How to train your brain like a marketing genius

In this video, we are going to go through how to train your brain like a marketing genius.

We live in a world now where marketing and distribution and content are one of the most important skills. And everyone knows what manufacturer to use to make whatever product. Anyone can copy whoever's idea. Software becomes easier to code. More and more people than ever have to discover a marketing toolkit. And they're beginning to realize it's not super simple, mainly because it goes foundationally against how we think as humans. We are naturally selfish creatures. We think in our own perspectives. We have our own biases. And to be an amazing marketer, you need to put yourself in other people's shoes and accumulate libraries, references, and ideas that are far beyond what normal people consume.

I have been working on this now for almost two decades, starting as a designer, working my way into content marketing, into sales, into product marketing, all the way up to being one of the most in-demand creative strategists in the world. You see me speaking on stage at Ken, doing workshops with Fortune 500 brands from fast food all the way to the biggest software, and working as a creator on really thoughtful and interesting campaigns with brands across the spectrum.

In this video, I'm going to share how to think, how to organize, and how to have perspective around marketing in a way that will make you stand out from everybody else. We're going to talk about people and the root of this, how to gain insights around what people consume and why, and use that to turn into marketing ideas. We're going to talk about references and visuals and how to build and think through actually creating those and building your own toolkit there. I'm going to walk through books to read and sociologists to consider, all the different tools if you want to be doing things like hacking funnels and figuring out how people do tactical items. Now I'm going to talk about the mind state shifts that are super important, probably more important than anything else here, in approaching marketing and creative work.

I'm super excited for this video. Fuck in. So I am out here in Puglia, Italy. Very random, I know, but I'm spending about a week here working on my upfronts. The upfronts is a term from traditional marketing and advertising. If you were a TV show or a TV network going into a new season or a new item, you would do upfronts to actually showcase all of your programming and then advertising or product placement opportunities brands would have within them. So even now you can see Paramount Plus will do upfronts for brands to consider how they could get placed inside of Paramount Plus shows or if they want to do advertising on a debut, etc.

And I'm working on that as a creator because, as many of you know, creators have very lucrative advertising deals now. You've seen me do work with all the biggest names from Claw to Cash App to Notion, Google, Amex, etc. But it's sporadic. It's up and down. And so one of my goals is to smooth out what that plan and cash flow looks like. And that requires creative planning, putting together a year of what content and ideas look like and how you can potentially integrate partners and come up with ideas that will resonate, build IP, etc.

And I realized, as I am doing that out here, just how much making content has influenced my thinking about marketing. It allowed me to put myself in the perspective of brands, of how would you hook around a concept and think through the nuance of creation. What I want to talk through in this video is how to speed-run that perspective.

So let's start with a core tactic. Every successful marketing campaign ever, every book you've read, every time I was mentored as a younger creative or worked on a campaign agency side, started with who is the customer? Where are they online or in real life where we can reach them? Where can you find that customer and advertise to them? How do you attract them? So when you have that advertising opportunity, how do you get them excited? And then what is the result you are presenting them? What are they going to get from your product?

This is basically the core of every marketing funnel or campaign ever, right? And it hasn't changed a ton for the past few decades. But what has changed is that people have gotten intricate. It used to be big monoculture items, right? I used to watch MTV when I was growing up. And you would see a clothing trend happening on MTV. Everyone's wearing a certain brand or type of clothes or whatever now, and that would get mirrored in the few magazines that we have that people actually read. And you would watch a shift inside your school or with people around you as these things permeate in pop culture.

But now we have these hundreds of little microcosms of what people are into. And that is an opportunity for younger marketers, people that want to think online, to actually drill down and come up with interesting ideas. So we're going to start with this concept of people. If you want to be a marketing genius, you want to be able to have content that performs, ads that crush, you need to master putting yourself in someone else's shoes. And within people, we have the people themselves and then have the insights that come from them. Let me break that framework down for you.

So if you want to discover insights about people, you need to watch them, you need to see them, preferably in real life, or recreate their experience online. A good way to think about this is the more out and about you are, you see me traveling the world all the time because I want to have a lot of perspective. And I have the resources to do that. But if I'm in France, I'm basically looking at, okay, what are the youth wearing? What are the brands I haven't seen before? How is Marseille different than Paris in terms of its style? Why do our products perform better in Australia versus what they do in California? You get to watch and see how people act, what they consume, etc.

One of the keynotes I've had around this, meeting with some friends out here in Italy, is the difference in entrepreneurship culture, right? Where it's actually so hard to break out of the social norms in rural Italy of, yeah, we're going to go to dinner, we're going to spend a couple of hours on it, we're going to chat after. If you are an entrepreneur, you're trying to lock in in the evening when every one of your friends is engaged in this long social experience, that's actually harder than the U.S., where people are a little bit less social and it's a little bit more approachable to be able to say, hey, I'm going to go do my own thing. Those are all little points you can think about or find in conversation around engaging with people.

And your job as a marketer is to come up with insights, ideas around this. And this is what you've seen in my content, right? So if you follow my content on short form here on YouTube, you've seen I present a lot of insight ideas. Men don't dress for women anymore to impress them, they dress for other men. People buy houses that are too big for them. People buy luxury for this reason. Almost all these videos I have are putting an insight out there, an idea, and then looking to get it validated.

