Stop Trying to Make Only Great Ads
Insights from Oliver Blackshaw at the Foxwell Meet-Up in Lisbon
TL;DR (For e-commerce brand owners and paid social creative strategists.)
Great ads are an output of a great process, not the goal itself. Build your creative strategy from 160–200 data points across multiple sources (not just your own reviews), go deep on avatars beyond demographics, tie every test to a belief-driven hypothesis, and run on a 3-month roadmap. When the system is right, winning concepts are traceable, defensible, and scalable.
Most e-commerce brands think their advertising problem is creative. But Oliver Blackshaw says it's actually a systematic problem.
At the Foxwell Meetup in Lisbon, Oliver broke down the exact framework his team uses to build their clients' creative strategy from scratch. He says that great ads aren't even the goal, they're just what happens when you get the process right. It's almost like you can't help but make great ads if you nail the system.
Failure #1: Living Inside Your Own Reviews
Most people start creative research by diving into their own customer reviews. Maybe you run them through an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude, pull out a few pain points, spin up some concepts, and call it a day.
But the problem with this method is that customer reviews only show you what customers decide to share (just a tiny slice of what's really driving their decisions) and it's also only a small fraction of your actual total addressable market of people who have already purchased. Oliver's team instead pulls 160 to 200 data points from four different places: 1) the brand's website reviews, 2) competitor reviews, 3) Amazon reviews, and 4) social listening (ie. comments on ads and organic social posts, etc.). He says the gold is almost always outside your own brand bubble.
His process is manual on purpose. A real creative strategist goes through each source themselves instead of just dumping everything into AI and hoping for the best. It's not that AI can't help, but if you skip the hands-on part of true data analysis, you miss the real understanding. You start to see patterns, spot when AI is making information up, and actually get a feel for how your customers talk.
And here's a big one that Oliver called out: don't build your whole concept around one wild review. Oliver's team saw a brand do this with a customer who joked their skin problem 'nearly caused a divorce.' The campaign totally flopped, because it was a one-off, not a real pattern.
Failure #2: Shallow Avatars
Most brands build avatars that barely scratch the surface. They stop at demographics and a couple of pain points. But Oliver goes way deeper: current situation → active problem → emotional state → market sophistication → what belief or fear is actually stopping this person from buying right now.
Market sophistication is a huge deal here. In crowded niches, your customers have heard it all before. It's not just about knowing how aware they are, you've also got to figure out how skeptical they are, and what it's really going to take to break through.
Each avatar also gets a core beliefs map. This digs below the pain points and gets into the worldview that shapes how they see your product. Those beliefs drive everything: your lead angle, your proof, and even the hypothesis you're testing.
Failure #3: Volume Without Intent
When creative isn't working, most brands just crank up the volume. Launch more ads, hope you find a winner, and then scale it. But Oliver says that volume only works if you keep the intent behind every test. If you lose the hypothesis and just start throwing creative into the account with no strategy or intentionality behind it, all you're doing is speeding up the chaos (and inevitable failure).
Oliver's team uses a hypothesis framework that's locked right into the avatar's core beliefs. Every test has a belief they're challenging, a measurable hypothesis (usually CPA-focused), a clear angle, a rough headline, and a format. Everything connects back through the system. Belief → hypothesis → angle → creative. Do this so if someone asks why a concept exists, you can point straight to the reason.
Failure #4: No Roadmap
Week-to-week creative decisions, even with solid data, can drift all over the place. That's why Oliver's team runs on a three-month roadmap. They're always doing two things at once: doubling down on what's already working by expanding formats, and hunting for the next big winner by testing new avatars and angles.
The roadmap also keeps you from spreading yourself too thin. When you've only got so many concepts you can launch each month, you have to be intentional about where they go. If you try to cover too many unproven avatars, that's when accounts start to stall out.
Taking Creative Swings
Once you've validated an angle, the game changes. Now it's about making it so good that people can't ignore it. Oliver shared three killer examples:
Travel compression socks: The team first validated the 'long flight traveler' avatar with a creator filming at home next to a suitcase. That was enough to prove the angle, but the real magic happened when they got the creator to shoot in an actual airport. Suddenly, the socks became the star of a travel vlog, and the context just clicked. CPA dropped below the account average and the concept scaled up fast.
The minimalist wallet: They knew the buyer demographic was mostly men, 30 to 60, so instead of a boring product demo, they switched it up to a couple-argument format. It was a fun way to show how an overstuffed bifold stacks up against the wallet. Same benefit, but a totally different vibe.
The science notebook: These buyers are all about identity; they see it and just want it. The team jumped on a 'this or that' organic trend, adding a gamification twist that got people to pick between notebooks. That little micro-agreement actually boosted conversion rates.
The Point
Great ads aren't just made, they're built, step by step. Start with sentiments, move to beliefs, then to hypothesis, angle, and finally the concept. When you've got the system dialed in, you can trace any ad right back to the insight that started it all. That's what makes your creative work defensible, repeatable, and ready to scale.
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Note: This blog was written by a human but aided by AI to draft the outline and synthesize ideas.
