Finding new ad angles is much harder than it seems, and it can be hard to organize them. So this article helps you organize them and uncover them as many times as you need. When they're organized, you can repeat the winning angles and cut the losing angles.]
The problem is you start with the product
When you sit down to think up new angles, you probably start with the product. You ask what else you can say about it, and for a few rounds that works fine. After that, every idea starts sounding like the one before it, because they are all pitching the same product to the same made up customer in your head. You don't fix that by thinking harder. You fix it by building a simple chart and filling it in one fixed order, starting from what people actually want.
Build the chart in this order
The chart is a short stack, and the order matters. You fill it from the top down:
- Product: the thing you sell
- Desire: the deep want your product delivers
- Most products serve two or three of these
- Persona: the specific buyer who feels that desire the most
- Angle: the argument or opening that sells that desire to that buyer
That is the whole spine. Two more levels sit under it, the visual you shoot and the text on screen, but the angle is where new ideas come from, so that is where we spend our time. Notice that desire sits above persona. You do not start with the buyer, you start with the want, and then you go find the buyers who feel it.
One desire holds several buyers
Take the sleep drink you sell. One of its core desires is simple: quiet a racing mind at night. That desire is not one person, it is a shelf that several buyers sit on. A stressed founder whose brain will not stop running through tomorrow. A night shift nurse who gets home wired and cannot come down. A college student lying awake after a late cram session. Same desire, three different people who feel it for their own reasons. You write each of them under that desire, and you have not even started on angles yet.
Each buyer gives you a stack of angles
Now pick one buyer and write his angles. Start with the stressed founder. Under him you might write a few: the ad that opens on him wide awake at 2am, staring at the ceiling while his laptop still glows. The ad about the meeting he keeps replaying in bed. The ad about waking up foggy and blowing the morning he needed. Each one is a different angle, and all of them come straight from his version of the desire. Do the same under the nurse and the student, and your angle list triples, because each buyer bends the same desire into their own world.
Tag the rest, don't add more levels
You will be tempted to add more levels like emotion, benefit, feature, and awareness, and you should not. A level is something you test one at a time, holding everything above it still, to find a winner. That is Desire, Persona, and Angle, and that is enough. Everything else is a tag, which is just a label you stick on each angle so you can sort them later. Awareness is a tag: is this angle for someone who does not know the problem yet, or for someone comparing you against two other brands. Emotion is a tag, and so is the benefit the angle leads on, and so is the feature it leans on. Tags are free, so add as many as you want. Levels are expensive, because every new level is another full round of testing before you can move down. Keep the levels to three and let the tags carry the rest.
Organize them so you can repeat winners and cut losers
Finding angles is only half the job. The other half is keeping track of them once you start testing. Tag every ad you run to one spot on the chart: one desire, one persona, one angle, plus its awareness tag. Now your results have somewhere to go. Instead of a folder of random ads you half remember, you look at the chart and see exactly which angle is working. A winner is not some lucky ad you are afraid to touch. It is a known spot on the chart, so you run it again with a new creator or a different edit. A loser is just as clear, so you cut it and put that money on an angle with a real shot. After a few months the chart is a full record of every angle you have tried and how each one did. You never run the same loser twice.
The angles were never inside your product. They were inside the people paying you, sorted under the handful of desires your product serves. Build the chart in order, desire first, then the buyers, then their angles, and you stop hunting for the next idea. You already have more than you can run. When an angle works, you run it again. When one flops, you drop it and move on. That is what unlimited angles really means. Not one lucky afternoon of ideas, but something you can run again every single week.
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