If you break that down to its core, that's what every marketer needs to do. They need to be able to see insights around them about their target consumers. How do people shop? What do they buy? What do they believe? And then you need the ability to validate them. And what's amazing about the world we live in right now is you can validate in two ways we basically never had when I was a marketer growing up.

And the first is content, what I'm doing. I will have an idea about luxury. I had a video about why people buy luxury, and it's because of how little respect they get from success, right? If you get success now in this world, people immediately go, nepo baby, oh, it's family money. Anyone could do that. And a lot of people that worked really hard for that feel a certain type of way about it, and it changes how they consume. That's an insight idea that I've had. So I will put out a video and basically see what the response looks like. And I can engage from that where a lot of people will disagree or they'll agree. And you look at them, you look at their profile, and you go, okay, well, why did they agree or disagree? Are they mirroring themselves? Do they have this innate belief? Is the target demographic I'm talking about agreeing or not? And you can begin to validate those ideas online really easily by creating content.

And the second way you can validate them is inside the Meta ads account, right? So if you are not familiar with Meta ads and the way they work now, it's ads on Facebook and Instagram. It is the most direct source for generating income any marketer has for any brand. And this idea of lots of creative is what's succeeded over the last few years. We don't have five ads or 10 ads. You have a hundred ads. You're constantly testing new angles, new ideas, statics and videos, and videos with creators and UGC. And you have to come up with this continual list of insights and ideas. And what this has done has made a lot of really cracked creative strategists. Because once you

Is the target demographic I'm talking about agreeing or not? And you can begin to validate those ideas online really easily by creating content. And the second way you can validate them is inside the Meta ads account, right? So if you are not familiar with Meta ads and the way they work now, it's ads on Facebook and Instagram. It is the most direct source for generating income any marketer has for any brand. And this idea of lots of creative is what's succeeded over the last few years. We don't have five ads or 10 ads. You have a hundred ads. You're constantly testing new angles, new ideas, and statics and videos and videos with creators and UGC. And you have to come up with this continual list of insights and ideas. And what this has done has made a lot of really cracked creative strategists. Because once you start doing, oh, I have to come up with 50 ad ideas. I need to understand my consumer. I need to understand all the psychology. And you get in a rhythm of that, you become really good. It's almost hard not to if you are focused on success there. And so your job as someone trying to become good at the marketing is to see these things around you. How do people interact, whether it's online or in the real world? How do they dress? What do they buy and why? Hey, lots more people are using this style and that, and asking why and coming up with a thesis. I think this is good, or I think this is bad, or I think it happened for this reason. Then validating that thesis, making content about it, seeing the results, or making ads about it and seeing if they generate a return or they get any spend. Because the Meta algorithm for ads, whether it shows it to more people or those people buy something, is the ultimate validator, and it's cheaper and easier to do than ever.

And so how do you do this? You do this by relentlessly putting yourself in other people's shoes. Every time you see something that's become popular, whether you like it or not, ask yourself, why does the target demographic like this? Why does that person wearing that shirt, why do they buy it? Why do they like it? Come up with an idea, a thesis. And you see a piece of content online. Okay, this has 8,000 shares. Who are they sharing it with? Are they sharing it with their spouse? Are they sharing it with their friend group, a group chat, a fellow entrepreneur? Are they sharing it at work? You begin to see how content moves. You begin to come up with an idea of why. And your ideas won't always be right. But it's the habit of coming up with the idea to validate that turns you from a normal person to a person who thinks in that marketing way. And then you take this level deeper in the psychology level. Who is this to impress? Because one thing you will learn, you will become jaded on as you become more and more of a marketer, is that marketers know that all of us are simple creatures. We want dopamine. We want likes on our posts. We want messages when we log into whatever app. And we want validation. We want the people around us, our spouse, our friends, casuals, family, whatever, to like us, to give us compliments, to think highly of us. And then we are competitive. We want to feel better than the people around us. These are innate human beliefs that what you'll notice, especially for younger marketers, is that they're so resistant to these ideas. Oh, I'm better than that. And what you learn as you run more and more ads is that no one's better than that. And everyone will say they are. They'll be in the comment section of whatever video. Oh, I would never do this for those people. Oh, I don't think like that. And you'll begin to understand there's a separation between the conscious, what people say, and the subconscious. And what marketers do in our great act is ignoring the conscious. Maybe they take a few insights from it, but you go, are these people performing versus what do they really act like? And then building theses is based on their actions.

And you will see this inside my videos. I call out all kinds of things that people would never admit. Men dress for other men versus dressing to impress women was one of them I did recently. This came from an insight. You were seeing those videos go around about people doing street interviews with girls asking what the ideal male arm size, how ripped are the guys? And then all of them choosing on the lower end of the spectrum. Very rarely would they choose someone ripped, and guys were losing their minds around it. We had this conversation around my kitchen table with our friends where guys were beginning to understand, oh wait, women actually do feel this way, even their own wives. And you go, wow, the men have really become so engineered to impressing other men. And they don't believe that. They will think for a second, oh, I'm not doing that because I have these other reasons, when in reality, they've been subconsciously worked through it. That is a marketing insight, something you can work with, something you can develop around. And you'll see in the comments, people won't even admit it. Beginning to think like that, develop those insights and test them as a framework that will make you excellent.

