Develop, Evaluate, and Improve Marketing Creative That Performs.
Special Fall Pricing: Regularly $1,000 is now 50% off—$500. Enroll here.
AI can generate headlines, ads, copy, and campaign ideas in seconds. But generating more creative does not mean generating better creative.
Marketers still need to know which idea has the strongest proposition, which headline will attract the right customer, which claim is credible, which campaign is distinctive, and which polished-looking AI output should never see the light of day.
This masterclass gives you a practical framework for developing, evaluating, and improving marketing creative — and for knowing what works, what does not, and why.
You will learn how strong creative work differs from weak work, why some apparently impressive ideas fail commercially, how to recognize a genuine proposition, and what separates distinctive marketing from polished mediocrity.
Drawing on proven principles from some of advertising’s most influential creative thinkers, the course connects classic creative thinking with the realities of modern marketing and AI. This is not a history lesson. It is an expert-led examination of what makes marketing work across propositions, headlines, landing pages, brand voices, campaign concepts, and AI-generated alternatives.
The result: stronger campaign ideas, more effective creative, better feedback to agencies and teams, and less time and money wasted developing work that was never strong enough to perform.
- Develop stronger campaign ideas before moving into execution.
- Find the strongest customer proposition before polishing the copy.
- Distinguish an idea problem from an execution problem.
- Turn vague marketing claims into credible reasons to believe.
- Develop and evaluate headlines for attention, relevance, and commercial purpose.
- Improve AI-generated creative instead of simply accepting what AI produces.
- Spot polished mediocrity, especially in AI-assisted marketing.
- Identify and strengthen ideas that are not sufficiently distinctive.
- Edit creative without stripping out personality and brand voice.
- Evaluate competing creative ideas using evidence rather than personal preference.
- Give agencies, colleagues, and AI systems clearer, more useful creative direction.
- Explain and defend creative recommendations with greater confidence.
Apply These Techniques to Real Marketing Creative.
The frameworks and exercises are designed for the work marketers create, brief, review, and approve every day, including:
- Advertising concepts and campaign ideas.
- Headlines, hooks, and calls to action.
- Email subject lines and messaging.
- Landing pages and website copy.
- Product and service propositions.
- Offers and promotional messages.
- Brand voice and content.
- AI-generated campaign alternatives.
- Agency and internal creative briefs.
Flexibility to Fit Your Schedule:
Can’t make it to a live session? No problem. You’ll receive the masterclass recordings, presentation materials, and supplementary resources after each session so you can revisit the techniques and apply them to your own campaigns.
Module 1: From Marketing Idea to Strong Creative.
Find the Proposition, Message, and Idea Worth Developing.
Strong creative work rarely starts with better wording. It starts with finding something worth saying: a product truth, a customer tension, a neglected benefit, or a compelling reason to choose.
This module shows you how to separate the underlying idea from the execution and how to recognize the difference between creative that is merely polished and creative that is genuinely persuasive.
The Essential Creative Distinctions
- Variation versus invention.
- Novelty versus relevance.
- Polish versus persuasion.
- Distinctiveness versus weirdness.
- A headline versus a proposition.
- An idea versus an execution.
Through presenter-led examples and comparisons, you’ll see why generating more options is easy. Knowing which ones deserve to survive – and how to improve them – is harder.
The Thirty Ideas Problem
Ask AI for thirty campaign ideas, and it will happily provide them. But are they really thirty ideas – or one idea rewritten thirty ways?
You will learn how to use AI for speed and range without confusing quantity with quality, and how to recognize when an alternative represents a genuinely new idea rather than a cosmetic variation.
Key Takeaways:
- The Giants’ Playbook: classic creative principles applied to modern marketing.
- The CRAFT Framework for diagnosing and improving creative work.
- The Thirty Ideas Test for evaluating AI-generated alternatives.
- A Distinctiveness Test for identifying generic campaign thinking.
- A clearer way to separate proposition, execution, and polish.
- Better language for developing and discussing creative work.
- Greater confidence explaining why marketing succeeds or fails.
Module 2: From Good Idea to Better Campaign.
Test, Challenge and Improve Creative Before It Goes Live.
Strong ideas still need to survive real-world scrutiny. Through a series of presenter-led cases, comparisons, and blind tests, you’ll see how apparently strong campaigns can unravel, why persuasive-looking work can still be weak, and how changing customer information can completely alter the best creative decision.
