Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you’re all enjoying the summer sun, some time with friends/family, and (maybe) getting some rest/relaxation. While I’ve been trying to do a little less travel over the summer, I couldn’t resist spending two days last week in Sheboygan,Wisconsin (of Home Alone fame, if you’re ever watched the greatest Christmas movie ever) for my first-ever in-person Foxwell Founders event. It was absolutely worth it - about ~60 agency + brand operators sharing learnings, experiences, challenges, goals in a relaxed, mostly-scenic setting. I attend a ton of events each year, and I can honestly say this was one of the best – not because of logistics or speakers or whatever, but because Andrew Foxwell + team went the extra mile to ensure everyone was welcomed, comfortable and able to share.

Over the course of the two days, there were several topics/questions that came up over and over again – all of which we’ll be covering on future issues.

1. How do you come up with more angles/hooks/funnels that can win/scale - especially when you’ve already a few that work?
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2. What does “optimizing outside of the ad account” actually mean? How do you do it?
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3. When should you think about brand v. performance? What’s the right balance between getting going/getting sales + building a brand?
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4. How do you think about creating “moments” for your brand/clients – particularly in industries/categories where the typical “big moment” (i.e. BFCM) might not be relevant (for instance, home services, B2B, senior living, finance/banking/fintech, SaaS, etc.)?
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5. What tech should you be using to improve your marketing? Not the stuff that markets the most or sucks up the most oxygen, but the tools/tech that actually help marketers and organizations get more done, improve efficiency, avoid mistakes and gain insight/advantage.

It also just so happened that these conversations were taking place at the same time I was finalizing The Digital Download’s first-ever sponsorship (talk about a buried lede) with…drumroll please).... Optmyzr. I’ve been a fan (and paying subscriber!) to Optmyzr for years, well before I started the newsletter. And my friendship with Fred Vallaeys predates even that (yeah, I’m feeling old) - going back to 2016, when he was kind enough to hang out with a much younger, exceptionally wide-eyed me…and share some helpful presentation pointers before my first-ever talk. All this to say: there’s no one I’d rather have as the first sponsor than Fred + the team at Optmyzr. This is a tool I use every day, that I’ve recommended to countless people and that I can honestly say saves me at least 10 hours a week.

It is both very cool and exceptionally odd to write: this week’s issue is (officially) brought to you by Optmyzr!

And, without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s topic: how to unlock + scale new audiences.

One of the persistent challenges I’ve heard - not just at the Foxwell event, but on calls with CMOs, operators, investors + other agency execs - is that it has been wildly difficult to scale performance and grow over the last ~6 months. This isn’t limited to DTC, either – it’s everywhere. B2B. B2C. Home Services. Banking/Finance/Fintech. SaaS.

Growth has been harder to come by for the vast majority of brands.

There are many reasons that have taken the brunt of the blame for that – tariffs, economic uncertainty, layoffs, natural disasters, supply chain issues, regulatory uncertainty, you name it - but I think there’s another root cause we need to address: most brands are caught in an optimization death-loop. This is a variant on a theme I’ve written about before (here) - but it’s one that I think should be talked about more.

Let’s start with a difficult-to-accept hard truth: for the vast majority of brands, performance marketing is just retargeting and re-engagement by another name. This is the result of the confluence of hyper-relevance (more on that later), the removal/nerf-ing of many traditional control levers and the ecosystem-wide adoption of “AI-powered” black box targeting.

Since the dawn of advertising, explicit targeting was how we reached new audiences. Sometimes, that was placement-level targeting (specific TV networks, specific radio stations, newspapers, billboards, etc.). Sometimes, it was interest-based (people who subscribe to this or read that) or behavioral (people who fly first class or work at such-and-such a company). The point is that, regardless of the mechanism, advertisers were doing the targeting (to some degree).