Now, to begin to understand more of this, because not everyone thinks this way and it's hard, it's hard to not think from your own perspective, I would highly recommend reading. And I'll put a list of people out here that are worth it. Goffman, Callan, Veblen, Bordeaux, Baudrillard, I'm going to butcher those names, Juliette Score. An Angelic has a book called Hitmakers that touches on brands and culture. All those other ones before it are sociology: why people consume, how it impacts their thoughts on class or taste. And these are foundational principles you will find. So many people reference them in content now because they are extremely pertinent to today. If you read through those and you come up with things like Score has this reference group shift idea about how people used to measure themselves against the people around them. And then they began to measure themselves against celebrity as people magazine and tabloids and TV began to come out. And now they measure themselves around these curated groups they see online. There's a really interesting concept that can foundationally change how you think about how people consume and how they would buy. And so that's the people in it.

We're going to dive into references here in a second and the visual side of this. But first, I want to note if you really want to get consumer insights, a lot of that's going to come from calls, right? People aren't honest in surveys, not honest in comments. You want to find places where you can actually engage with real people. So if you're in any services business, if you're in any business that does sales calls, we do a lot of these. I work with the Darkroom agency, and there's a lot of pitch calls for different agencies that are bringing stuff on, right? I would highly recommend documenting the pain points that come up in those calls, whether it's your calls or someone else's. You can use Granola to do this, who are my partner on this video. So Granola is an AI notepad without a meeting bot. It transcribes audio from Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and in person with no awkward bot. And it gives you AI-enhanced notes. So if you do shorthand notes while you're listening to a customer call or whatever, it will actually flesh those out for you. But most importantly, it does recipes, and recipes is where this really shines. So if you are going through a bunch of sales call logs, you can have a recipe that says, pull out the customer pain points from this, pull out the complaints they had, the desires they had, and that could be ad angles. You can literally specify that. What could I use as a marketing pain point to test from this call? Give me a list. And run that recipe after every call and you'll get five or six in a list. And then all of this can go via MCP to ChatGPT project or the typical marketing workflow. A lot of people use, they'll have a project for their brand, there's notes in them with a brand voice, and they'll type within it. And if you are piping in all these ideas into that, it's going to be like, give me more angles based on our sales calls, write the angles in our brand voice. That's how modern workflow works. You can do that all with Granola. You can learn more about Granola at the link in the description. And thank you to them for sponsoring this video and making a great piece of software.

So now let's break into references because once you begin to understand people and develop insights, you're going to realize that you need to pair those with being visually unique, with brand identity, with what stands out in the ad. And the better you are at that, the more results you can get. So I'm going to talk about mood boarding briefly for a minute and exercises you can do to mood board. And now I'm going to project for their brand, there's notes in them with a brand voice and they'll type within it. And if you are piping in all these ideas into that, it's going to be, give me more angles based on

our sales calls, write the angles in our brand voice. That's how modern workflow works. You can do that all with granola. You can learn more about granola at the link in the description. And thank you to them for sponsoring this video and making a great piece of software. So now let's break into references because once you begin to understand people and develop insights, you're going to realize that you need to pair those with being visually unique, with brand identity, with what stands out in the ad. And the better you are at that, the more results you can get. So I'm going to

talk about mood boarding briefly for a minute and exercises you can do to mood board. And now I'm going to talk about funnel hacking, or the tactical version of it. All right, so this is my cosmos. You can go to my cosmos and check it out. I'm a little less active now. When I was actively mood boarding, I saw a bunch of these collections on here. I want to talk about the exercise of this, of organizing visuals to make a point. So you will see on here, I'll have some references I'm pulling from my YouTube videos. If you scroll back, I have a bunch of actual work stuff I was doing. So one instance,

future voyage. This is a pitch I was doing for merchandise for a company. You will see in this mood board, I have the materials of the merchandise. We're going to do a lot of metallic, futuristic stuff. Some of the form factors, we're talking about doing bags. I was sharing some metallic ideas all the way to what the potential packaging could look like, to the tags, to the actual typography and logos and iconography. I am sharing references for a breadth of ideas you can put into a board that becomes the foundation of a pitch, whether I show them the board itself, or we pull those references into slides for a deck, which is a presentation. Now,

same thing with color. So this board was particularly for a color exercise for a brand. How do we have a unique color setup? How could that play out inside photography and visuals? Where are we taking inspiration? So there was this muted one that we had here. I have a whole series of those in there for some color projects I was working on. This one, this board, was from an activation that we were putting together. We were thinking about what kind of photos we want people to take at the activation. How could we curate our own art direction? What would our target consumer capture?

