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Why copying competitors leaves the strategy layer empty
Dara Denney opens with a blunt argument: if your creative strategy starts by copying what competitors are running, you are not really doing strategy yet. Even the slightly smarter version — sorting by ads library performance or chasing the formats with the most impressions — still keeps you in reaction mode. Her point is not that competitor research is useless. It is that competitor research sits below the level where a brand decides what it actually needs to say next.
That is the value of the video. Denney is not pitching a bigger pile of ads. She is building a working method for understanding the brand, the market, and the customer before anyone chooses hooks, angles, or formats. For DTC teams, that shift matters because it changes the creative brief from “what is winning elsewhere?” to “what gap are we trying to fill here?”
The direct answer is straightforward: her creative strategy process begins with brand research, customer language, and market signals, then uses those inputs to decide which persona, objection, or awareness level deserves attention next. The ad is the output, not the starting point.
The research stack behind a stronger creative brief
Denney breaks her agency workflow into a living research SOP, and the structure is the story. The goal is to produce several context documents before creative planning begins: a reputation analysis, a customer review mining sheet, an AI analysis of the review data, and a competitors document. That sequence is meant to create a fuller picture of what the customer sees and feels before buying.
Her reputation analysis starts with the brand and product itself. She looks at who founded the company, what the founding story was, how the product is positioned, what the best-selling items are, how the brand merchandises those items, and which offers are being pushed in paid social. She also focuses on the product promise: what transformation does the product claim, and what proof or evidence does the brand have to support it?
That matters because creative strategy is not only about persuasion style. It is also about offer structure. Denney notes that sometimes the product assortment or bundle framing is part of the creative opportunity. If a lower-priced item is hard to scale on Meta, a strategist may need to think about how to increase basket value or reposition the bundle so it solves a more visible problem.
From there, she widens the research lens to first-page search results, press coverage, Reddit, Amazon, social media, and YouTube. Each source contributes a slightly different kind of signal. Press can help reveal brand legitimacy or news that changes how an ad should be framed. Reddit often surfaces blunt objections and pain points. Amazon can show whether bestsellers and reviews differ from DTC behavior. Social channels reveal storytelling style, creator usage, and how much transparency the brand offers. YouTube comments, even when the reviews themselves are imperfect, can still expose skepticism and frequently asked questions.
The point is not volume for its own sake. The point is pattern recognition across places where a potential customer might hesitate.
How reviews, reputation, and AI surface real objections
Once the reputation analysis is in place, Denney moves into customer review mining. This is where the framework becomes especially useful for paid social teams, because it pulls language directly from buyers rather than from internal assumptions. She recommends gathering reviews from the website, ad comments, and top ads over the last year, not just the brand’s owned review platform. In her workflow, the top-performing ads matter because they reveal the comments that are already shaping the market conversation.
She then feeds that material into AI to organize the findings. The questions she asks are practical: what strengths and weaknesses show up most often, what complaints repeat, what “golden nugget” phrases appear, and what triggers seem to move someone toward purchase? AI is used as a sorting and synthesis layer, not a substitute for judgment.
That division is the most useful part of the process. Denney is clear that machines can compile and cluster information, but they cannot decide which insight is strategically important. She still wants human review because a sharp strategist can tell the difference between a noisy comment and a repeated objection that should shape a campaign.
Her persona work follows the same logic. She combines review data, the reputation analysis, and a prompt that produces a deck the team can review. The goal is to identify both existing and new personas, especially if the brand needs to reach net-new audiences. In other words, the persona is not a marketing invention; it is a way to translate repeated customer patterns into something a creative team can actually plan around.
Turning findings into personas, gaps, and a roadmap
Denney’s framework gets even more practical when she turns research into planning. She says the biggest mistake many creative strategists make is staying trapped in weekly sprints. That tempo can keep a team busy without giving it room to make bigger, more deliberate decisions about formats, creators, or launches.
Her answer is to work at two planning horizons: quarterly and monthly. Quarterly planning helps the team see the bigger business picture, while monthly planning turns that view into a workable roadmap. That gives creative strategy room to breathe. It also keeps the team from confusing activity with direction.
She identifies three gap areas that are especially important once the research is done:
Persona gaps
Are the ads speaking to the right people? Are some customer types missing entirely? Are others overrepresented even though the research points to a different opportunity? Denney treats persona gaps as one of the most common places where an account can improve.
Awareness gaps
Is the account leaning too much on mid-funnel or bottom-funnel content? Are the best performers all offer-driven when the brand actually needs more top-of-funnel volume? In her view, strategy should reflect the full journey, not just the part of the funnel that closes fastest.
Creative diversity gaps
Are the ideas truly varied, or are they only different versions of the same concept? Denney also extends this question to creators: does the brand have enough range in lifestyle, gender, age, job type, and overall vibe? That kind of variety is part of the strategy, not an afterthought.
This is where her approach becomes more than an analysis exercise. It becomes a planning system that tells the team what to make next and why.
What the Grüns, Oats Overnight, and Rhode examples reveal
Denney’s examples show how the same process can lead to different strategies depending on the brand.
With Grüns, she saw repeated language around skepticism: was the brand a scam, or was it worth the price? That led her to propose ad concepts that confront doubt directly rather than tiptoeing around it. She also leaned into a playful, slightly negative angle that frames the product as the “scam” because it is actually good for you and tastes good. The value there is not the joke itself. It is the fact that the idea came from customer language.
With Oats Overnight, she noticed a different pattern. People were asking whether the product fit into a GLP-1 lifestyle, and other comments pushed back on the idea that the product could be easily DIY’d at home. That opened two strategic lanes: one tied to a specific use case, and another that leans into convenience and taste as reasons not to make it yourself. She also spotted an underrepresented persona around fullness, which gave her a gap to fill in the creative mix.
Rhode required a different read because beauty does not behave like a direct-response supplement brand. Denney points out that the brand’s products and audience cues suggested a different tone, one that still needs performance but may rely more on vibe and partnerships. She noticed an absence of partnership ads and saw an opening for an older creator or celebrity profile that could extend the brand beyond the younger audience some consumers assume it serves.
Across all three examples, the same pattern holds: research should point toward a specific next move. Not a vague inspiration board, but an actual angle, persona, or format decision.
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