Hello there,
Hello Vibe Marketer,
If you have been in D2C or e-commerce, you've already felt this gap.
You write the ad, know the product inside out, the copy sounds right.
Good product. Good creative. Good offer.
And it's just... not converting.
First instinct is to go back and fix the creative or tweak the offer..
The real problem is not that. It's the angle.
And the angle is wrong because it came from you and not from your customer.
Your customer has already told you exactly why they want to buy on Amazon, Reddit, on review sites in their own words, unfiltered, unprompted, when nobody from your brand was in the room.
That is where the real angle lives.
In this issue, I'm sharing a section from Skills Lab episode 2: the vibe marketer’s community exclusive session, where Jackson Dean gave a walk through of his creative strategist plugin that pulls real customer quotes from Amazon, Reddit, and Trustpilot and turns them into angles that actually convert.
Note: Skills Lab is where Jackson Dean does a monthly deep dive on building and using a skill for a real marketing pain point. Missed episode 1? Read it here…
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Session notes: Behind the system that turns Amazon reviews into winning ad angles
Okay, what is interesting about this system is: Jackson's research layer.
It is not built on one clever prompt. It's built on a guided principle.
Usually: People ask Claude to go find customer reviews and come back with something useful. The problem is Claude has no standard for what useful looks like.
Result: It might pull 5 quotes. It might pull from one weak source. It might fill the gaps with what sounds plausible. You'd never know.
What Jackson built: Engineered a research standard into the plugin itself. Claude doesn't move forward until it hits 50 quotes. It doesn't skip sources. It flags every piece of data by where it came from.
Result: Makes the output different. You are not getting what Claude thinks your customer probably says. You're getting what they actually wrote
The Creative Strategist plugin runs in 3 stages:
- Stage 1 | Customer Research: Where the raw material comes from
- Stage 2 | Persona Builder: Who your buyer actually is, and who to stop targeting
- Stage 3 | Angle Generator: The angles that earn their place, ranked and ready to test
Outcome: 5-8 scored angles, ready to hand to your media buyer. Each one backed by real customer language, matched to a specific buyer moment and built to run on Meta, TikTok, or above the fold.
Stage 1: The 3-tier research system
Tier | Source | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
Tier 1 | Amazon, Reddit | This is where D2C buyers are most honest, most emotional, most specific someone leaving a 3-star review at 11pm about the thing your product should have solved. The skill goes here first, always, and doesn't move on until it has at least 10 quotes from 2 different Tier 1 sources. | If you don't have this, you don't have customer research. You have guesses with citations. |
Tier 2 | Review sites, industry forums | Solid signal from real buyers, used to build volume toward the 50-quote minimum after Tier 1 sets the foundation. | Fills the research to the required standard without compromising on quality. |
Tier 3 | Search result metadata | The fallback used only when Tier 1 and Tier 2 hit blocks, flagged clearly in the output, never mistaken for primary source data. | Keeps the system moving when sites block access without pretending the data is better than it is. |
Every quote that comes in gets tagged across 3 dimensions:
Source quality - where the quote came from and how reliable that source is, so you know which quotes to weight more heavily when building angles.
Emotional intensity - how fired up the person was when they wrote it, scored 1 to 3. In D2C a score of 3 is someone venting that's the language that stops the scroll. High intensity quotes are the raw material for hooks that actually land.
Buying journey stage - where in the decision process this person was when they wrote it. Pre-purchase anxiety reads completely differently from post-purchase regret and both are useful for completely different angles.
What you end up with isn't a list of reviews. It's a ranked, tagged, sourced map of what your actual buyer was thinking and feeling at every stage of the decision, in their own words. That's your creative brief. Written by your customer, not by you.
Stage 2: From research to personas that actually mean something:
D2C personas give you an age range, an income bracket and a list of what someone is generally anxious about. This is super generic and does not target the needs, wants and pain points of customers.
Jackson's system builds personas clustered by behavior. Not who they are, but how they decide.
Each persona includes:
Decision journey monologue - the customer's internal voice reconstructed from 50 real quotes: What they thought before they searched; what made them click; what made them hesitate and what finally made them buy.
Language fingerprint - the exact words and phrases your buyer uses, ready to drop into copy
Attention patterns - what makes them stop scrolling in their specific context
Mini creative brief - ready to hand directly to a copywriter or media buyer
You get 2-4 behavioral personas. Along with the anti-persona.
The anti-persona - the person who looks like your buyer, browses your category, maybe even adds to cart and never converts. That's how you stop burning budget on traffic that was never going to buy.
Stage 3: From personas to angles that earn their place:
Instead of brainstorming strong hooks and ideas based on our intuition, Jackson's system scores every angle through a 3-gate system before it makes the list…
Gate | The question it asks | What gets cut |
|---|---|---|
Gate 1 Evidence | Is this angle backed by a pattern that showed up repeatedly in actual customer language. Not a feature from your product page, not a hunch from your last team meeting? | Any angle that can't be traced back to real customer language |
Gate 2 - Persona match | Does this angle speak to a specific decision moment for a specific persona or is it just generally interesting to someone, somewhere? | Angles that are broadly interesting but don't map to a real buyer moment |
Gate 3 - Differentiation | Could your main competitor run this exact angle tomorrow? | Any angle a competitor could copy without changing a word |
Only angles that pass all 3 gates get ranked and scored.
Outcome?
A ranked brief for your media buyer, backed by what your customer already told you…
Scored angles → media buyer knows what to test first, no guessing
Hook starters → copywriter has a starting point, not a blank page
Format variants → one brief covers short-form and long-form, no extra work
Platform notes → no briefing separately for Meta vs TikTok
Angles to avoid → saves budget before a single dollar is spent
Testing roadmap → media buyer has a sequenced plan, not a pile of options
Quick note: In my previous issues I have covered [what a skill is] and [what makes one powerful], so you can always go back to those if you want the full foundation first.
If you want something built specifically for marketing, check out the skill system here: thevibemarketer.com/skills
Want to go deeper?
This is what Skills Lab looks like every month.
Jackson has shared the full Creative Strategist plugin inside the community. The skills, the pipeline, the whole thing.
If you want access the plugin plus the live sessions, the builds marketers are shipping with AI in real time, come join the community.
And, if you wanna learn from the smartest AI marketing practitioners and also scale your marketing efforts end-to-end - opt-in for the vibe marketer bundle.
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Here’s what I have been reading this week:
1. the AI models coming out of china are DIRT CHEAP and extremely powerful and here's the helpful guide for how to use them…
2. interesting thread on the best businesses to be in a post-AGI world.
3. how to make $1,000/hour selling AI audits to small businesses (full guide)…
4. $1000 MRR and OpenClaw distribution system to scale.
5. GitHub Repo: Online video editor with real-time preview…
6. how to run profitable tiktok ads for apps (complete guide).
7. how to use Claude Code to hit #1 trending on X…
Learn. Ship. Grow. With AI.
Crazy time to be building with AI. And, looks like Claude code is leading the game…
Wanna scale marketing and outperform your competitors? Upgrade your AI.
Wanna learn from marketers actually shipping with AI? Upgrade yourself.
Wanna unlock both at once? Get the bundle.
Got feedback or a question? Just hit reply. I read every message.
Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Share it with a friend who is figuring AI out too.
—The Boring Marketer