And then how could we create an experience that would allow that, that matches the way our target customer makes content now? And you will see some of the exact look and feel, like, okay, do we do branded bags like this? Can we have people doing stunts? Hey, if we had rugs, we could duplicate the shot, we get cars out there, or the popsicles aesthetic, we capture content at the DJ, right, you begin to put together the frameworks to approach that all the way to visual ideas for a campaign, right? This one was actually for the artists that this is named after. We're looking at, okay, what does this campaign look like? How can we have some visual ideas that tie together for

the specific project? I'm showing these because I want you to use this as an exercise. If you want to become and think like a marketing genius, you have to be able to put marketing and visual references together in little packages to tell stories. And this is an exercise I would highly recommend versus scrolling. Instead of opening Instagram or opening TikTok, open Cosmos, open Arena. Arena is a little bit different inside its function, but it has a lot of more unique stuff in there. Arena is boards, doesn't have that same infinite feed, but you can go through the boards together. Look at this on the side here. Everything that links this item is here on the side,

so you can go find new boards. You're like, oh, cool. This is a whole website board this guy put together. Oh, that's also out on this crash out board. And you can go down the rabbit hole of visuals, which is what Arena is good for, versus a scrolled feed. And there's all kinds of really unique stuff on there that's not in other places. But if you are doing that process, when you're scrolling, you have a couple of your boards you're putting together for ideas you have, a future project you want to do, a campaign you'd love to shoot one day, a merchandise collection you'd like to put together, that is a use of your time versus standard scrolling that is actually

helping hone your brain in as a marketer. How would I use this board in a pitch? How could I curate all the references that I love around a category? That is a way to think about mood boarding here. And you'll also notice once you get advanced in this and you want to go from I'm good at it to I'm great at it, you need to have references that other people don't have, right? Everyone's on Instagram bookmarking the same stuff. Everyone's following the same curators. If your content is on hidden or any of those big aggregators, artifacts and whatever it is, it's probably not unique enough, right? That means everyone's seen it. So another one to think about is IRL mood boards.

So I'm in Italy right now. I create mood boards when I travel of stuff that I see because it gives me an edge in a lot of these conversations. So this is an Italy mood board where I literally have illustration. I'm doing this in board software. I used to do this in Milanote. This is from last summer. This one here. I do a lot of this in Luma now. I'm pulling every illustration example I saw, whether that was in a store, on a door, whether that's on a magazine, on the ground, merchandise, and I'm organizing that into this board. Same thing with typography, all the cool typography that I saw. I love this. These two from Il Parada, and it was the same restaurant with the two

logo types. A book I grabbed, a sign at a store, I have all that typography reference there. Same thing with packaging, all the different packaging that I liked that I saw, other textiles and materials references. This is an edge that takes you from good to great, right? So when I go to pull up a packaging reference, I'm pulling up, hey, here's a water bottle that I found at this unique spot in Italy that has this hook anchor fish motif, blue and white combo. That's not on everyone else's mood board. And I have hundreds of these. I'm constantly doing this. This is what I will do on the flight back or on a Sunday night, if I'm procrastinating, I will go pull

the things from my photo album into this. And when I'm running around, this is how I think. I want to capture, oh, I love that sign or the typography on this illustration. I'm adding this to my boards. I like this texture. This is what makes it differentiating. So when I walk into these meetings, one of the reasons I'm one of the higher paid people in the world doing this is I have stuff no one else has. I'm at the trade show in Milan. I can be like, oh yeah, well, what about this trim option we have? Yeah, I know who made that. I've got the card, and that's all linked in here. And of course we can pull out this exact reference for the

Italian heritage denim or whatever it is. The more of those you have and the more actionable you can make them, the more useful that you become as a creative strategist, creative director, marketer. So I would be looking at the world around you. You are a documentarian. You are a curator. How can you put those in your mood board accounts? How can you put those on boards? How can you integrate them into your work? And even if you don't touch it, say you're gathering all this, but you're only working on ads now, but you want to be doing merch later. How great is it going to be to have all your

references organized when you dive into it? And very similar to this is this idea of funnel hacking, right? When you engage in any experience buying something online, look at the funnel. And this is what I like to do. How many pages did it take me to? Did they upsell me from there? What emails did I get along the way? Document that, put that in the board. You will find a lot of cracked marketers will have your Figma or their Milanote, their Luma or whatever, with a bunch of those funnel breakdowns on it. This was the cool landing page because they'll go away, right? They'll disappear. The ads will stop running, whatever it is. You want to screenshot it, document it at the

