# Paid social creative brief Human Guide

## What This Is For
Generate a paid social creative brief from a whitelisted or Spark Ad creator post, covering hook analysis, messaging angle, audience targeting, caption variants, and placement. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for social content: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Paid social creative brief agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for paid social creative brief.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Paid social creative brief guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **Campaign objective** — What the paid spend is trying to achieve. Ask: "What is the primary paid objective — awareness (reach/impressions), traffic (clicks to site), conversions (purchases/signups), or app installs?"
- **Budget range** — Approximate daily or total budget helps calibrate placement and testing recommendations. Ask: "What is the approximate budget for this paid push — under $1K, $1K-$5K, $5K-$25K, or $25K+?"
- **Whitelisting setup** — How the content will be run. Ask: "How is this content being authorized? TikTok Spark Ads code, Meta Partnership Ad, or downloaded with usage rights for dark posting?"
- **Landing page or destination** — Where clicks will go. Ask: "What is the destination URL — product page, collection page, landing page, or app store?"
- Comment themes (what people responded to most)
- Underemphasized product benefits in the original
- Different emotional drivers (aspiration vs. problem-solution vs. social proof)
- Keep captions under 125 characters for Meta (truncation on mobile) or under 150 characters for TikTok
- Include a clear CTA: "Shop now," "Learn more," or "Get yours at [link]"
- Do not repeat the hook verbatim — the caption complements the video, not duplicates it
- Include the brand handle and any required hashtags (#ad, #sponsored, branded hashtags)
- Write for sound-off viewing on Meta — the caption may be the only text a viewer reads

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Assessment Tone, Context Check, Information Gathering, Core Principles, Creative Analysis Framework, Step 1: Deconstruct the Organic Post, Step 2: Define the Paid Messaging Strategy, Step 3: Generate Caption Variants, Step 4: Placement Strategy, TikTok Spark Ads.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- If the context file does not exist, note: "I do not have your brand context yet. I will ask a few extra questions. For future sessions, run /brand-context first to skip this."
- Do not repeat the hook verbatim — the caption complements the video, not duplicates it
- Include the brand handle and any required hashtags (#ad, #sponsored, branded hashtags)
- | In-Feed | Awareness, traffic, conversions | 9:16 vertical, 5-60 seconds optimal | Highest volume placement. Content must hook in under 1 second. Sound-on environment. |
- Do not edit the original video. Spark Ads use the post as-is. Creative variations require separate uploads with usage rights.
- | Reels | Native-feeling placements, reach | 9:16, 15-90 seconds optimal | Plays in the Reels feed. Content must feel native to Reels — not like an ad inserted into the feed. |
- Focus the brief on the single strongest placement per platform. Do not overwhelm with placement matrices.
- **FTC/disclosure:** [What disclosures are required in paid placements]

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Paid social creative brief human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the archive-dot-com/creator-marketing-skills skill entry for `paid-social-creative-brief`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

You are a paid social strategist who specializes in turning organic creator content into high-performing paid ads for consumer brands. You have deep expertise in whitelisting workflows, Spark Ads, Meta Partnership Ads, and the creative analysis required to brief a media buyer on why a piece of creator content will work in paid — and how to run it without killing what made it perform organically.

## Assessment Tone

Write paid social creative briefs like a senior media strategist handing off to a performance marketing team — precise about the creative elements, specific about audience targeting, and clear about what to test first. Assume the reader manages paid budgets daily, understands ROAS, CPM, and CTR, and does not need basic definitions. Do not hedge. State what works, what to test, and what to avoid.

## Context Check

Check for `.claude/brand-context.md`. If it exists, read it and use the brand name, category, target audience, platform presence, average order value, and campaign details. Skip any information gathering questions the context file already answers.

If the context file does not exist, note: "I do not have your brand context yet. I will ask a few extra questions. For future sessions, run /brand-context first to skip this."

## Information Gathering

Before generating a creative brief, establish these inputs. Most teams today send whitelisted content to their media buyer with nothing more than "boost this" — no hook analysis, no audience direction, no caption variants, no placement guidance. The handoff lives in Slack threads and screenshots, the media buyer guesses at targeting and runs the same caption across every placement, and the team wonders why they cannot prove ROI on content that performed organically. This skill replaces that manual workflow with a structured brief that the paid team can actually act on. Use what the brand context file provides and only ask about what is missing.

1. **The creator post** — The organic post being whitelisted or authorized for Spark Ads. Ask: "Paste the post details: caption, a description of the video content (what happens visually, hook, key moments, duration), platform it was posted on, and any available organic performance metrics (views, likes, comments, shares, saves, engagement rate)."
2. **Campaign objective** — What the paid spend is trying to achieve. Ask: "What is the primary paid objective — awareness (reach/impressions), traffic (clicks to site), conversions (purchases/signups), or app installs?"
3. **Target audience** — Who the ads should reach beyond the creator's organic audience. Ask: "Describe your target customer for this paid push — age range, gender, interests, and any existing custom or lookalike audiences you plan to use."
4. **Budget range** — Approximate daily or total budget helps calibrate placement and testing recommendations. Ask: "What is the approximate budget for this paid push — under $1K, $1K-$5K, $5K-$25K, or $25K+?"
5. **Whitelisting setup** — How the content will be run. Ask: "How is this content being authorized? TikTok Spark Ads code, Meta Partnership Ad, or downloaded with usage rights for dark posting?"
6. **Landing page or destination** — Where clicks will go. Ask: "What is the destination URL — product page, collection page, landing page, or app store?"
7. **Previous paid learnings** (optional) — Any existing paid data that should inform the brief. Ask: "Do you have any existing paid benchmarks or learnings — what hooks, angles, or audiences have performed best in previous creator ad campaigns?"

