“You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it.”
-Ogilvy on Advertising
Principle: Let others do your research.
When David Ogilvy - so good an ad man Don Draper chose him for cosplay - spoke about doing “your homework,” he was referring to picking through scores of product specs and data for juice like this:
However, I think there’s another type of advertising homework that needs to be done: find what’s already working in your niche.
Tactics
Most ecom business owners will use Meta ads, and God blessem. They’re useful. Some will also take the organic route, and build a good following on social media.
In both cases, it’s useful to see what’s already working. Here’s how:
Search your niche on Instagram Reels or Tiktok (fitness, travel, camping, etc.)
Identify top voices in that niche
Go to their accounts and identify their videos with view:follower ratio of 5:1
Put each 5x video in a spreadsheet with these column headers
Visual hook (what you first saw)
Audio hook (what you first heard)
Text hook (what you first read if in first 3 seconds)
View count
Topic
Format (street interview, talking head, podcast, 1-person conversation, etc.)
Do this for 10-20 videos per creator in your niche
Make a list of 5 sub-niches (Travel: cc rewards, budget travel, luxury travel, destinations, restaurants, etc.)
Repeat
You’ll wind up with a list of hundreds of viral videos, their topics, hooks and scripts you can then repurpose for your own content and ads.
Don’t forget to add your own spin and expertise.
Habit
Open up a Google Sheet, and go start collecting videos that work in your niche.
When you reverse engineer what people are already reacting to, you cut your learning curve in half.
Mike
Today’s inspiration: The Reels Expert