How I Get Ad Ideas AI Can't Copy (Psychology Backed Method)

Summary of the Video

• The speaker starts with a word association game: connect two unrelated concepts (e.g., pineapple → spaceship) through a short chain of related links.

  • The goal is to show that forcing unexpected connections can quickly produce a new idea.

• They introduce themselves as Sarah Levenger, a creative strategist who uses behavioral science/psychology to improve ad performance.

• The main claim: e-commerce ad performance problems (e.g., higher CAC and lower ROAS) are largely driven by creative fatigue—ads “burn out” faster than before as audiences effectively tune out within weeks.

• Marketers often respond by using AI to generate many ad variations, but the speaker argues this mostly increases the volume of average ads rather than creating truly memorable concepts.

• They explain a limitation of AI-driven language generation: language models tend to optimize for likely continuations, which can raise the floor but flatten the ceiling (i.e., fewer genuinely surprising, high-potential ideas).

• The real bottleneck is described as upstream: the limiting factor isn’t media spend or automation—it’s running out of interesting ideas (i.e., strategy and creativity).

• Advertising’s “one job,” in their framing, is to build recall by triggering emotion and surprise.

  • If ads aren’t memorable, platforms charge more and performance (click-through/conversion) declines.

• They argue that creativity is trainable, not just a matter of taste or talent.

  • They reference bisociation: great ideas often come from combining two things that don’t normally belong together, creating insight in the “gap.”

Creativity Exercises (Do Before Looking at Ad Accounts)

They recommend running creativity work before checking ad accounts or writing more headlines:

• Idea games like animal mashups (combine two animals into a new mashup name).
• Absurd pairing prompts, such as:
  • Connect your product to a random “dumb” object nearby.
  • Do an “alien archaeology” exercise: describe the product as if it were discovered in a pyramid.

Personal Example: Melatonin and Silence

• The speaker shares a counterintuitive finding from their own routine: they eventually conclude that total silence works best.
• They turn that into an ad idea by connecting melatonin with headphones/airplane mode—something that may not be structurally obvious at first, but is more surprising and memorable.

Why It Works (Processing Fluency)

• They connect creativity to processing fluency and perception research (e.g., “Booba vs. Kiki” shape-sound associations”).
• Humans quickly and automatically process micro-signals and tend to prefer options that feel easier or clearer to decode—so creative arrangements can influence what audiences perceive and remember.

Creative and Targeting Are Linked

• They connect creative strategy to targeting: platforms like Meta effectively “read” creative elements (colors, backgrounds, accents, etc.) and decide who to show it to.
• Better creative arrangement can therefore improve targeting and help reduce costs.

TL;DR

CAC is fundamentally an idea problem disguised as a media problem. Don’t solve creative fatigue by generating more average AI ads—solve it by training ideation like a muscle using weird-connection games.

Speakers

• Sarah Levenger