Positioning rewrite. 142 video deliverables. Six months.
SEEQ is a clear-protein brand built on TikTok by two founders. They'd started the category conversation, built an audience, hit real volume. The next phase needed creative the buyer could actually scale against a real ad spend, not founder-shot organic content stretched into paid placements. Six months to get there.
Creative direction engagement across the whole stack. Positioning rewrite, theme map, asset gap-fill, hook system, weekly ship cycle. All five hats on one account: designer, filmmaker, photographer, analyst, and the production system that ties them together. No agency layer between the work and the founders.
Performance creative is a search problem. You map the territory, narrow with data, and double down on what's moving the account. SEEQ ran through the standard five-step loop, adjusted for a founder-led TikTok-native brand entering its scale phase.
Audit. Read the ad account, the organic library, and the TikTok comments side by side. The brand had genuine voice and category authority, but the paid ads were lifted organic posts with no buyer-facing structure. No hook isolation, no theme separation, no way to read what was actually doing the work in the funnel. The audience knew clear protein because of SEEQ. The buyer didn't have a system to compound that.
Theme map. Built a six-theme test plan with each theme aimed at a distinct audience and decision moment: brand awareness, problem awareness, education, mom-targeted, anti-alcohol, press validation. Every theme got its own static set so a buyer reading the account could compare angle against angle instead of trying to back-solve which message inside a hybrid ad pulled the click.
Asset gap-fill. The founders had volume on TikTok but no shoot library built for paid. The fastest authenticity gap-fill: shot the founder podcast-style across a single day. Long-form conversation on record, mined for hooks line by line. Each line that earned a stop became the opener of its own ad. Same closer across the set, different opener every time, so the buyer could read which question was carrying the funnel without controlling for production variance.
Messaging. Ran every hook candidate through a brand-trained scoring pass. Three filters: does it sound like SEEQ, does it earn the watch, does it set up the close. Most of the press-validation theme survived the brand filter and the performance filter together. Most of the anti-alcohol theme got softened until it stopped earning the watch, then got narrowed to the variants that held both edges.
Ship, read, iterate. Weekly cycle against the ad buyer's read of the account. Education-themed cuts and the founder podcast openers pulled ahead within the first three cycles. The mom-targeted theme didn't separate from the broader benefits theme, so it got folded in rather than killed. Pulled two new candidate themes off the back of education: a single-ingredient breakdown and a barista comparison. Both went into the next cycle. The system was running itself by month four.
One asset from each test angle. Benefits, mom, back-in-stock lifestyle, product hero, two review cuts.
Six themes mapped. Two emerged as the spine of the program by month three. Two new candidates pulled off the winners by month four. 142+ video deliverables across the engagement. Founders kept the system after the engagement closed because the test plan ran itself.