# Angle Frameworks and Evidence Mining ## Contents 1. Five levels of awareness (Schwartz) 2. Market sophistication - the neglected sibling 3. The pain × persona matrix 4. Hook trigger taxonomy 5. Concept / angle / hook - the vocabulary dispute 6. Evidence-mining methods ## 1. Five levels of awareness (Eugene Schwartz) From _Breakthrough Advertising_ (1966). Schwartz's argument: a copywriter cannot create desire, only channel existing desire, and the buyer's awareness level decides which opening can do that work. His own word was _levels_, not stages. Operational mapping (as popularized by Motion): | Level | Audience state | Hook strategy | | -------------- | ------------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Unaware | Doesn't know they have the problem | Introduce the pain through a relatable situation; no product mention | | Problem-aware | Knows the problem, no solution found | Agitate; make them feel understood; build urgency | | Solution-aware | Comparing options | Differentiate; position against alternatives; call out what failed them | | Product-aware | Knows you, hasn't bought | Remove objections; social proof; FOMO | | Most-aware | Ready to buy | Direct offer; urgency; guarantee; price anchoring | Two rules make this usable in a brief: - The **messaging angle stays constant across levels - only its expression changes**. - Budget interacts with level choice: smaller budgets start at problem/solution-aware (people already searching), scaling budgets invest in unaware content to grow the top. The table above runs in Schwartz's own progression, coldest to warmest - a spectrum, not a priority order. When the audience genuinely spans several levels, the choice of which to brief first is ranked separately: - effort: unaware > problem-aware > solution-aware > product-aware == most-aware - value (new demand the level can reach): unaware > problem-aware > solution-aware > product-aware > most-aware - efficiency: most-aware > product-aware > solution-aware > problem-aware > unaware Product-aware and most-aware tie on effort because neither brief teaches anything: both are written for a buyer who already knows the category and the product, so both come down to an offer line and a proof line drafted in the same afternoon. They separate on value, not on what they cost to write. The efficiency ordering is real but capacity-capped: the top two rungs are retargeting-sized pools that exhaust within days at any serious budget, so the highest ratio is not the right first brief. **What the ratio starves is unaware** - the only level that creates demand rather than harvesting it, and the only one that needs education-weight creative to work. An advertiser who briefs by ratio alone spends its whole budget re-selling the audience it already has. Promote unaware once the lower rungs are saturated and frequency climbs without incremental volume, or when the interview answer was a compounding mandate: category-education creative keeps working long after a retargeting ad has burnt its pool. Default rung: **problem-aware or solution-aware** - big enough to spend against, cheap enough that the creative is an argument rather than an education. Re-rank against assets already owned: an established category-education content library, or an audience list that dwarfs the retargeting pool, changes which rung is actually cheapest for this advertiser. Where a level has no reachable audience at all - no retargeting pool yet, no list - delete that rung from the brief's menu and say so, rather than ranking it first on a ratio nobody can spend against. ## 2. Market sophistication - the neglected sibling Schwartz paired awareness with sophistication: how many competing claims the buyer has already heard in the category. Awareness says what the buyer knows; sophistication says how tired they are of hearing it. | Level | Prescription | | ----- | ------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | Plain claim - first to market says the simple thing | | 2 | Bigger claim - outbid the plain claim | | 3 | Mechanism - claims exhausted; explain _how_ it works | | 4 | Better mechanism - mechanisms compete; yours must be newer/stronger | | 5 | Identity/belonging - claims dead; sell who the buyer becomes | Rarely an explicit brief field, but it decides whether the brief needs a "unique mechanism" section: at sophistication 3+, an angle without a mechanism is just another tired claim. Deliberately not ranked by efficiency, unlike the menus elsewhere in this file: the level is diagnosed, not chosen. The market has already heard what it has heard, and a level-2 claim in a level-4 market is not a cheaper option - it is a wrong one. Ordering these rungs by effort would read as a menu and invite exactly that mistake. ## 3. The pain × persona matrix Motion's Creative Strategy Engine template, per intersection: ``` PAIN: PERSONA: MESSAGING ANGLE: Use case: Deepest desire: Feature/benefit: Objections: ``` Build the matrix before briefing: rows = pains (or desires, for aspirational categories), columns = personas. Each filled cell is a candidate angle. Campaign structure often falls out of it - pain buckets become campaigns, personas become ad sets. Different personas experience the same feature as different benefits; write the benefit per cell, never once globally. ## 4. Hook trigger taxonomy Eight trigger types (Motion's brief-field categories). Tag every hook option with exactly one; the tags build a hook-performance history