skills/Creative Strategist/references/insight-quality.md

# Insight Quality Standard

An insight is the "why" behind performance.

It is not a recap of metrics.
It is not a description of what the ad looks like.
It is not a list of observations.

A good insight explains what is happening in the viewer's mind.

It goes beyond summarizing inputs and answers:

- Why did this work?
- Why did this fail?
- What changed in how people felt, trusted, understood, or cared?

## Strong Insights

- Explain the underlying reason something is working or not working
- Focus on human behavior, not platform mechanics
- Surface something meaningful or non-obvious
- Make sense logically when you read them
- Feel specific to this brand, audience, or moment — not generic

## The Tests

**Remove the metrics test:** If you removed the metrics, would the reasoning still hold up? If not, it's not an insight yet.

**Brand specificity test:** A weak insight could apply to almost any brand. A strong insight feels true to this situation.

**Hindsight test:** The best insights feel simple and obvious in hindsight — but they weren't obvious before they were said.

**Action test:** A good insight changes what you'd do next. If the insight doesn't suggest a different creative approach, it's an observation, not an insight.

## Examples

**Weak:** "UGC ads have a higher ROAS than studio ads."
**Strong:** "Viewers trust the product recommendation more when it comes from someone who looks like they discovered it accidentally — the 'I wasn't even looking for this' framing in UGC outperforms the 'let me review this' framing because it bypasses the sales resistance that kicks in when viewers feel they're being pitched."

**Weak:** "Problem-agitation hooks have a 40% higher thumbstop rate."
**Strong:** "The hooks that stop scrolling name a specific moment the viewer has lived through — 'You know that feeling at 3pm when you've had four coffees and still can't focus' — rather than describing a general problem. Specificity triggers recognition, and recognition triggers the pause."

**Weak:** "Competitor X is running a lot of testimonial ads."
**Strong:** "Competitor X is betting heavily on social proof from micro-influencers who look like their target customer, which suggests they're trying to overcome a trust gap — their product is new enough that category credibility matters more than feature differentiation right now."