On ads now, but you want to be doing merch later. How great is it going to be to have all your references organized when you dive into it? And very similar to this is this idea of funnel hacking, right? When you engage in any experience buying something online, look at the funnel. And this is what I like to do. How many pages did it take me to? Did they upsell me from there? What emails did I get along the way? Document that, put that in the board. You will find a lot of cracked marketers will have your Figma or their Milanote, their Luma, or whatever, with a bunch of those funnel breakdowns on it. This was the cool landing page because they'll go away, right? They'll disappear. The ads will stop running, whatever it is. You want to screenshot it, document it at the time. This is what I liked about it. I'm going to replicate this funnel for a future project. I'm going to have this in my toolkit. That's how you have to think whenever you see anything good. Look, it takes the extra four minutes of not scrolling to get a bunch of screenshots and organize it. It's worth the time. And if you want to do this, actually do it tactically. This is the toolkit for it. You want to look at anyone's ads, the Meta Ads Transparency tool. Go to their Facebook profile, go to transparency, go to ad library. You can see any brand, the ads they're currently running. You can bring that into InMotion. If you want the advanced workflow of it and create briefs, etc., videodatabase.org. This is the one we have in Cut30. We do this for organics. You can basically look by category, supplements, real estate, whatever it is, search key terms and come up with videos that are high performers. And we basically break those down into outlines and briefs. Another super useful one for that, Milled does this for email, milled.com, where I actually have email campaigns for brands over the years. Particl has this inside for email and SMS. Particl also has landing page changes. Ahrefs. Ahrefs has landing pages. You want to see what people are running ads on, the landing pages they have. Ahrefs is an SEO tool, but it basically breaks down all the pages on a site and traffic and backlinks going to them, as you're able to hunt down all the weird infrastructure people are using. OuterSignal will give you your customer personas from your email list. Super useful to be able to think about, okay, I want to put myself in my target customer's shoes. I'm going to talk about in a second in the framework section. Great to even just know who they are because they're often not who you think. Archive.com will help you do research for UGC. And then I'm looking for insights beyond what I see in the streets. New Consumer, which is a newsletter from Dan Frommer, is an excellent one, where they're doing a lot of research themselves about, hey, people are consuming this instead of that or changing this habit. You have stats to back it up. So I pull a lot from the things that they come up with. We're going to end here with two mind-state shifts, two important things to think through as you begin to train your mind like this. And the first is every time you see an ad, I want you to think, is this ad good or bad to me? This goes, you see something on Instagram, just stop on it for a second. See something on TikTok, just stop on the ad for a second. Don't immediately scroll. Same thing with a billboard, magazine, TV ad. Don't look away, look at it. Is this good or is this bad to me? Then, is this good or is this bad to the target demographic? Who is this selling to? It's not selling to me. It's selling to suburban moms. Do I think this is actually successful to them, or is it bad to them? Now you're beginning to develop opinions on things, which are super critical. Another generational gap I've noticed with younger people is they are afraid to have that opinion, or they want their opinion to be super uncancellable, right? But opinions are the foundation of good marketing. This is good, this is bad, and why? Then if it's good, if you like it, whether for you or for somebody else, what tactic are they using? Are they using scarcity? Are they making a claim? Are they doing problem-solution? Are they mirroring or giving a scenario someone sees in their life? And then what's the pain threshold? They have a little bit of pain. Hey, you deal with this problem, or a lot of pain, really pushing in your face how bad something is and how much they could change it. You can begin to see, okay, the things I think are effective often use this tactic or that tactic. Take notes on this, write this stuff down, carry a notebook, pop it in your notes app. The more of these insights or ads you like, etc., are the foundation for everything you're going to do. And if you never take any notes, you never link any of this. You have to start. Your organization, what you have to bring up inside of meetings and for references, is going to be the foundation of you being good at marketing. And last, and the most important one of all of this, is this idea that everything is exciting. This is a mental switch. People often go, oh, I'm a marketer. I really want to work on fashion. I really want to work on beauty. The real reminder of being good at marketing is you can make any single thing exciting. You need to make laundry detergent exciting, legal services, accounting, whatever it is. And your passion is a big part of what determines that. And I've had this in Cut30, right? So those of you who don't know, Cut30 is where we train content creators. We have a hundred people every Cut30 and then infinite people who did it before can repeat. We have a hundred new folks every time, eight times a year. All those people, we don't determine what they are. I can't be like, oh, I only want fashion creators or cool creators in there, right? We get everybody from fiber to investment services to architects. Literally every walk of life under the sun will be inside of there. If I was unexcited by any of those, the program wouldn't work, right? What works is I get stoked about every single one. Legal services, let's hit it. And the framework you can get people excited for from a marketing perspective is stories, how to relate to pop culture, and how to relate to a pain point and agitate it, dial that pain point up. Let's talk about the first two. So stories, legal, great example. If you're a lawyer making content or ads by a lawyer, it could just be like, have a DUI, hit this. Or from a content perspective, you could break down the history of famous DUIs and how they got off, whether you'd use that same defense today or not. Immediately more compelling organic content, right? Then how to relate to pop culture, right? What's the big thing happening in pop culture right now? The Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce wedding that just happened. Okay. Now if I'm an accountant, I want to talk about accounting. I don't have to talk about their wedding, but people are excited about influencer weddings in general. I could hook with that. Hey, this wedding just happened. Can influencers write off their wedding costs if they make content around it? And what can they write off and not? That's interesting content. It's an interesting lead magnet article, something you could run ads to, where you're presenting this from a shift and likely get a lot of people who are saying, hey, well, I have a business. I might document this. Oh, I could write this off, but not that. All of a sudden you're bringing people down your funnel. Again, you can make any of these things exciting, but stories, by relating it to pop culture. And my main takeaway I want you to have here is that I want you to be a killer. If you are great at this, you are excited by it, you have amazing references, you are going to begin to make great work once you get reps in. To tie this all together, I have a free creative strategy course, just a couple of modules of how to apply this tactically. So basically these are all conceptual items, how you begin to think. If you're like, okay, well, how do I do this in a job? I've never done it before. I have some very tactical thoughts on that you can get in a little free program. I will link that down here below. And overall, I just want to remind you, be excited, build your toolkit, add references, put yourself in other people's shoes, and you will be thinking far more advanced than even 90% of the business people that you work with. Appreciate y'all watching.

jaded on as you become more and more of a marketer is that marketers know that all of us are simple creatures. We want dopamine. We want likes on our posts. We want messages when we log into whatever app. And we want validation. We want the people around us, our spouse, our friends, casuals, family, whatever, to like us, to give us compliments, to think highly of us. And then we are competitive. We want to feel better than the people around us. These are innate human beliefs that what you'll notice, especially for younger marketers, is that they're so resistant to these ideas. Oh,

I'm better than that. And what you learn as you run more and more ads is that no one's better than that. And everyone will say they are. They'll be in the comment section of whatever video. Oh, I don't, I would never do this for those people. Oh, I don't think like that. And you'll begin to understand there's a separation between the conscious, what people say, and the subconscious. And what marketers do in our great act is ignoring the conscious. Maybe they take a few insights from it, but you basically go, are these people performing versus what do they really act like?

