the curtain on our creative process.

Look, this isn’t open-heart surgery. It’s about being organized, deliberate, and communicative - both internally and externally.

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SET THE TABLE

Before you begin searching around meta’s ad library, Instagram, etc. for inspiration, make sure you create two internal documents…

Create a list of brand expanders

Identify 2-3 leaders in your category and 2-3 leaders or challengers in other categories.

This list of 4-6 brands should be dynamic. Come back once a quarter and see if it’s worth dropping 1-2 and adding in 1-2 new brands.

Design your target customer(s)

Odds are, you have 2-4 customer profiles. Each respond or take action based on different value props.

Create a one-pager outlining these audiences. Give each a human name, what are their pain points? Add in a few psychographics (hobbies, interests, etc.), age and gender.

Every piece of content you create should be for at least one of these audiences.

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FIND YOUR AD INSPIRATION

Use Meta's ad library and/or Foreplay to source inspiration, then organize creatives systematically in Slack and Notion for easy access.

Source Ad Creatives

I’ve mentioned this many times in previous newsletters, but we spend a good amount of time in meta’s ad library, sourcing ad creatives for clients.

Lately though, I’ve really been using and loving Foreplay. This is where we’re looking at what our expander brands are doing; what they’re running, hooks that work for them and so on. It’s a huge unlock.

Build Ad Creative Organization

Organization is imperative. Do what works for you. I recently listened to Oren John on the Open Residency podcast talk about his process on this.

What we do is save creatives in Foreplay. If I find something I really like, I share it in slack with either my team or in an external channel with our clients for a gut check.

If I know I’m going to be using a creative as a reference for something soon, I’ll add it to a “Not Started” video or static ad creative in our project database in Notion, so it’s there once when we kick the creative production off for that asset.

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GET YOUR DUCKS IN A ROW

Create organized brand kits with fonts, colors, logos and structured asset folders to save time and streamline creative production.

Build a brand kit

Spend a little bit on the front end putting together an organized brand kit. Make sure your kit - at the very least - includes brand fonts, colors, logos and icons.

You’ll save yourself a ton of time down the road, each time someone asks for your logos, fonts, colors, etc.

Organize your raw assets

Create a dropbox or google drive and dump all creative assets in neatly organized folders. This is where you’ll have full usage UGC files, product videos/images, founder content, licensed stock images/videos, etc.

The more organized you are here the better. Make it easy on yourself and your team whenever someone goes into these folders to try to pull something out to use.

CREATE THE CONTENT

Build a project management database

Notion AI can now build a database in seconds. Above is an example of the backend of a specific ad creative we built for one of our clients, Symbiome.

The properties above are all important for their own reasons, but it’s possible there’s other properties worth including that are important for your team’s specific workflow.

Use our ad creative storyboard template

Whether you’re working with a full time video editor, a freelancer, a contractor, whatever; creating a storyboard will remove a lot of ambiguity. Your creative partners will thank you.

Download our storyboard template. It’ll help.

HOUSE THE FINALS

Once your asset is finalized, leave the asset somewhere where you can reference or pull it easily. Maybe that’s Notion, Google Drive, Dropbox - whatever. Just store them somewhere where it’s easy to get them if needed.

Your creative process is costing you conversions at every stage—and peak season is too important to wing it.

The four non-negotiables: identifying expander brands for inspiration, organizing your asset library systematically, creating detailed storyboards, and housing finals strategically.

Which step are you prioritizing first? Email me at [email protected] and let me know.

See you next time ✌️