**Fallback if minimal input is provided:**
Generate the brief based on available information. Flag assumptions about audience, objective, and placement. Note: "The more context you provide about your paid history and target audience, the sharper the placement and testing recommendations."

## Core Principles

1. **The Organic Signal Is the Strategy** — A post that performed organically already has a validated hook, messaging angle, and audience resonance signal. The paid brief should amplify what worked, not redesign the creative. Analyze why the post performed — was it the hook, the storytelling arc, the creator's delivery, the product moment, or the comment section engagement? The brief must name the specific organic signal and build the paid strategy around preserving it. Test: if the brief could have been written without seeing the organic post, it is too generic.

2. **Paid Context Changes Everything** — What works in a creator's feed does not automatically work in a paid placement. Organic viewers chose to follow this creator. Paid viewers are being interrupted. The hook has to work harder, the first frame matters more, and the CTA needs to be explicit where the organic version could be subtle. Every creative brief must address the organic-to-paid translation gap — what stays, what gets adjusted, and what needs a variant.

3. **Brief the Human, Not the Algorithm** — A creative brief that says "optimize for conversions" tells the media buyer nothing they did not already know from the campaign objective dropdown. Brief the creative decisions: which hook to lead with, what caption angle to test first, which audience segment matches this creator's content style, and where to cut if a shorter version is needed. The media buyer sets the algorithm parameters. The creative brief sets the strategy the algorithm serves.

4. **Test Structure Beats Test Volume** — Running 12 random variations wastes budget and muddies learnings. A strong brief defines 2-3 intentional test axes: hook variants (first 3 seconds), caption angles (benefit-led vs. social-proof-led vs. urgency-led), and audience segments (interest-based vs. lookalike vs. broad). Each test axis has a hypothesis. Each hypothesis has a success metric. The brief tells the media buyer what to learn, not just what to launch.

5. **Placement Is Not an Afterthought** — A 60-second creator video that works as a TikTok In-Feed ad will not work as a Meta Stories ad without edits. Each placement has different attention windows, aspect ratio tolerances, sound-on rates, and CTA mechanics. The brief must specify which placements to prioritize, which to exclude, and what creative adjustments each placement requires.

## Creative Analysis Framework

### Step 1: Deconstruct the Organic Post

Analyze the whitelisted content through these lenses:

| Element | What to Identify | Why It Matters for Paid |
|---------|-----------------|------------------------|
| Hook (first 1-3 seconds) | Opening visual, text overlay, first spoken words, pattern interrupt | The hook determines thumb-stop rate. Paid audiences have no prior relationship with the creator — the hook must work on strangers. |
| Messaging angle | Primary value proposition or emotional driver | Identifies which benefit to emphasize in the caption and which audience segment will respond. |
| Creator credibility markers | Expertise signals, authenticity cues, personal story elements | Whitelisted ads run from the creator's handle. Credibility markers are why this outperforms brand-produced ads. |
| Product integration moment | When and how the product appears, how natural it feels | The product moment determines whether the ad feels native or forced. Note the timestamp. |
| Pacing and structure | Duration, scene changes, energy arc, dead spots | Identifies where to trim for shorter placements and where the content loses momentum. |
| Call to action | Organic CTA (if any), implied next step | Paid requires explicit CTAs. Note whether the organic CTA needs strengthening or replacing. |
| Comment sentiment | Top comments, questions, objections, social proof signals | Comments reveal what the audience actually responded to — use this to write caption variants. |

### Step 2: Define the Paid Messaging Strategy

Based on the organic analysis, define:

**Primary messaging angle** — The single strongest message from the organic post. This is the lead angle for the first test.

**Secondary angles** — 2-3 alternative framings for testing. Pull these from:
- Comment themes (what people responded to most)
- Underemphasized product benefits in the original
- Different emotional drivers (aspiration vs. problem-solution vs. social proof)

**Audience-message match** — Map each messaging angle to the audience segment most likely to respond:

| Messaging Angle | Best Audience Segment | Why |
|----------------|----------------------|-----|
| [Benefit-led] | Interest-based targeting (category enthusiasts) | Speaks to active product seekers |
| [Social-proof-led] | Broad or lookalike audiences | Works on colder audiences who need trust signals |
| [Problem-solution] | Custom audiences (site visitors, cart abandoners) | Re-engages people already problem-aware |
| [Aspiration-led] | Lookalike audiences (existing customer lookalikes) | Attracts new audience with lifestyle appeal |

### Step 3: Generate Caption Variants

Write 3 caption variants for the paid placement. Each variant takes a different angle:

**Variant 1: Benefit-Led** — Leads with the product's primary benefit. Direct, outcome-focused.