Hi Reader -

In 2007, Warren Buffett walked into a room full of the most expensive brains money can buy.

He bet them a million dollars that the most brainless investing strategy on earth would beat their most genius ideas over ten years.

They took the bet. Of course they did. These were hedge fund managers - people with Ivy League degrees, thirty monitors each, and extremely strong opinions about the 25 basis points the Fed moved last week.

The brainless strategy was basically putting $$$ in an index fund - the S&P 500. Ten years later, the brainless strategy was up 125%. The hedge fund guys’ smartest fund made 87%. Their worst made almost nothing.

Then Buffett gave the winnings to charity, which is somehow the most insulting part.

And this wasn’t a fluke.

Over any fifteen-year stretch, about nine out of ten professional stock pickers lose to the boring index. The best-paid job in finance, beaten by a fund that does nothing but sit there and look cute.

Now here’s what this has to do with creative strategy.

Every ad you ship is a stock pick.

A swing at the one brilliant idea that beats the market. Most of them are supposed to lose, and you cannot tell which in advance, no matter how good the deck looked.

Soooo stop trying to beat the market.

John Bogle, the man who built the first index fund, put it best.

Your haystack is made of three things.

1. Your own winners. The ads already printing money, remade and remixed and shipped again so you can find a variable that beats your control.
2. Your competitors’ winners. The stuff clearly scaling in their account, which they were kind enough to test for you.
3. Ads based on proven direct response principles from the masters - loss aversion, specifics, headline formats - the works.

And this is the part everybody overlooks.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about copying.

Even a clean clone bombs.

A fresh cut of your own proven winner falls flat. A lift of your competitor’s best ad dies on arrival, because you are not selling their product. You’re selling yours. Same hook, different promise, different buyer, different result.

Copy the surface and you’re cargo-culting. You got the shape of the thing without the reason it worked.

And the reason it worked is a hundred years old and written down. The whole canon of direct response is a handful of books. Hopkins in 1923. Caples. Ogilvy. Schwartz.

Read them this weekend and you’re ahead of 99% of the people posting carousels about ‘RIP designers.’

Because the fundamentals tell you what the ad was actually doing underneath.

And once you can see that, a dead clone stops being a mystery. You know what it was built to do, why it didn’t, and what to make for your product instead.

And this is where AI finally earns its keep.

Not by dreaming up a genius idea out of thin air. By taking the frameworks that have worked for a hundred years and generating from them. Better, faster, and far more structured than you could ever manage by hand.

It’s on this foundation of time-tested ideas that you can use AI to build your ‘genius’ ads - not by having AI go crazy over a blank page.

(If anything, one of the most important things we do for advertisers is save them from their own ‘genius’ ideas - by helping them focus on the proven stuff that works).

Anyhooo, if you’re spending $50k+/month and want help w/ creative the ‘boring’ way, reply “HAYSTACK” and we’ll talk.

Or don’t. I’m sure your next ‘big swing’ idea is exactly what will beat the market.

Later,

Shamanth

P.S. I contributed to Singular's new Marketer's Guide to Turning AI into Real Growth, a practical playbook on making AI actually move the numbers. It's free. Grab it here.