The 10x marketer
creative direction speed run + the Swiss grid
Last night, hundreds of you joined the June community call where I talked about the creative direction shift: how personal brands need creative direction more than brands.
Brand campaigns now are anchored by personalities: models, influencers, team members, founders.
And now marketers from SaaS to CPG to venture capital are putting personalities at the forefront. They’re running podcasts, they’re promoting their releases on LinkedIn, they’re making videos, they’re hiring creators, they’re hiring UGC, they’re briefing creators for ads.
Level one of this was creative strategy: how do you provide briefs and hooks for advertising?
Level two of this is bringing full creative direction principles to personal brands, small and large.
From the creator who just cracked 100k this year and really wants to be somebody to the multiple executives at companies who are now realizing their LinkedIns and occasional Instagram videos are driving an awful lot of leads.
The term creative director has become very diluted over the last decade.
From people at fashion houses or in agencies to every small brand adopting it, to the intangible person with a mysterious source of income who has it listed on their Instagram but with that comes a genuine change in its consumption.
There are far more creators, founders, and executives who are thinking about the principles of branding, launching, aesthetics, and world-building than there are brands.
It is a radical new market to be able to provide services in and to understand as you navigate a business in any category.
I’m trying something new this week. It’s a Speedrun bootcamp for one week only, $499, designed to serve two demographics.
If you have a personal brand and need more systems and feedback to get to the next level ...
ORif you’re a creative with some writing or creative direction chops and want to learn to offer support to personal brands as a service...
3 live calls, 10+ videos, and extensive worshipping on ideation, and creative direction for personal brands whether you are one or are working for them. We might do it again, we might not, it’s the first of its kinda, come lock in.
How to become a one person marketing machine
The one-person marketing operator was talked about as viral bit around Claude’s one person growth team a few months ago… but in the modern era you’d be quite surprised how effective one person or a small team could be
Whether you’re running your own business or trying to be indispensable inside someone else’s, the playbook is the same: ruthless prioritization around the things that actually move revenue.
Here’s how to structure a week if you’re a lean marketing operator:
1. New creative (8 hrs) Ideation, briefing creators, recruiting UGC talent, assigning and following up. This is the engine. If this isn’t running, nothing else matters.
2. Performance & funnel (4 hrs) Load new creative into ads, read analytics, make notes. Don’t spend more time than this in ads manager. Meta first, then Google, then TikTok for physical products. If you’re a services business, YouTube ads are worth a look.
3. Landing pages & email (4 hrs) Match your pages to whatever messages are working. Broadcast emails, automations, abandoned cart. This is where the revenue lives between campaigns.
4. Influencer & creators (full day) Outreach, contracts, scheduling, tracking. This is its own job and should eventually become one. Until then, treat it like a discipline, not an afterthought.
5. Logistics (8 hrs across the week) Emails, follow-ups, the stuff that keeps everything above from falling apart.
That’s roughly 4.5 working days. Fill the rest with more content.
I break all of this down in-depth, on whiteboard in the video.
Lock in.
The Grid & Learning Design
In a world drowning in AI-generated sameness, we’ve all heard that “taste is the differentiator.” But I feel taste is really about understanding the foundations that built the world around us and trying it for ourselves; taste is developed by understanding what makes things work, and then making the edit that makes your work unmistakably yours.
But where to start, and gain inspiration?
I wrote about the grid, Swiss design, and using the principles of layout in the modern world here.
When we talk about personal brand creative direction… sometimes its simpler than you think.
From TikTok trend to IRL product by a payments juggernaut.
The relentless stream of popcorn buckets as merch continues… and we’re not mad.
Even in a crowded visual world, Pelle Cass still stops the feed.
Natatlie’s an incredible example of how intellectual influence is having its moment on Instagram right now.
The set is the top of funnel podcast hook, and Base has a good one, the only thing that can help with such an unsavory subject and a brand with so much distrust.
Until next time,
Oren