Hi Reader -

Del Close taught basically everyone who's been funny in the last 40 years. Tina Fey. Bill Murray. Amy Poehler. Mike Myers. The godfather of modern improv.

He wrote a book called Truth in Comedy. The title is the lesson.

His whole thing: nothing is funnier than the truth. The audience laughs when they recognize something real. The moment you abandon truth for something clever, you lose them.

I keep coming back to this because ads work exactly the same way.

We've all been in that meeting.

Big idea. Beautiful production. Clever concept. The agency is thrilled. The brand team is thrilled. Someone says "we're laddering up to the brand essence" with a straight face and nobody blinks.

Everyone watches the cut and nods approvingly. Someone whispers "this could win awards." Which, to be clear, has never reduced anyone's CAC.

It tests fine. Decent hook rate. Nothing embarrassing.

And then it never breaks $5 per day. Ever.

The post-mortem is always the same.

"Algorithm's weird right now." "Audience wasn't ready." "Let's test a different hook."

Sometimes someone suggests "maybe we need to be even bolder with the creative" and I have to mute myself on Zoom.

Nobody ever says "maybe the ad was too clever and not true enough."

Because that would mean the last three weeks of production and the agency's invoice was a complete waste of everyone's time.

And nobody wants to be that person.

Meanwhile.....

Woman talking to camera about a problem she genuinely had. No script. Minimal production. Shot on an iPhone in what I'm pretty sure was her kitchen.

Half the team wanted to kill it before it launched. "Too simple." "Doesn't feel premium." "This is what we're running? Really?"

One person actually said "this isn't the brand we're trying to build" and I still think about that sometimes.

All while the ad is hitting $307100.15 in spend. Still scaling.

The ads that actually work, the ones that hit $10k, $50k, $100k, are never the most "creative."

They're the most true.

User's problem in the user's words. Transformation they already want. Emotion they already feel.

This is why we're obsessive about mining reviews, scraping Reddit threads, pulling verbatims from customer research. That's where the truth lives. Not in a brainstorm room. Not in a creative brief written by someone who's never had any idea about the users.

You can(and SHOULD) use AI to surface this faster, pattern-match across thousands of reviews, find the phrases that keep showing up, identify the emotions that resonate.

But AI is just the shovel. The gold is the truth. Always has been.

When we deconstruct winners across accounts, the pattern is almost boring.

It all comes back to the same thing.

Nothing converts like the truth.

If you're spending $50k+/mo - and want to see what it's like to run a creative strategy that builds on your users' lived experiences & their truth - while helping you scale profitably, hit reply and say 'TRUTH' and we'll talk.

Later,

Shamanth

PS: I've written about improv and creative strategy before. The ideas connect.