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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
⏱️ The three seconds your creator brief never mentions
📊 Google and OpenAI are giving advertisers more control over AI-driven campaigns
👨💻 Tweet of the day
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Together with Tatari
Forward 2026: A Forum for the Future of TV Advertising on Oct. 29, NYC
Paid social is getting harder to scale, while creator discovery and AI are changing how customers find brands.
If you keep relying on the same digital playbook, your acquisition costs can rise before your team finds the next reliable growth channel.
On October 29 in New York City, Forward by Tatari puts you in the room with leaders already adapting.
Hear Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman share how one of the internet’s biggest communities thinks about discovery, followed by an open Q&A.
See how Cody Plofker and leaders from Liquid I.V., MANSCAPED, Thorne, and Avocado Green Brands are approaching customer acquisition and full-funnel growth.
Learn how brands use TV to produce measurable growth beyond crowded digital channels.
Bring your toughest growth question for a chance to have it answered by Reddit’s CEO or the marketer who helped take Jones Road to nine figures.
Attendance is free, but in-person space is limited.
⏱️ The three seconds your creator brief never mentions
UGC ads built around a deliberately tested hook produce roughly 30% higher completion rate, 142% more engagement, and a 43% lift in conversions compared to standard UGC that skips hook testing. That’s not a marginal creative-quality difference.
It’s close to a different category of asset, and the gap traces back almost entirely to the first three seconds, the part most creator briefs never specify beyond “grab attention.”
Most briefs describe the product, the key selling points, and the call to action in real detail, then leave the hook itself to the creator’s instinct.
That works when a creator happens to have strong hook instincts and produces something forgettable when they don’t, and a brief with no hook guidance has no way to tell in advance which outcome it’s going to get.
Brief the hook with the same specificity as the offer
A brief that says “start strong” gives a creator nothing concrete to work from. A brief that specifies two or three hook approaches to test, a bold claim, a relatable problem, a surprising visual, gives them a real starting point instead of a vague instruction.
Rewrite your next round of briefs to include explicit hook direction, not just product and CTA details. This costs nothing extra in production and turns hook quality from a coin flip into something the brief actually influences.
Request hook variants as a standard deliverable, not an upsell
Getting one version of a video means getting one bet on which hook works. Getting two or three hook variants on the same core content means having actual data on which one performs before scaling spend behind any of them.
Build variant hooks into your standard ask for any creator whose content is likely to go into paid, rather than treating it as a special request reserved for your highest-budget campaigns. The cost difference is usually small relative to what a weak hook costs in wasted impressions once it’s live.
Test hooks before committing spend, not after
Launching a single hook straight into paid and watching performance is the slowest, most expensive way to find out whether it works. By the time the numbers come in, the budget behind a weak opening is already spent.
The catch is that hook testing only works if your creators can actually shoot three different openings without the video falling apart, and that’s a narrower pool than most brands expect.
Insense matches brands with creators who already work this way, then connects the variants to Ads Manager so the winning hook shows up in the data before real spend goes behind it. Il Makiage, Quince, Huda Beauty, and Monster Energy all source creator content there.
Before your next brief goes out, book a free strategy call to see who in your niche can deliver hook variants, plus $200 toward your first campaign.
A great product with a forgettable first three seconds never gets the chance to make its case. The hook isn’t decoration. It’s the gate everything else has to get through.
📊 Google and OpenAI are giving advertisers more control over AI-driven campaigns
Google is adding new ways to steer automated bidding, OpenAI is turning ChatGPT ads into interactive conversations, and a recent Google Smart Bidding change is altering how budget-limited campaigns compete.
The Breakdown:
Prioritize Valuable Products - Google’s new Product Value Optimization beta lets advertisers adjust product values by brand, category or individual product, steering Performance Max and Shopping toward priorities like profit, seasonal inventory or best-sellers.
Conversational ChatGPT Ads - OpenAI is testing Sponsored Agents, letting users open a separate branded conversation to ask product questions. ChatGPT Work can also create, update and analyze campaigns through an Ads Manager plugin.
Ads Meet Marketing Data - New HubSpot and Shopify integrations bring CRM and product data closer to campaigns, while AI can suggest creative, customize existing copy to conversational context and translate ads into a user’s preferred language.
Smart Bidding Gets Costlier - Smarter Ecommerce found median CPCs for budget-limited tROAS campaigns rose 15.8% after Google’s Aug. 17 update, while median impression share fell from 40% to 31%. Longer-term ROAS effects remain unclear.
Ad platforms are giving automation more responsibility while adding new ways for advertisers to steer it. Google wants businesses to define what inventory and performance actually matter, while OpenAI is rebuilding campaign creation and the ad itself around conversational AI.
🗝️ Tweet of the Day
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Briefing the hook with the same detail as the offer is the fix. Most briefs spend a page on the product and one line on the first three seconds. Naming two or three hook types to test also makes the results readable, because you know which variable changed.