Advertisement Creative Process

Full Guide

Understanding The Goals And Obstacles Of Advertising

To understand why we go about this process in the way that we do, it’ll help to gain a perspective on how advertising works and the obstacles that are typically at play when seeking to achieve your goals.

Firstly, the goal of advertising is to increase sales by enabling buyers of the category to select the brand at their time of need or want.

So how does advertising enable sales? Simply put, advertising is a form of communication to buyers from the brand to let them know they have a solution.

Although, it’s very important to point out that the vast majority of potential buyers are not ready to buy at any given point in time. In B2B contexts, it’s been coined as the 95:5 rule (less than 5% are ready). This isn’t 5% of people who see your ad — it’s 5% of all potential category buyers, whether they see your ad or not. That means most of your audience today won’t buy today, but many will later — and your brand needs to be the one they remember.

This has a profound implication advertising and this fact alone is something that most business professionals are ignorant about, or negligent about. This unfortunately breeds both unwanted noise and unethical (sales) practices, which also creates ad avoidance (creating yet another obstacle for us).

The implication of most buyers needing the solution later, us that advertising must be remembered later. To go an extra step, the goal of the marketer is to have the brand be remembered in the most common scenarios when buyers enter their buying cycle. Scientifically, these are named Category Entry Points (CEPs).

If we want our brand to be remembered, it helps to understand how memory works—specifically, that emotion enhances the strength and longevity of memories. This is due to the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing emotion, which boosts the encoding and consolidation of emotional experiences.

Since emotion plays such a key role in our ability to remember, it must play a key role in advertising for those ads to perform optimally.

Shepherd®’s Process

Prerequisite Growth Hub tasks: Basic customer research (CEPs) and Logo Creation.

The following is a series of questions to guide you to induce a strategically relevant and emotionally powerful message. You may follow it exactly or follow a similar process that will inevitably provide an emotion invoking output, using a message that you believe is strategically important from your brand’s perspective, and spurs buyers to take the action you want and believe what you want them to believe.

1. What is your business?

State the business, what’s being sold, the industry or category.

2. What are your current business goals?

Describe broad goal of the brand based on it’s current performance and future direction.

3. What are your services/products?

Outlaying the range of solutions available begins to set the context.

4. What are the customer segments for these?

Identifying the segments e.g. for B2B this would be the different industries and the characteristics of the individuals within them paints the backdrop. It’s our target audiences.

5. What are their CEPs in order of volume/most common?

Ideally using a combination of our basic and advanced customer (CEPs) research insights identified as part of Voyager’s Foundations tasks, this makes it clear the specific moments in which we want our audiences to be able to remember the brand, and to receive our messaging. They are the contexts with which we can make our messaging relevant.

6. What emotions do they experience as part of these CEPs?

Humans experience hundreds if not thousands of feelings every single day. Before we harness it, let’s understand the kinds of emotions they are already experiencing. We may know these from our Foundational research insights.

7. What do we want them to feel?

The same or something different as a response. Note some potential emotions as options.

8. What memory (or any concept of thought) would we like to bind our brand with as part of this emotional experience?

This may be the most challenging step. However, given this is a creative process, creativity is required.The quality of creative input into this step is what creates publicity and impact – which is the very essence of marketing effectiveness (and hence, in the long run, business performance). This is why I believe creativity, applied with artifice in any area of life (education, sport, arts) is the key to achieving results most effectively or efficiently. Its the magic dust; your wild card. Introduce something different, yet genius. Take as long as it you need until you are convinced you’ve found the perfect ingredient to the campaign.

9. What do we stand for or what specific action do we want them to take?

The call to action (CTA) or slogan for the campaign (or the business). This is not imperative, however for some campaigns, this can be used as a powerful tool based on the context knowledge (main CEP) being targeted.

10. Execution

There are two main approaches to executing your campaign creative:

Using stock media to produce the advertisement in-house
Outsourcing production to a professional videographer or animation team (Voyager covers this in the High End Creative Production task)

In both cases, your responses to the strategic questions above become the creative brief—defining the core message, emotion, and scenario to be captured.

A third option is now emerging: AI-generated video. Platforms like Artlist have recently introduced AI video tools that allow users to animate still images with emotional realism. This may be a potential route if stock video is not doing it for you.

Whether it’s video or static, your audience should be able to tell—even subtly—what you’re offering and which category you belong to within a few seconds. Clarity builds memory.

Bonus Strategy: The Wild Card

Beyond the 10-step creative process Shepherd® follows, we’ve noticed that the best campaigns often include one unteachable, unpredictable advantage: the wild card.

This is the element of genius—a creative spark that makes the whole idea bigger than the sum of its parts.

Your wild card could be:

A distinctive brand asset introduced by the brand team (a character, jingle, or symbol)
A thematic narrative that ties together multiple ads into a bigger story arc
A replicable idea that’s both simple and powerful across many executions

Example: In our work with Gibbons Fitness, we anchored the campaign on the idea that life is made of finite, countable experiences—reminding people that our time with loved ones is limited. That emotional truth became the foundation for a long-running, flexible ad concept with staying power.

We encourage every brand to search for this wild card. It might come from your agency. It might come from a brilliant internal team member. Whoever finds it—let it lead.

Execution Principles

When translating a creative idea into execution, follow these evidence-based rules to maximise effectiveness:

Brand Recognition
Always display your logo or distinctive brand asset in a simple, uncluttered way. In video or radio, embed your jingle or brand sound throughout — don’t leave the logo until the very end. This strengthens memory encoding and ensures attribution.
Category Clarity
Make it easy for buyers to instantly recognise the category (e.g., fitness, insurance, food). Without this, the ad won’t help at the moment of category entry.
Simplicity at a Glance
Billboards and social posts must work in one glance. Avoid cramming text or design elements. Use one bold message and strong contrast for readability.

