The Creative Strategy Loop

Generation (Modes 1–3) answers "make me ads." This reference answers the question that comes first: which ads are worth making, in what order, at what production cost — and the retro that turns each month's results into next month's plan. It's the standing operating loop of a creative strategist, run by an agent with a human deciding.

Signals → Concepts (evidence-ranked) → Roadmap (tiered, capacity-checked) → Briefs → [Modes 1–3 produce] → Monthly retro → back into the icebox

Step 1: Read the Three Signals

Creative direction comes from synthesis across three independent signal sources. One source alone misleads: the account tells you what worked among things you've tried, customers tell you why they buy in their words, and organic content tells you what the audience chooses to watch when nobody's paying.

Cadence: a monthly deep dive (60–90 min, all three sources, feeds the monthly roadmap) plus a weekly ~20-minute refresh (what changed: new winners/losers, new review themes, anything spiking organically). Research beyond what the next decision needs is busywork — every synthesis session should end in concepts, not notes.

Trust rule: every insight the agent surfaces must carry its receipt — which review, which ad's metrics, which organic post. An insight without a source doesn't enter the icebox. (Same grounding rules as everything else in this skill.)

Step 2: Turn Signals into Evidence-Ranked Concepts

A concept is one testable creative hypothesis: segment × motivation × angle × format, with its evidence attached. "UGC for moms" is not a concept; "new-parent insomniacs (per 40+ reviews mentioning 3am feeds) × 'quiet enough to not wake the baby' × before/after demo × POV night-shot video" is.

Rank every concept by the strongest evidence supporting it:

Higher evidence earns roadmap priority — an earlier slot in the slate. Production tier is a separate call, set by validation strength, existing assets, capacity, and risk: even a tier-2 customer-language concept starts low-fidelity until it shows a funnel signal. Hunches aren't banned — they're just cheap and last.

Step 3: Branch on Account State

The right creative mix depends on which of two states the account is in. Diagnose before roadmapping — a plan built for the wrong state wastes the month.

Exploration state — nothing (or nothing new) is working:

• Go wide, not deep: mostly net-new concepts across different segments and angles; keep iterations to a small minority — iterating on losers multiplies losers
• Redefine "win" per-metric: with no full-funnel winners, a single-metric improvement (a hold-rate lift, a CPC drop, a CVR bump) on any test is a hit worth pulling on — see the diagnostic funnel
• Iterate only on hits; everything else stays exploratory
• Common root causes to check while testing: the creative is boring (safe, seen-before), the message is overcomplicated, the offer/UVP is unclear, or CPMs are punishing a too-narrow audience

Scaling state — one or more concepts are converting profitably:

• Go deep on the winner while it's open: a winner-led slate of visually-distinct variations of the winning concept (same message, new execution — near-duplicates mostly cannibalize the original's reach and teach you nothing new, so variations must look meaningfully different), plus a remix lane (tonal/emotional re-executions of it) and sub-angle probes drilling into the winning segment; tune the split to budget, fatigue speed, and production velocity
• Keep a small exploration allocation alive even mid-scale — winners fatigue, and the next winner is rarely an iteration of the current one
• Speed matters more in this state: a scaling window is finite

Step 4: The Roadmap Artifact

Maintain one living document (suggested: roadmap.md beside the Grounded Inputs corpus) with three horizons:

## Icebox        — every concept, evidence tier + source attached, nothing scheduled
## This quarter  — 2-4 themes chosen from the icebox (the bets), with why-now
## This month    — the slate: concept | evidence tier | production tier | owner | status

Each monthly-slate concept gets a production tier:

Capacity check — the rule that keeps roadmaps honest: count what the team (or the AI pipeline) can produce at quality this month, and roadmap to that number. A 20-concept slate against 8 concepts of real capacity doesn't produce 20 ads; it produces 20 compromised ones and a burned-out team. Cut by evidence rank until the slate fits.

From the slate, generate one brief per concept (segment, motivation + verbatim source, angle, format, hook matrix rows, production tier, success metric) and hand each to Modes 1–3 for production.

Step 5: The Monthly Creative Retro

Last step of the loop, first input of the next one. One artifact per month (suggested: retros/YYYY-MM.md):

## Winners     — concept, the funnel numbers, and the WHY (which element earned it)
## Losers      — concept, where in the funnel it died, hypothesis for why
## Metric wins — full-funnel losers with one strong metric (these are leads, not losses)
## Learnings   — pattern-level notes → written back into the icebox as new/revised concepts
## Kills       — concepts retired from the icebox, with reason
## Next slate  — first draft of next month, updated evidence ranks

Retro rules:

• Judge concepts, not ads. Three executions of one concept failing says the concept is wrong; one failing says the execution was.
• Read the funnel, not the ROAS column. The diagnostic funnel says what to fix; ROAS alone says only that something is broken.
• Enough data before verdicts — respect the impression/spend thresholds in Common Mistakes and the ads skill's decision systems; a two-day read is a coin flip.
• Every learning lands somewhere: icebox update, evidence re-rank, or kill. A retro that changes nothing in the roadmap was a meeting, not a retro.

To run this loop on a schedule (retro on the 1st, weekly refresh Mondays, daily batches via Mode 3), see the creative loops in marketing-loops.

Failure Modes

• Roadmapping without a diagnosis — a slate built before reading the three signals is a wish list; testing without a diagnosis isn't strategy
• Iteration-heavy slates in exploration state — polishing losers while the real problem (angle, offer, audience) goes untested
• Ignoring capacity — the plan the team can't produce at quality is a plan to produce slop
• Evidence-free concepts jumping the queue — the loudest stakeholder's hunch ships as a T3 shoot while tier-2 customer language sits in the icebox
• Retro as theater — winners celebrated, nothing re-ranked, icebox untouched
• Scaling-state complacency — 100% of the slate on winner variations; when the winner fatigues, the pipeline is empty