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Customer research for ad creative — generations, micro-moments, emotions

Sarah Levinger's customer-reality research (the "customer cake") — generational context (information, money, life stage, trust), micro-moments when the problem surfaces, and emotional mapping (valence/intensity, private vs social, acute vs chronic) — with where to find each, plus review-mining shortcuts from Dara Denney and Emily Hickey.

Updated 2026-10-24·4 sources·ad-creativecustomer-researchpersonasconsumer-psychologycreative-strategy

Customer research for ad creative

TL;DR

  • Sarah Levinger’s system has three realities: customer (how they experience the problem), brand (what the business needs now — Brand reality — production capacity, true creative cost and team alignment), presentation (which format the brain in that state accepts — Matching ad formats to the buyer's state — the T-E-E-P framework and awareness levels).1
  • Research for insights, not fun facts: “she wants to lose weight” is a fact; “getting dressed for lunch with a friend who just lost 40 lb and her jeans don’t fit” is an insight that tells you creator, tone, brief.2
  • Customer research has 3 layers, in order: generational context → micro-moments → emotional mapping.3
  • Small team? Skip generational; do micro-moments, emotions and formats.4
  • Fastest shortcut: upload all reviews as CSV and search for failed attempts before your product (feeds “investment” hooks).5

Details

Layer 1 — generational context (4 questions). The brain maps new stimuli onto past experience; familiar formats get processed with less resistance (familiarity effect) — e.g. boomers raised on magazines respond to long-form article-style ads.6

  1. Childhood information environment (3 TV channels and authority vs infinite internet and “everyone has an agenda”) → which formats feel safe.6
  2. Relationship with money (90s boom vs graduating into 2008 and student debt) → “self-care starts at home” lands as aspiration or insult.7
  3. Actual life right now (building/pivoting career, sandwiched between parents and teens, newly retired) → relevance on a specific Tuesday.8
  4. How they judge risk and whom they trust → authority-averse audiences get peer/friend angles; authority-trusting get doctors/experts.9 Sources: Pew Research; age-specific subreddits, Facebook groups, Quora, LinkedIn; BLS and census data (category price shifts reveal hidden objections); YouTube comments, podcast reviews, Amazon Q&A for tone. Absorb vocabulary — don’t write angles yet.1011

Layer 2 — micro-moments. A good strategist finds pain points; a great one finds when they show up (time of year, week, day) in real-world, not marketing, situations. Hyper-specific situations give you a place to put the camera, a creator, a story — and suit Andromeda’s appetite for specific content.1213 Where: Reddit/Facebook groups/forums for first-person “I was at the dentist…” stories (near-ready scripts); Amazon/Trustpilot reviews (compare 5/3/1-star for objections); quizzes, CS tickets, post-purchase surveys for why now; TikTok/IG comments where people tag friends (“this is so me”).14

Layer 3 — emotional mapping. For each moment ask: which emotion is strongest? private or social? acute or years-long? A private, chronic problem wants “you don’t have to suffer alone anymore”, not hypey “join others like you”.15 Place emotions on Russell’s (1980) valence × intensity model to pick hooks and stories.16

Cadence. First Monday of each month: refresh generational, micro-moment and emotion research per avatar.17

Other research moves.

  • Emily Hickey’s best headline source: customer and non-customer interviews (e.g. “I stopped wearing jeans at 40 because they’re not comfortable”); also founder/design-decision interviews, ad and site comments, listicles (“finally, a turtleneck that doesn’t choke your neck”).18
  • Dara: Ads Manager demographic breakdowns every test and month, Motion’s “intended audience” AI tag, and plain stalking of customers on social.19
  • AI: Sarah stopped asking LLMs to “do research” (they echo your bias); she has agents scrape real conversations by keyword, then asks AI what it sees.20

Disagreements / caveats

See also

Footnotes

  1. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 03:05 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  2. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 09:12 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  3. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 10:42 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  4. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 1:21:18 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  5. I tested over 1000 ads. Here are the hooks ACTUALLY making MONEY @ 00:00 — Dara Denney ↩

  6. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 12:12 — Sarah Levinger ↩ ↩2

  7. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 13:43 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  8. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 15:14 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  9. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 16:46 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  10. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 19:52 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  11. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 21:27 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  12. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 23:01 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  13. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 24:35 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  14. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 26:05 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  15. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 27:38 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  16. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 29:10 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  17. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 1:13:31 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  18. Emily Hickey's "Motivator Map": The Creative Framework Behind $1B in Meta Ad Spend @ 16:42 — Emily Hickey ↩

  19. The 5 Levels of Creative Diversity (most brands miss this) @ 09:00 — Dara Denney ↩

  20. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 1:33:57 — Sarah Levinger ↩

  21. Customer & Audience Research for Ads: Sarah Levinger's System For Winning Creative @ 1:26:02 — Sarah Levinger ↩