And then building theses is based on their actions. And you will see this inside my videos. I call out all kinds of things that people would never admit. Men dress for other men versus dressing to impress women was one of them I did recently. This came from an insight. You were seeing those videos go around about people doing street interviews with girls asking what the ideal male arm size, how ripped are the guys? And then all of them choosing on the lower end of the spectrum, very rarely would they choose someone ripped and guys were kind of losing their minds around it. We had this conversation around my kitchen table with our friends where guys were beginning to

understand, Oh wait, women actually do feel this way, even their own wives. And you go, wow, the men have really become so engineered to impressing other men. And they don't believe that they will think for a second, Oh, I'm not doing that because I have these other reasons when in reality, they've been subconsciously worked through it. That is a marketing insight, something you can work with, something you can develop around. And you'll see in the comments, people won't even admit it. Beginning to think like that, develop those insights and test them as a framework that will make you excellent. Now to begin to understand more of this,

because not everyone thinks this way, and it's hard, it's hard to not think from your own perspective. I would highly recommend reading and I'll put a list of people out here that are worth it. Goffman, Callan, Veblen, Bordeaux, Baudrillard, I'm going to butcher those names, Juliette Score, An Angelic has a book called Hitmakers that touches on like brands and culture, all those other ones before it are sociology. Why people consume, how it impacts their thoughts on class or taste. And these are foundational principles you will find. So many people reference them in content now because they are extremely pertinent to today.

If you read through those and you basically come up with things like, like Score has this reference group shift idea about how used to people used to measure themselves against the people around them. And then they began to measure themselves against celebrity as like people magazine and tabloids and TV began to come out. And now they measure themselves around these curated groups they see online. There's a really interesting concepts that can foundationally change how you think about how people consume and how they would buy. And so that's the people in it. We're going to dive into references here in a second and the visual side of this. But first, I want to know if you

really want to get consumer insights, a lot of that's going to come from calls, right? People aren't honest in surveys, not honest in comments. You want to find places where you can actually engage with real people. So if you're in any services business, if you're in any business that does sales calls, we do a lot of these, you know, I work with the darkroom agency and there's a lot of just like pitch calls for different agencies that are bringing stuff on, right? I would highly recommend documenting the pain points that come up in those calls, whether it's your calls or someone else's.

You can use granola to do this, who are my partner on this video. So granola is an AI notepad without a meeting bot. It transcribes audio from Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and in person with no awkward bot. And it gives you AI enhanced notes. So if you do shorthand notes while you're listening to a customer call or whatever, it will actually flesh those out for you. But most importantly, it does recipes and recipes is where this really shines. So if you are basically going through a bunch of sales calls logs, you can have a recipe that say, pull out the customer pain points from this, pull out the

complaints they had, the desires they had, and that could be ad angles. You can literally specify that. What could I use as a marketing pain point to test from this call? Give me a list and run that recipe after every call and you'll get five or six in a list. And then all of this can go via MCP to chat GPT project or, you know, the typical marketing workflow. A lot of people use, they'll have a project for their brand, there's notes in them with a brand voice and they'll type within it. And if you basically are piping in all these ideas into that, it's going to be like, give me more angles based on

our sales calls, write the angles in our brand voice. That's how like modern workflow works. You can do that all with granola. You can learn more about granola at the link in the description. And thank you to them for sponsoring this video and making a great piece of software. So now let's break into references because once you begin to understand people and develop insights, you're going to realize that you need to pair those with being visually unique, with brand identity, with what stands out in the ad. And the better you are at that, the more results you can get. So I'm going to

talk about mood boarding briefly for a minute and exercises you can do to mood board. And now I'm going to talk about funnel hacking or tactical version of it. All right, so this is my cosmos. You can go to my cosmos and check it out. I'm a little less active now. When I was actively mood boarding, I saw a bunch of these collections on here. I want to talk about the exercise of this, of organizing visuals to make a point. So you will see on here, I'll have some of like references I'm pulling from my YouTube videos. If you scroll back, I have a bunch of like actual work stuff I was doing. So one instance,

future voyage. This is a pitch I was doing for merchandise for a company. You will see in this mood board, I have basically the materials of the merchandise. We're going to do a lot of like metallic, futuristic stuff. Some of the form factors, we're talking about doing bags. I was sharing some that we liked kind of metallic ideas all the way to what the potential like packaging could look like to the tags to the actual typography and logos and iconography. I am basically sharing references for a breadth of ideas you can put into a board that becomes the foundation of a pitch, whether I

show them the board itself, we pull those references into slides for a deck, which is a presentation. Now, same thing with color. So this board was particularly for a color exercise for a brand. How do we have a kind of unique color setup? How could that play out inside of like photography and visuals? Where are we taking inspiration? So there was this kind of muted one that we had here. I have a whole series of those in there for some color projects I was working on. This one, this board was from an activation that we were putting together. We were thinking about what kind of photos we want people to take

