You're reading the signals wrong
🥲 The category has already decided what works. Most brands are reading the signal wrong, and more!
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We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.
🥲 Your reading the signals wrong
Creative research has a unit-of-analysis problem. You pull a competitor's top ads, reverse-engineer the hook, and brief your team against what you see. The output looks like competitive intelligence. It is actually one team's budget history dressed up as market signal.
A single brand's creative mix reflects their agency relationship, their internal preferences, and whatever survived their testing eighteen months ago. That is not the category talking. That is one account's scar tissue.
The category talks through spend-weighted runtime. Everything else is noise.
Same Runtime. Completely Different Signal.
A 60-day ad is not a 60-day ad.
Pull the top 50 brands in your category. Filter for 14-plus-day runtime. Weight by estimated spend. What surfaces is not a list of old ads. It is a map of angles the market has already validated with serious money. The category's revealed preference, not its stated one.
Angle Is One Layer Too Shallow
Clustering by angle (problem-led, identity-led, comparison-led) feels like insight. It is table stakes.
Two ads can share the same angle and target completely different buyers. When you cluster, add a second axis or the research is incomplete.
Cold awareness: what pulls a buyer into the category for the first time. They do not know the solution exists yet. The job is demand creation.
Warm consideration: what closes a buyer already comparing options. They know the category. The job is preference formation.
These require different briefs, different structures, and different success metrics. A problem-led ad written for someone who has never heard of your category is a fundamentally different creative bet than one written for someone actively evaluating alternatives.
Conflating them is the structural reason most category research produces creative that looks identical to everything already running.
The Cluster Worth Briefing Into
After mapping spend-weighted runtime against awareness stage, one cluster matters more than the rest.
The angle winning with long runtimes, validated by real spend, but where fewer than five brands are executing well.
That is not a crowded space. That is an opening the category leaders are underleveraging while defending the positions they already hold.
Brief into the gap. Not into the pack. Your job is not to make a better version of what is dominating. It is to own the territory nobody is defending yet.
That distinction is the difference between creative research and creative strategy.
Partnership with Planable
70+ practitioners cracked the AI visibility code. They're teaching it live.
A buyer chose a competitor last quarter because the AI recommended them. Not because of price. Not because of product. Because their brand showed up where the decision was already being made and yours didn't.
BreakingSilos 2026 is built for the leaders who don't want to find out that way. Free. Online. June 9th.
You'll walk away with:
- Which signals AI uses to decide which brands surface and which don't
- A strategy that connects your SEO, social, content, and PR so they build on each other
- The language to get your org moving on this before your competitors do
The people teaching this have already built it. Rand Fishkin (Co-Founder and CEO, SparkToro), Bogdan Babiak (CMO, SE Ranking), and Crystal Carter (Head of AI Search and SEO Communications, Wix) are among the practitioners on stage across 30+ sessions. Zero vendor pitches.
The frameworks here take months to figure out on your own. You can skip that part.
Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.
🐥 Tweet Worth Saving
🥳Events
🔥 What a Marketing Org Looks Like When AI Actually Runs It. Chime, Bitly, and Udemy Show You Live.
June 11 | Virtual Event | Free
What three real marketing teams are built and running right now? Tyler Roehmholdt, Nicholas King, and Bridget Nelson are on stage showing the exact systems behind their orgs and the moment everything started compounding.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
🔥 How the Creator Marketing Lead at Edelman Predicts Whether a Creator Will Drive Sales or Just Impressions
June 11 | Virtual Event | Free
Most brands only find out a creator was wrong for them after the budget is spent. Brooks Miller, EVP of Creator Marketing at Edelman, and Eric Ford, formerly Global Communications at L'Oréal, share the exact framework brand-side teams use to call that before the contract is signed.
✅ Reserve Your Free Spot
Can't make it live? Register anyway, you'll get the recordings within 24hours.
Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.