The three-layer production model

One brief into 10+ variants isn't magic — it's architecture. The brief is designed before the shoot to produce multiple assets, each with its own hook, format, and placement spec.

What the top-performing hooks looked like

CTR grew from 1.55% to 3.4%+ through a documented iteration loop, not a single winning idea. The patterns that emerged:

What I learned that travels to any platform

The origin

Our chemistry teacher called our friend group "schmucks." We were multi-sport athletes who got our work done but knew how to have a good time. In one of his classes we made ice cream the classic way: salt, ice, cream, sugar in a bag. We even wrote a business plan for a local year-round ice cream shop as an economics project. Four years later, Covid sent us all home from college.

We had time, savings, and a story. We opened Shmuck's as a real business in less than two months from inception. Walk-up window on Main Street, counter inside the Hudson Valley Food Hall. Fresh-pressed waffles, homemade ice cream, local and seasonal ingredients. Nut-free, vegan-friendly, celiac-safe.

The marketing approach

We had no budget for traditional advertising and didn't need it. The brand was the marketing. A name like Shmuck's travels on its own: it's funny, it's local, it's a story you want to tell people. We leaned into that.

PR outreach as local kids with a story. Community-first positioning in a town that cares deeply about supporting local. Guerilla marketing by showing up at events, being present, being part of what Beacon already was. Social content that felt like friends sharing something, not a brand advertising.

The Loaded Waffle (a fresh-pressed liege waffle topped with homemade ice cream, maple syrup, and amarena cherries) became the signature. Shareable by design, photographable by nature. User-generated content without asking for it.

Operations and management

We had 15+ employees at peak: hiring, scheduling, training, and managing a team from scratch with no prior blueprint. I built every SOP the business ran on: opening and closing procedures, inventory stocking levels, waste tracking, vendor ordering cadences, and recipe systems that let new hires produce consistent product from day one.

Vendor relationships, supplier negotiations, ingredient sourcing, all managed directly. The operational infrastructure was built alongside the brand, not handed to us. Every system was designed and documented by us.

What it proved

You can build a brand on a story and a name before you build anything else. The digital marketing fundamentals I'd spent years applying to other people's businesses (audience, message, channel, conversion) applied just as cleanly to a street-side ice cream window. The context changes. The system doesn't.

After two years and $300K+ in revenue, all three founders made the same call independently: close the business after graduating college and committing to full-time careers. Shmuck's was a proving ground from day one, and it proved everything it needed to.

Sold-out international tour

Geo-targeted paid social across every tour market, run as separate local campaigns. Each city got its own creative cut, its own audience build, and a spend curve weighted toward whichever shows were selling through slowest. 13% CTR, $0.50 CPM across the run.

The artists I worked with were operating at Billboard Top 100 scale. At that level the audience is already watching and the algorithm magnifies whatever signal you put into it, good or bad. Campaign timing, targeting, and creative all had to land on the first try.

Organic growth before it was a playbook

Grew an emerging artist from 5K to 25K Instagram followers through meme page partnerships and content clipping. The thesis was simple: find where the audience already spends time and put the artist in front of them there, instead of asking them to come somewhere new.

The actual work was cold-DMing meme page admins and anime edit accounts, negotiating post terms one at a time, and tracking downstream streams and follower lift to figure out which placements actually moved the needle. There was no rate card for any of this yet. No industry category. What's now a standard line item in every label's budget was something I was figuring out from first principles.

The system, once it stabilized: source high-engagement pages in the artist's niche, license or trade posts, clip the most shareable moments out of existing content, distribute through accounts that already had the audience. 50M+ impressions through guerrilla distribution that had no template.

The challenge

Jakischrist makes one-of-one high-fashion pieces — handmade, $500 and up, with a level of craft that can’t be replicated at scale. The problem: demand consistently outpaced what could actually be filled. Every drop sold through instantly, but there was no system to capture that demand, grow it deliberately, or convert it into sustainable revenue. The brand had cultural heat and no infrastructure to hold it.

The solution

Rather than trying to scale what couldn’t be scaled, we built around the scarcity. Seasonal product lines gave the brand a release cadence the audience could anticipate. Themed lot drops — curated collections with a defined window and limited quantity — turned demand anxiety into sell-through momentum. Every release since has sold out. The one-of-one pieces became the brand’s identity anchor; the drops became the revenue engine.

Platform migration and infrastructure

The brand was running on Big Cartel — fine for early-stage, not built for what Jakischrist was becoming. I led the migration to a fully integrated Shopify stack: inventory tracking tied to production timelines, content planning and influencer management brought into the same system as the product calendar, and paid media on Meta and TikTok running against properly segmented audiences with creative matched to the drop cycle.

The infrastructure made the drops repeatable. Before, a sell-out was a happy accident. After, it was a designed outcome.