Now? Targeting is automated and (largely) driven by the creative itself. Platforms have gotten so good at calculating the expected performance of a given creative on a person-by-person basis that most advertisers are no longer choosing who sees their ads – they’re putting it on broad, maybe adding some audience suggestions (NOT targeting), uploading a bunch of ads and pressing “go”.

What’s wild is that - in many cases - the performance of those ads is remarkably good. Meta (and YouTube, and TikTok, and X, and Linked) know that:

• A video touting new features/product enhancements only works on an audience that knew of/was interested in the base product.
• An ad that opens with “Back in stock” will only work on people who previously attempted to buy.
• A UGC testimonial only makes sense to someone who is already familiar with the brand/product, but is looking for some kind of reinforcement or de-risking.
• Influencer ads only work if the person is both trusting of the influencer and familiar with the brand/product – in which case, the influencer ad can serve as a “final push” across the finish line.
• A founder story only resonates if the user already has context for the brand.

And each serves those ads to subsets of their audience accordingly. Now, none of these are bad ads or bad concepts – quite the opposite! Depending on your brand/situation, you should absolutely be running ads like the above in your account. But, these ads are end-of-maze by design; that is, they tend to work on people who already have some level of familiarity with your brand (read: they tend to resonate with warm audiences).

And this is the crux of the death loop:

(1) ads like the above tend to perform exceptionally well in your account BECAUSE they’re (effectively) remarketing.

(2) ad platforms recognize the patterns within the creative, compare those patterns to billions of other ads and determine both the expected performance and ideal audience for the ad. In the cases above, Meta/YouTube/TikTok would then serve those ads to warm-ish audiences.

(3) the combination of (1) and (2) results in cost-effective conversions (sales, leads, whatever), leading you (the advertiser) to think this creative is performing (because it is, in one context) and to make more variants of it.

(4) but those variants have the same Achilles heel as the first batch: in order to perform, they need an audience with existing familiarity with your brand/product/service.

You can see where this is going. To scale, you have to break this cycle, which means making ads for cold/unknown audiences, EVEN IF the performance of those ads is suboptimal in the short run.

I’ve said it before, but every ad platform is fantastically efficient at giving you exactly what you ask for (implicitly or explicitly). That extends to creative: if your creative is tuned to warm buyers, you’ll keep getting warm buyers. Conversely, if you want new buyers, you need to make ads that look, feel, and sound relevant to people who don’t already care.

In other words, we’re going back to the good ‘ol days of advertising. History may not repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme.

The Growth B.R.I.D.G.E. Framework

The first step for growing any brand is breaking the above death spiral – which means creating more than just variations of themes that convert warm audiences. It means building a strategic, creative operating system that reliably generates new angles, reaches new people and earns the right to grow.

Candidly, this isn’t a media buying or performance advertising challenge. This is a brand-building challenge in a world dominated by curation and attention scarcity. Fortunately, you don’t have to solve this one by yourself – we’ve created and proven a framework that makes this exponentially easier:

G — Uncovering Growth Opportunities

Before you start mapping behaviors, building angle-audience matrices, or running SparkToro queries, you need to zoom out and ask a more foundational question:

Which audiences are actually worth going after?

Not every audience is a growth opportunity. Not every adjacent use case will scale. Not every early signal deserves the resource commitment required for a new creative initiative. While no founder/executive wants to hear this, the real job is identifying where your brand has earned the right to win next.

That starts by studying behavior, not demographics or GA4. You're looking for signs of breakout intent or unexpected product-market fit - especially the stuff that doesn’t show up in marketing/audience dashboards. Some places to look:

• High-LTV outliers: Customers who stick around longer or spend more than expected, especially if they don’t fit the core target audience/ICP.
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• Unusual product/service combinations: People buying SKUs together that suggest a use case you haven’t been messaging to.
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• Rapid re-purchase from non-core segments: Users outside your target audience who come back faster than expected, buy more than you’d expect, or otherwise exhibit weird behavior.
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• Competitor reviews and comment sections: Dig into what users love, hate, or wish existed in your competitors’ products. Look for patterns in unmet needs, unexpected use cases, or underserved sub-segments. Often, the whitespace is hiding in the 3-star reviews.
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• Emerging audience segments in competitor/adjacent brands: Study who your competitors are attracting that you’re not. What partnerships are they launching? What influencers are they sponsoring? What language are they testing in ads or landing pages that you haven’t tried yet?
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• Support tickets or reviews that mention alternative use cases: Any time a customer can find a novel use case or approach to using your product/service/solution that you’re not marketing, get curious.
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• Social comments that reference identity, emotion, or occasion: Look for people framing your product in terms of who they are, not just what it does.
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• Behavioral crossovers in adjacent categories: Look at products or categories your best customers also buy from, especially ones that solve parallel problems or fit into the same routines. For example, if you’re a DTC skincare brand, explore overlaps with sleep supplements, meditation apps or wellness podcasts. While you’re not technically in the same category, there’s plenty of overlap for you to anchor into with new creative.

This is a search for edge signals: the patterns your dashboards + brand teams can’t see but your customers are already creating.

Find the edges. That’s where the unlocks live.

Growth rarely comes from squeezing more out of what’s already working. It comes from identifying the non-obvious - the edge-case user who talks about your product in an unfamiliar way, uses it alongside something outside your category and/or buys it for a reason you hadn’t even considered. That’s your opportunity.

From there, tools like SparkToro become exponentially more powerful, because you’re no longer using them to validate assumptions. You’re using them to explore new terrain.

This stage is about finding non-consensus opportunities. Audiences that are in the meaty portion of the ICP bell curve, but might represent your next wave of growth if you bridge your brand to them in a way that resonates.

B — Behavioral Intelligence

Audience insight + understanding is the thing that separates marvelous from mediocre. Unfortunately, too many marketers build ads based on assumptions, outdated archetypes and poorly-calibrated mental models instead of actual data.

There are two parts to this:

Part I: the individual, user-level research (think surveys, focus groups, short-form interviews).

Part II: the big-picture behavioral and cultural intelligence.

You need both. My go-to starting point is usually a quick-and-dirty survey, sent via email or shared in social targeted to a relevant audience segment. For the survey itself, use Momentive or Typeform, combined with some curated outreach (a few LinkedIn or IG DMs go a long way) to gather directional feedback and baseline insight.

Once I have that, I run the same audience profile through SparkToro. That gives me the broader layer of context: what they’re paying attention to, who they trust and how they self-identify across platforms. Once you have both, compare – where do the anecdotes (read: the surveys) and the data (SparkToro audience intelligence) agree? Where do they disagree?

If SparkToro says one thing and your survey data says another, you’re not dialed in on the audience just yet. That disconnect is your invitation to go deeper – to refine the audience, to ask more probing questions, to revisit your SparkToro searches. It’s entirely possible you're surveying the wrong people, or that SparkToro’s data is missing something (recently, an audience profile on a VERY liberal SparkToro audience search showed Charlie Kirk as one of the more watched channels on YouTube – which made no sense until I asked a few audience members. It turns out the data on SparkToro was right, but for the wrong reason: they hate-watch him). Maybe your assumptions are off. Until the qualitative and quantitative data start to reinforce each other, you still have work to do.

R — Relevance Mapping

Once you actually understand how your yet-to-be-activated audience thinks - what they care about, how they talk about their problems, what they’re trying to solve -the next step is turning that insight into something actionable.

Start by identifying 4–6 angles that reflect different ways to frame your product/service to the audience, based on everything you’ve uncovered in your research:

• “Finally, a skincare brand for men who don’t care about skincare”
• “The zero-maintenance way to impress your in-laws”
• “Because your back hurts and you’re too young for it to hurt this much”
• “The premium version of the thing you use every day and never think about”

Then map each of those angles against the five classic stages of awareness:

• Unaware
• Problem-Aware
• Solution-Aware
• Product-Aware
• Most Aware

Once you've mapped your creative angles against awareness stages, you’ll see it clearly: too much Product-Aware messaging, not enough discovery/new audience content. The solution for this is to use the insights you uncovered in the first step – then craft questions that can be translated into hooks/ad content. Basically, we’re going to turn those edge cases + oddballs into into strategic creative direction:

For High-LTV Outliers

People who don’t look like your primary target audience, but stick around longer or spend more than they otherwise should.