No creative expertise is assumed. The focus is on learning how to make better development and campaign decisions.
Case 1: Copy Court.
Several competing campaign ideas are placed side by side. Some are strong, some are weak, and some look stronger than they really are. You will learn how to move beyond “I like this one” toward “This one is more likely to work, and here is why.”
Case 2: The Brief Breaks.
A campaign may look excellent until one piece of customer information changes. You will see how to distinguish between creative that merely needs adjusting and a concept whose proposition, audience fit, or strategy needs to be reconsidered.
Case 3: The Seduction Test.
Beautiful language, confident claims, and polished presentation can disguise an empty proposition. AI makes this problem easier to produce at scale. You will dissect persuasive-looking weak work and identify what is missing beneath the polish.
Case 4: When AI Disappears.
Compare AI-assisted and human-developed approaches to the same commercial problem. See where technology accelerates creative development and where human insight, challenge, and judgment still carry the burden.
The Final Blind Test: Human. AI. Hybrid.
You will compare examples that are increasingly difficult to categorize. The more important question is not who or what created the work – it is whether you can spot the strongest idea and explain why it deserves to move forward.
Key Takeaways:
- Greater confidence in developing and evaluating marketing creative.
- A structured framework for making better creative decisions.
- The Copy Court method for comparing competing ideas.
- The Brief Breaks technique for stress-testing campaigns.
- The Seduction Test for detecting persuasive-looking weak work.
- A clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of human, AI, and hybrid creative development.
- Better ways to brief agencies, colleagues and AI systems.
- Stronger techniques for protecting brand distinctiveness.
- A repeatable method for reviewing and improving creative work within your team.
Who should attend?
This masterclass is for anyone who creates, briefs, commissions, reviews, improves, or approves marketing creative, including:
- Marketing Managers and Directors.
- Brand Managers.
- Copywriters and Content Teams.
- Social Media Managers.
- PR and Communications Professionals.
- Email and Performance Marketers.
- Agency teams.
- Founders and business owners.
- Anyone responsible for reviewing AI-generated marketing.
You do not need to be a creative director or have advanced AI expertise. If you create, brief, review, improve, or approve marketing creative, this course is designed for you.
How to Convince Your Boss You Should Take This Class
Improve Marketing Creative: Develop stronger propositions, messages, headlines, and campaign ideas before they go into production.
Reduce Wasted Creative Development: Catch weak propositions, audience problems, and unsupported claims before time and money are spent polishing them.
Get Better Results from AI: Generate alternatives faster while recognizing generic, derivative, or persuasive-looking weak output.
Improve Agency and Team Performance: Give clearer, faster, and more actionable creative direction.
Protect Brand Distinctiveness: Spot ideas, claims, and voices that could just as easily belong to a competitor.
Make Better Creative Decisions: Replace “I like this one” with a structured method for explaining which idea is stronger and why.
Strengthen Human Judgment: Use AI without surrendering the ability to think, challenge, edit, and decide independently.
Download Materials
- Recording of the live presentation with slides and audio.
- PDF of the complete presentation.
The Presenter:
Jonathan Gabay
Jonathan Gabay teaches AI in Copywriting, Brand Storytelling, and Video Scriptwriting and Production Using AI Masterclasses for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.
Jonathan is an accomplished content writer, digital marketer, journalist, and lecturer renowned for collaborating with esteemed brands. He also serves as a trusted advisor to the media, offering insights into the latest developments in brand marketing and PR.
What sets Jonathan apart is crafting compelling brands and communication campaigns leveraging the power of AI.
Jonathan has published 17 books, including the university-level textbook Digital Marketing and AI Psychology, which explores digital marketing, artificial intelligence, and consumer psychology for students and marketing professionals.
Beyond writing and teaching, Jonathan advises many organizations on subjects spanning AI implementation, storytelling, video production, copywriting, crisis management, digital advertising, PR, marketing, and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of change. He is a senior lecturer at the University of West London, Oxford College of Marketing, and the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
From government entities to corporate giants and non-profit organizations to grassroots movements, Jonathan’s counsel is sought by those seeking to harness the transformative potential of AI and innovative digital marketing strategies.
Social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathangabay/
If you’re at all interested in AI and want to learn not to fear it but to embrace it, this workshop – and many of Jonathan’s other workshops – are for you. The ROI is so very obvious to me.
This course breaks down the key changes to marketing we need to know in this day and age. It gives you a guide on how to break into the public eye with your marketing.