at the activation. How could we curate our own art direction? What would our target consumer capture? And then how could we create an experience that would allow that that matches the way our target customer makes content now? And you will see some of the kind of exact look and feel like, okay, do we do branded bags like this? Can we have people doing stunts? Hey, if we had rugs, we could duplicate the shot, we get cars out there, or the popsicles aesthetic, we capture content at the DJ, right, you begin to put together the frameworks to approach that all the way to like visual ideas for

a campaign, right? This one was actually for the artists that this is named after we're looking at like, okay, what does this campaign look like? How can we have some visual ideas that tie together for the specific project? I'm showing these because I want you to use this as an exercise, you want to become and think like a marketing genius, you have to be able to put marketing and visual references together in little packages to tell stories. And this is an exercise I would highly recommend versus scrolling. Instead of opening Instagram or opening TikTok, open Cosmos, open Arena. Arena is a little bit

different inside its function, but it has a lot of more unique stuff in there. So basically, Arena is boards, doesn't have that same kind of infinite feed, but you can go through the boards together. So basically, look at this on the side here. Everything that links this item is here on the side, so you can go find new boards. You're like, oh, cool. This is a whole website board this guy put together. Oh, that's also out on this crash out board. And you can basically go down the rabbit hole of visuals is what Arena is good for versus kind of like a scrolled feed. And there's all kinds

of really unique stuff on there that's not in other places. But if you are doing those process, when you're scrolling, you have a couple of your boards you're putting together for ideas you have, a future project you want to do, a campaign you'd love to shoot one day, a merchandise collection you'd like to put together, that is a use of your time versus standard scrolling that is actually helping hone your brain in as a marketer. How would I use this board in a pitch? How could I curate all the references that I love around a category? That is a way to think about mood boarding here. And you'll also notice once you get advanced in this and you want to go from I'm good

at it to I'm great at it, you need to have references that other people don't have, right? Everyone's on Instagram bookmarking the same stuff. Everyone's following the same curators. If your content is on hidden or any of those big aggregators, artifacts and whatever it is, it's probably not unique enough, right? That means everyone's seen it. So another one to think about is IRL mood boards. So I'm in Italy right now. I create mood boards when I travel of stuff that I see because it gives me an edge in a lot of these conversations. So this is an Italy mood board where I literally have

illustration. I'm doing this in like board software. I used to do this in Milanote. This is from last summer. This one here. I do a lot of this in Luma now. Basically, I'm pulling every illustration example I saw whether that was in a store on a door, whether that's in on a magazine, on the ground, merchandise, and I'm organizing that into this board. Same thing with typography, all the cool typography that I saw. I love this. These two from Il Parada and it was the same restaurant with the two logo types. A book I grabbed, a sign at a store. I have all that typography reference there. Same thing

with packaging, all the different packaging that I liked that I saw, other textiles and materials references. This is an edge that takes you from good to great, right? So when I go to pull up a packaging reference, I'm pulling up, hey, here's a water bottle that I found at this unique spot in Italy that has this like hook anchor fish motif, blue and white combo. That's not on everyone else's mood board. And I have hundreds of these. I'm constantly doing this. This is what I will do like on the plane flight back or, you know, on a Sunday night, if I'm procrastinating, I will go pull

the things from my photo album into this. And when I'm running around, this is how I think. I want to capture. Oh, I love that sign of the typography on this illustration. I'm adding this to my boards. I like this texture. This is what makes it differentiating. So when I walk into these meetings, one of the reasons I'm one of the higher paid people in the world on doing this is I have stuff no one else has. I'm at the trade show in Milan. I can be like, oh yeah, well, like what about this trim option we have? Yeah, I know who made that. I've got the card and that's all linked in here. And of course we can pull out the, you know, this exact reference for the

Italian heritage denim or whatever it is. The more of those you have and the more actionable you can make them, the more useful that you become as a creative strategist, creative director, marketer. So I would be looking at the world around you. You are a documentarian. You are a curator. How can you put those in your mood board accounts? How can you put those on boards? How can you integrate them into your work? And even if you don't touch it, say you're gathering all this, but you're only working on ads now, but you want to be doing merch later. How great is it going to be to have all your

references organized when you dive into it? And very similar to this is this idea of funnel hacking, right? When you engage in any experience buying something online, look at the funnel. And this is what I like to do. How many pages did it take me to? Did they upsell me from there? What emails did I get along the way? Document that, put that in the board. You will find a lot of cracked. Marketers will have your Figma or their Milanode, their Luma or whatever, with a bunch of those like funnel breakdowns on it. This was the cool landing page because they'll go away, right? You know, they'll

disappear. The ads will stop running, whatever it is. You want to screenshot it, document it at the time. This is what I liked about it. I'm going to replicate this funnel for a future project. I'm going to have this in my toolkit. That's how you have to think whenever you see anything good. Look, it takes the extra four minutes of not scrolling to get a bunch of screenshots and organize it. It's worth the time. And if you want to do this, actually like do it tactically, this is the toolkit for it. You want to look at anyone's ads, the meta ads, transparency tool, go to their Facebook profile, go to transparency, go to ad library. You can see any brand, the ads they're