Emotion Over Persuasion
Remember: most buyers are not in-market today (95:5 rule). Your ad is for brand building—making your brand memorable for later—not direct selling. Emotion is the lever that fuses memory and brand.
Music & Sound
Science shows music powerfully activates the amygdala, enhancing memory and emotion. Choose soundtracks carefully to align with the emotion you want to encode.
Consistency Across Executions
Whether billboard, social, video, or radio, embed brand elements throughout. This multiplies the touchpoints for memory (logo placement, colours, jingles, characters).

Static Ads

For static image-based ads, our go-to is Adobe Stock, though Shutterstock is also well-known for high-quality photography. Adobe Stock offers a generous 10 free assets as part of their trial—usually enough to complete one strong campaign idea.

Here’s what to expect:

When you first generated your idea using Shepherd’s creative framework, you probably had a certain visual in mind. That’s normal—but stock libraries are finite, so you’ll need to adapt. This part of the process involves translating the idea into execution using what’s available, which means some elements may change. The goal is to find visuals that best express the strategy and emotion you’ve already established.

This step requires good taste and a sharp eye for design, so it often pays off to include your designer or senior marketer in the process. Choose images that align with your target audience, campaign scenario, and emotional tone. This isn’t the time for guesswork—it’s about applying creative direction to the best available options.

To bring cohesion to your ad and subtly reflect your brand, consider adding a soft gradient overlay using your brand colours—fading from a corner or edge, with high transparency (10–20%) to avoid overpowering the image. This can help create visual warmth or depth without distracting from the main message. Always ensure your logo is clearly placed, ideally in a consistent corner, and avoid clutter—ads should be easy to digest at a glance. Stick to one focal point, minimal copy, and strong contrast between text and background.

A word on feedback: focus groups rarely work, especially for B2C brands targeting the general public. They tend to overthink, overanalyse, and rarely mimic real-world exposure. A better alternative is to post the ad up somewhere visible (like the office) and observe people’s first reactions—what they feel, notice, or say. Take it with a grain of salt, but it can help validate your design instincts. Remember: every ad should be built for a specific audience in a specific moment. Generic feedback often misses that.

Video Ads

For video ads, two reliable, creator-friendly platforms remain MotionArray.com and Artlist.io. Both offer affordable monthly subscriptions with full commercial licenses, giving you access to professional-quality creative assets without breaking the bank.

Til now, Motion Array has been a go-to for all-in-one production. It offers:

High-quality stock video footage
Soundtracks to create emotional resonance
Sound effects for polish and energy
AI voiceovers in various accents and styles—realistic enough to replace hiring a professional

Designers can download preview versions of video, audio, and animation assets to build mockups for client approval—so you don’t need to license anything until you’re confident.

A new frontier is rapidly forming: AI-generated video production.This is where text-to-video and scene-to-animation tools are redefining creative speed and scale.

Leading options include:

Scenario — a next-generation creative platform that merges image generation, animation, and cinematic scene creation into one pipeline. Its strength lies in iterative storytelling: moving seamlessly from static visuals to animated sequences while maintaining character, lighting, and brand consistency. Scenario has become a favourite among brand and motion designers looking to cut production friction between concept, storyboard, and final render.
LTX Studio — designed for brand storytelling, offering scene-based video generation with persistent characters and stylistic continuity across multiple outputs. Ideal for creating narrative-driven brand content or character-led campaigns.
Sora 2 by OpenAI — the most advanced text-to-video model to date, capable of rendering ultra-realistic cinematic footage directly from a written prompt or script. It’s particularly powerful for concept testing, product storytelling, and rapid visualisation before committing to full-scale production.
Veo by Google DeepMind — for photorealistic AI film production, integrated into the broader Google Workspace ecosystem.
Canva AI Video Creator — a quick, accessible solution for social-media-ready short-form content where speed and consistency matter most.

Together, these tools represent a shift from traditional editing to AI-assisted creative direction — where teams can storyboard, animate, and render concepts in hours instead of weeks.

This evolution won’t replace high-end production for flagship campaigns, but it unlocks enormous potential for fast-turnaround brand content that still maintains creative consistency and storytelling cohesion.

Strategic Context Matters

Great creative doesn’t live in a vacuum.

In fact, according to 2024 research presented by Mark Ritson at Cannes Lions, one of the three critical factors separating average campaigns from those delivering up to 12x the effectiveness is not just creativity or budget—it’s time. The most effective campaigns weren’t those that ran briefly, but rather those that were given 2–3 years to build salience and embed memory structures over time.

This reinforces a truth often ignored by many businesses: media planning is just as important as the creative itself.

At Shepherd®, we encourage clients to treat their media schedule as part of their brand asset investment—not just a spend. Consistency and duration allow the emotional impact of your message to compound, increasing the likelihood your brand will be remembered at a buyer’s moment of need.

Compliance

Regardless of how or where your ad runs, you must comply with your region’s advertising and consumer protection laws. In Australia, for example, the AANA (Australian Association of National Advertisers) handles public complaints and sets guidelines across all ad formats. The ACCC can issue fines, require businesses to run corrective advertising, or even take legal action if your ad causes harm or misleads the public.

Make sure you review:

Industry-specific laws
Country-specific standards
The platform’s advertising policies

This isn’t just about avoiding trouble—it’s about protecting your brand’s long-term reputation.