Photography lead generation

Managed paid media for a NY photography studio across event, specialty, and pop-up shoots — effectively four different photographers with four different audiences under one system. Segmented campaigns by shoot type, built creative tailored per segment, and ran a full funnel from cold traffic through booking confirmation. 25K+ leads, $430K+ revenue, $2.96 avg CPL across Meta and Google.

Home services — high-ticket lead gen

LA's largest masonry company. Hyper-targeted geographic and psychographic campaigns for million-dollar outdoor installation projects. The insight: the audience for a $100,000 outdoor kitchen isn't hard to find — they live in specific ZIP codes, drive specific cars, own their homes. $20 leads that closed into million-dollar projects. That ROAS math is what made me open my own contracting business.

Valley Pro Painters

Applied everything I'd learned to my own contracting business. Paid search and social to scale to $130K+ annual revenue. The same targeting precision and landing page discipline I'd been building for clients, now generating my own income while I finished college.

Beauty and franchise

Managed lead generation for 6 franchise locations across salons, lash studios, and women’s beauty businesses. The challenge unique to franchise work: delivering local relevance at national scale. Each location needed geographic targeting precise enough to feel neighborhood-specific, while the messaging and offers had to stay within the brand system the franchisor controlled. I built campaigns that worked within those constraints — local audience signals, franchise-approved assets, location-specific offers — applied consistently across every location simultaneously.

Education platforms

Ran paid media for online education and course businesses — a vertical where the funnel is long, skepticism is high, and creative has to establish credibility before it can sell. Lead quality over lead volume, with content sequences designed to pre-frame the pitch before the landing page ever saw the click.

What I learned across 40 accounts

The funnel is always the same: get attention, earn trust, remove friction, convert. The creative and the channel change. The reason most campaigns underperform isn't the ads — it's what happens after the click. I learned full-funnel by necessity because I couldn't let my clients fail at conversion when the traffic was working.

The problem

Static ads were the account's least-examined format. UGC and expert-led video got the research and the iteration. Statics were treated as filler and social proof — a headline, a product shot, a statement, or a dense copy of another brand's "winning" ad.

Performance showed this clearly: top-spending statics averaging 2% CTR. CPAs were high. The format was underperforming not because statics don't work, but because they weren't being briefed with the same discipline as everything else.

The insight-first ad system

I rebuilt static creative as an insight-first discipline using the same theory and pipeline used for video production — owning five stages end-to-end, handing off to design with enough structure that no designer ever asked for a reference ad and every batch delivers a weekly winner.

The key principle: before a hook or headline has ever been delivered to a creator or scaled into more expensive-to-produce formats, messaging gets tested directly against an insight. Each launch is built as a complete creative campaign, a concept-based mix tested across a defined audience or cohort — so we learn what messaging resonates methodically and at volume, not by luck or format-copying.

Worked example — closing the conversion gap

Working sessions with the media buying team surfaced a gap the account kept missing: the testimonial layer. The brand ran strong on expert authority and education, but had no first-person customer voice running as paid media. Solution-aware buyers — the ones who'd already watched the expert content — were the largest under-served audience in the funnel.

Insight Card

I built the insight card around what those buyers were actually saying in comments and reviews: "I believe the science. I haven't heard of anyone else using this successfully for my specific problem." That's not an awareness problem. It's a conversion problem — and it needed a specific creative format to solve it.

Execution Brief

The execution brief translated the insight into a shipping-ready format: 3–4 pull-quote statics, skin-background + white text, attributed to a real person, audience 30–45, solution-aware. No imagery. Specificity as the creative. The brief flagged the blocker upfront: real customer quotes had to be sourced before design could execute.

Six briefs shipped in the same day just like this, covering six distinct messaging gaps the account wasn't serving: testimonials, money-back guarantee, price vs. competitor anchor, bundle math, expert credentials, and an editorial treatment of paired clinical experts. One working session, one design review, 75+ ads ready for launch.

Working within legal constraints

The women's course launched alongside a prescription bundle with a legal memo attached, derived from compliance reviews, partner audits, and platform constraints: no naming the compound, no outcome guarantees, no competitive medication comparisons, bundle-only framing, banned verbs vs approved verbs. HSA-eligibility claims required LegitScript certification language.

The brief was the audit trail — every claim traced to an approved verb, every expert's credential verified, every regulatory flag captured before design. Compliance wasn't a gate at the end of the process. It was built into the brief structure from the start.

Insight-first briefing is how brands unlock new audiences

Insight-first briefing, not reference-ad translation, is how brands find new audiences at lower CPM. The framework I built is brief structure robust enough that a single designer produced over 75 unique ads in a week without asking for a reference image.

Starting from social listening, customer reviews, and interviews, I turn raw observations into researched insights we can test methodically at volume. That means determining winning messaging and finding new audience cohorts with concept-based launches before ever sending a creator a scripted hook or scaling into more expensive-to-produce formats.