currently running. You can bring that into in motion. If you want to like the advanced workflow of it and create briefs, et cetera, video database.org. This is the one we have in cut 30. We do this for organics. You can basically look by category supplements, real estate, whatever it is, search key terms and come up with videos that are high performers. And we basically break those down into outlines and briefs. Another super useful one for that. Mild does this for email, mild.com, where I actually have email campaigns for brands over the years. Particle has this inside for email and SMS to

particle also has landing page changes. Ahrefs. Ahrefs has landing pages. You want to see what people are running ads on the landing pages they have. Ahrefs is an SEO tool, but it basically breaks down all the pages on a site and traffic and backlinks going to them as you're able to hunt down all the like weird infrastructure people are using. Outer signal will give you your customer personas from your email list. Super useful to be able to think about, okay, I want to put myself in my target customer shoes. I'm going to talk about in a second in the framework section. Great to even just know who they

are because they're often not who you think. Archive.com will help you down research for UGC. And then I'm looking for insights beyond what I see in the streets. New consumer, which is a newsletter from Dan Frommer is an excellent one, where they're doing a lot of research themselves about like, hey, people are consuming this instead of that or changing this habit. You have stats to back it up. So I pull a lot from the things that they come up with. We're going to end here with two mind state shifts, two important things to think through as you begin to train your mind like this.

And the first is every time you see an ad, I want you to think, is this ad good or bad to me? This goes, you see something on Instagram, just stop on it for a second. See something on TikTok, just stop on the ad for a second. Don't immediately scroll. Same thing with a billboard, magazine, TV ad, don't look away, look at it. Is this good or is this bad to me? Then is this good or is this bad to the target demographic? Who is this selling to? It's not selling to me. It's selling to suburban moms. Do I think this is actually successful to them or is it bad to them? Now you're beginning

to develop opinions on things which are super critical. Another generational gap I've noticed with younger people is they are afraid to have that opinion or they want their opinion to be super uncancellable, right? But opinions are the foundation of good marketing. This is good, this is bad and why? Then if it's good, if you like it, whether for you or for somebody else, what tactic are they using? Are they using scarcity? Are they making a claim? Are they doing problem solution? Are they mirroring or giving a scenario someone sees in their life? And then what's the pain threshold? They have a little bit of pain. Hey, you deal with this problem or a lot of pain.

Really pushing in your face how bad something is and how much they could change it. You can begin to see, okay, the things I think are effective often use this tactic or that tactic. Take notes on this, write this stuff down, carry a notebook, pop it in your notes app. The more of these insights or ads you like, et cetera, are the foundation for everything you're going to do. And if you never take any notes, you never link any of this. You have to start your organization, what you have to bring up inside of meetings and for references is going to be the foundation of you being good at marketing. And last,

and the most important one of all of this is this idea that everything is exciting. This is a mental switch. People often go, oh, I'm a marketer. I really want to work on fashion. I really want to work on beauty. The real reminder of being good at marketing is you can make any single thing exciting. You need to make laundry detergent exciting, legal services, accounting, whatever it is. And your passion is a big part of what determines that. And I've had this in Cut30, right? So those of you who don't know, Cut30 is where we train content creators. We have a hundred people every Cut30 and then infinite people who did

it before can repeat. We have a hundred new folks every time, eight times a year. All those people, we don't determine what they are. I can't be like, oh, I only want fashion creators or cool creators in there, right? We get everybody from fiber to investment services to architects. Literally every walk of life under the sun will be inside of there. If I was unexcited by any of those, the program wouldn't work, right? What works is I get stoked about every single one. Like legal services, let's hit it. And the framework you can get people excited for a marketing perspective is stories, how to relate

to pop culture and how to relate to a pain point and agitate it, dial that pain point up. Let's talk about the first two. So stories, legal, great example. If you're a lawyer making content or ads by a lawyer, it could just be like, have a DUI, hit this. Or from a content perspective, you could break down the history of famous DUIs and how they got off, whether you'd use that same defense today or not. Immediately more compelling organic content, right? Then how to relate to pop culture, right? What's the big thing happening in pop culture right now? The Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey wedding that just happened. Okay. Now if I'm an accountant,

I want to talk about accounting. I don't have to talk about their wedding, but people are excited about influencer weddings in general. I could hook with that. Hey, this wedding just happened. Can influencers write off their wedding costs if they make content around it? And what can they write off and not? That's an interesting content. It's an interesting lead magnet article, something you could run ads to where you're presenting this from a shift and likely get a lot of people who are saying, Hey, well, I have a business. I might document this. Oh, I could write this off, but not that. All of a

sudden you're bringing people down your funnel. Again, you can make any of these things exciting, but stories by relating it to pop culture. And my main takeaway I want you to have here is that I want you to be a killer. If you are great at this, you are excited by it. You have amazing references. You are going to begin to make great work once you get reps in. To tie this all together, I have a free creative strategy course, just a couple of day, a couple of modules of like how to apply this tactically. So basically these are all conceptual items, how you begin to think. If you're like, okay, well, how do I do this

in a job? I've never done it before. I have some very tactical thoughts on that you can get in a little free program. I will link that down here below. And overall, I just want to remind you, be excited, build your toolkit, add references, put yourself in other people's shoes, and you will be thinking far more advanced than even 90% of the business people that you work with. Appreciate y'all watching.