• What was the initial frustration or trigger for them to convert?
• What originally brought them in, even if it wasn’t what we intended?
• What do they value more than our main audience does? (e.g. durability, prestige, simplicity)
• How do they describe us to others? What’s their shorthand?

For Behavior in Adjacent Categories

People buying products that serve parallel jobs-to-be-done or sit within the same routine.

• What is the trigger/impetus for them to act?
• What are they solving for with those adjacent products?
• Where does our product logically slot into that routine or mental framework?
• What expectations or aesthetics carry over from the adjacent category?

For Users Found in Competitor Reviews

People frustrated or underserved by a competing or alternative brand.

• What promises did that brand fail to deliver?
• What outcomes do they care about that aren’t being addressed?
• Is there a specific feature or function that’s broken/not working?
• What’s the tone of their complaint? Are they disappointed, frustrated, confused?

For Niche Customers with High LTV

Non-core customers who come back quickly, often because they’re effectively solving a different problem with our tool/service/solution.

• What pain point are they solving faster or more urgently than your typical buyer?
• Why are they willing to spend so much (time/money) on our solution?
• What product attribute is driving that fast purchase (or repurchase) behavior?
• Are they buying for themselves or someone else?

For Customers/Clients with Unexpected or Weird Use Cases

Customers using your product in ways you never planned, but which clearly work.

• How do they describe what the product does for them?
• What secondary benefits do they value that your primary audience doesn’t even think about?
• What other tools or hacks are they combining with your product?
• Why are they bothering to hack together a solution? What aspects of the current options in the market do not work for them?

By tying these prompts to real edge signals, you ensure the creative gap-filling process isn't generic or theoretical – instead, this focuses on questions that can encourage you to create more upper-funnel, cold-audience-activation content (i.e. creative focused on Unaware + Problem Aware).

I — Insight to Execution

This is where a lot of teams get stuck.

They’ve got audience insight. They’ve got strong angles. But their creative process is still ad hoc - it’s siloed, reactive and full of one-off requests. The solution is to build out a system for creative iteration that makes it easy:

• Angle Mapping: Every concept, hook, and execution is tagged by its strategic angle (e.g., “anti-establishment,” “identity-driven,” “aspirational”) - this enables easier analysis later.
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• Current Creative: There are some brands that are having success marketing to this audience right now - so rather than spin your wheels, leverage your existing audience intelligence to identify which brands that is. Head over to Meta Ads Library (or TikTok, or YouTube) and see what those advertisers are running – what formats? What angles? What hooks? What proof points? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: good creatives borrow; great creative steal outright.
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• Performance Feedback Loops: Assets aren’t just tracked by format; they’re tracked by the audience stage (not aware - most aware), narrative and content. This allows you to see which angles land with cold vs. warm users.
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• Aggressive Hook Discovery: The hook is the single-most-critical component of your ad – so don’t keep running the same, old, tired one out there. Every question from the above section can (and should) be at least one hook. When you find winning hooks, attach them to other creatives and see if you can replicate the success.
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• Narrative-Level Iteration: When something starts working with net-new customers (e.g., “this is for people who hate yard work”), scale sideways into similar concepts – keep the hook, iterate the narrative, proof points, CTA, etc.
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• Creator Iteration: in cases where you’re running creator/influencer ads and you hit on a winner, generate a transcript – then have other influencers/creators do variants of the winner. Bonus points if you upload that winning transcript, along with your audience intelligence, to Gemini/GPT and have it create 3-5 additional hooks or scripts.

