Your Phone Isn't Listening to You. I Am.

You go home for Thanksgiving this year. Your mom  spits stuffing across the table as she exclaims, "Honey, you have to get one. It's life-changing." Really? Is a food processor really life-changing?

It doesn't matter. You're not buying it. Food processors are so hard to clean anyway. 

You fly home a day later. You're waiting to board your plane and open Instagram to see the poultry massacre that ensued. 46 million this year? Yikes, maybe I should be a vegetarian.

But the food just doesn’t taste the same…

How Did That Ad Get Here? 

Wait, what’s that? In all its mechanical, pureeing power: there it is. A fucking  Cuisinart. You're being stalked. Tracked. Simmered on medium-low until you're ready to be plated. 

How did Mark do it this time?

Easy: Pixels, purchase signals, and an algorithm that's seen a billion people just like you.

But you're asking the wrong question.

Why did I actually buy the damn thing?

I'm the guy behind the ads that take you from "do I need this?" to "what do you mean my CVC code isn't working? I've saved it in Chrome a hundred times already."

Here's the icy truth. We are not tracking you, but we are studying you. Stalking you. Like a predator to its prey. You will buy our vegan, cruelty-free, non-GMO, gluten-free soap sooner or later. 

Because of a sale, or your beliefs, or your desires, eventually, that buy button looks too good to be true. 

That’s because of me (or people like me). 

I wake up, study my consumer, build ads, and go to sleep. I wake up; I do it all again.

I read comment sections. One-star reviews. Reddit threads. 

I don't need to bug your phone. People like you have already told us everything we need to know. 

Sorry to burst your bubble, but your thoughts aren’t unique. Nor your pain points or motivations.

Ads aren't created by accident. Major algorithmic and retrieval changes inside social platforms let creatives build more narrowly than ever before. We put dozens of ad types into the market and trust the machine to find each potential buyer, which means structure, audience targeting, and budgeting matter less than ever.

What matters? Volume and creative diversity.

How It Actually Works

My time is consumed by finding pain points, motivations, angles, and formats, rotating them with one another like a choreographed square dance.

Pain Point 1 + Angle 1 + Format 1.

Pain Point 1 + Angle 1 + Format 2. 

Motivation 2 + Angle 2 + Format 5. 

Motivation 6 + Angle 3 + Format 7.

And on, and on, and on.

Let's take the Cuisinart. Why did you buy, you ask?

Well, I don't know why you personally bought it. But I do know why others like you did.

Here's a simple way to distill it.

Pain Points:

Chopping takes forever. I'm bad with a knife. Eating healthy is too much work.

Motivations:

I want to feel like a real cook. It will save me money on groceries. World-class quality.

Angles:

"15 minutes of chopping in 8 seconds." "It pays for itself." "I thought it was a waste of counter space. I was wrong."

Formats:

B-roll montage. Talking head video. Before-and-after static image.

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Now, let's sauce 'em up.

Chopping takes forever + 15 minutes of chopping in 8 seconds + B-roll montage. 

Eating healthy is too much work + It pays for itself + Talking head video. 

I'm bad with a knife + World-class quality + Before/after image.

Starting to click yet?

Remember that thought you had at the gate? You should be a vegetarian. Should you give it a shot? 

Your motivation.

But the food doesn’t taste the same. 

Your pain point. 

Food processors are so hard to clean. 

Your objection. 

So, why did you actually buy the damn thing?

Final Answer

You’re thinking about becoming a vegetarian. Our easy-to-clean Cuisinart will take your vegetarian meals from Meh to Michelin. 

For the longest time, it was "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." 

Consider the curtain pulled forever. 

Next time you hit that buy button, you'll know exactly why. But it's not your fault. Your hands were on strings the whole time.