Your goal should be a non-stop flow of well-researched, highly resonant ads that can be deployed to colder audiences.

D — Direction Through Creative

Every creative concept is a bridge, connecting where your audience is today to where your brand needs them to go. Some bridges are strong and obvious. Others are too narrow, too risky, or just built for the wrong people.

Your job isn’t to keep paving the same route. Your job is to build new bridges, strong enough to carry people who’ve never heard of you, never considered your category and don’t trust you yet. To do that, you need to rethink:

• The first frame – What’s the image, hook, or opening line that gets them to even look at the bridge?
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• The framing – What’s the real problem you’re helping them solve? How are you positioning it?
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• The protagonist – Who is this ad for? Who’s crossing the bridge? What do they want on the other side?
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• The belief – What does the viewer have to believe about your product/brand to want to make that journey? What do they have to believe about themselves (i.e. for a weight loss drug, a target audience would need to believe they can do it IF they have support/help)?

Great creative doesn’t just explain the product/service; it taps into the existing need/demand (i.e. pain point/challenge/trigger) and makes the path forward obvious and worth taking.

G — Growth via Expansion & Iteration

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more disastrous time-suck in marketing today than people testing 7 versions of the same ad with a different font or background color or icon style.

To use an analogy, if a house with white exterior paint doesn’t sell, does the seller immediately try to paint the exterior off-white or grey or just-barely-blue? No! Why? Because, odds are, the paint wasn’t the problem. The problem was either the offer, the positioning or the audience-solution alignment (i.e. they needed a 4 bed house and this was barely 3).

The same thing is true in ads.

You need new ideas. New voices. New angles. New reasons to care.

Start testing fundamentally different directions:

• Parents vs. professionals
• Relief vs. empowerment vs. humor
• Social proof vs. personal transformation
• High-polish vs. lo-fi UGC

And don’t bail too early. Some of your best-performing concepts will look like underperformers at first, especially if they’re aimed at colder audiences. Give it time. Resist the temptation to pull the plug.

E — Exploration / Optimization Balance

One of the most difficult truths for performance media buyers to accept when trying to activate new audiences is that top-of-funnel creative won’t always win in-platform – especially at first.

Why?

Because the audience is cold. They don’t know your brand from a hole in the wall. It takes time (and repetition) to break through to them. It likely won’t happen on the first impression, but (assuming you’ve done your homework on the creative + their profile), it will happen.

Since I’m quite hungry, I’ll use a food analogy:

Imagine you have some pasta sitting out for about 30 minutes, and it gets a little cold. You want it piping hot (just like your customers!) so you put it in the microwave for 10s. When it comes out, it’s steaming. That’s how ads work with warm customers – it doesn’t take much to get them back to “hot”.

Contrast that to the frozen pasta dish – these are the cold audiences. If you put a bowl of frozen noodles in the microwave for 10s, when you pull it out it’s probably still frozen. That doesn’t mean your microwave is bad, you’re an incompetent cook, or that the pasta is somehow irredeemably flawed – it just means that warming up frozen pasta takes a little longer.

The same thing is true for advertising (especially to colder audiences) – it takes a little longer. You need to be OK with spending some money on discovery if you’re going to activate new audiences and unlock new levels of growth. Yes, it is frustrating and no, your CFO might not immediately agree, but do it anyway. It will be tempting to go back to the “old ads” that “just worked” – but remember, those ads worked because they targeted people who already knew you; that pool is finite.

You’re doing this to unlock new audiences - and new revenue - that are completely unavailable to those old ads. So, give your top-of-the-funnel/beginning-of-the-maze content room to work. Track post-view behavior. Look at time-on-site. Watch what happens to branded search after someone sees the ad. The creative that opens your next market probably won’t look like a winner on Day 1, but by Day 90, it might just be fantastic.

The most important thing: Stop making ads for people who already know you.

Make ads for the audiences you haven’t met yet, because that’s where the growth is.

Until next week,

Sam

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