by trigger type over time. The awareness level gates which triggers can work at all (section 1); marginal effort then ranks the survivors. Rows below run in that efficiency order, matching SKILL.md § Hook Direction - the top four change a line and reuse the shoot, the bottom two need one. | Trigger | Direction pattern (not a script) | Marginal effort on an existing body/layout | | -------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Pain agitation | Open inside the worst moment of the problem | Near-zero: one spoken line, evidence already mined | | Identity call-out | Name the person directly ("if you run ops at a 50-person SaaS...") | Near-zero: one spoken line and one overlay | | Contrarian / myth-busting | Open against the category's common advice | Near-zero to write; costs political capital when the claim contradicts brand or category orthodoxy | | Urgency / stakes | Open on what it costs to wait | Near-zero to write; gated on offer mechanics and on substantiating the scarcity claim | | Curiosity gap | Open a loop the ad (or landing page) closes - the gap must be visible, relevant, and feel closable | Near-zero to write, plus the resolution field below | | Social proof / credibility | Open with the crowd, the number, or the authority | Near-zero if the asset exists; a week if it must be gathered, plus testimonial sign-off when regulated | | Aspiration / desire | Open on the after-state (default for desire-anchored categories) | An after-state to stage or shoot | | Pattern interrupt | Open with something visually/verbally out of place for the feed | A shoot or a new frame - highest of the eight | The order is a default, not a law. Re-rank per account before recommending a first test: an owned footage library, an in-house editor, or a founder who performs well on camera each move an expensive trigger up several places. Curiosity hooks add one brief field: where the tension resolves - in the ad, on the landing page, or in a demo/conversation. Unresolved tension reads as a trick and burns credibility. ## 5. Concept / angle / hook - the vocabulary dispute Three published positions, so expect collaborators to disagree: - **Concept as container**: concept = the format shell (us-vs-them, before/after, founder story); angle = the argument inside it. The concept is about you; the angle is about them. - **Angle as interpretive frame**: the angle is why this person should care right now; hooks, claims and formats are downstream. Strategists call hooks "angles", copywriters call claims "angles", media buyers call format swaps "angles" - and the looseness is expensive, because you cannot learn when everyone tests something different under one label. - **Tooling split**: hook = opening 1-3 seconds; angle = the core argument or emotional appeal. The convergent practical fix: tag creative on multiple independent dimensions (format, creator, messaging, imagery, persona - Dara Denney's five) instead of arguing over one word, and restate this skill's fixed definitions in every brief header. ## 6. Evidence-mining methods Run before brainstorming. Every brief claim cites one of these sources. Five methods compete for the same hours, listed below in efficiency order - the cheap ones confirm what you already ran, the expensive ones generate what you have not: - effort: broad voice-of-customer > scored review mining > competitor-ad boarding > negative-review objections == past winners - value (new angles the method can produce): scored review mining > broad voice-of-customer > competitor-ad boarding > negative-review objections > past winners - compliance cost: broad voice-of-customer (consent and data-handling review before call recordings or CRM notes leave the system) > scored review mining == negative-review objections (verbatims are the reviewer's words - check the platform's terms before quoting one in an ad) > competitor-ad boarding == past winners Negative-review objections and past winners tie on effort at one hour each, for unrelated reasons that happen to cost the same: one is a read of the category's 1-2 star reviews, the other a pull from the ad account. Competitor-ad boarding ties with past winners on compliance because both read material you are entitled to see and quote nothing into an ad. **What the efficiency order starves: scored review mining.** It tops the value axis - the only method that fills the whole pain x persona matrix - and costs a day, so a ratio defers it to a week that never arrives. Promote it when the cheap sources only confirm what you already ran (the tell is an angle bank whose entries are all one angle wearing different hooks), or when the mandate is compounding: the matrix it produces feeds every brief for the rest of the quarter, not just this one. Default: work down from the top until the brief's fields are full. Re-rank against what this account already owns: a B2B product with no public reviews inverts the top of the list and makes voice-of-customer first by default; a sales team that already tags lost-deal reasons in the CRM turns the most expensive method into an afternoon. A method the account cannot run at all - no reviews to mine, no consent path to call recordings - is deleted from the list and named as deleted, never carried at the bottom where the next brief cites it as a source it never used. **Past winners with their metrics.** An hour in the ad account, and it fills two brief fields at once: the recommended-first-test rationale and the test block's benchmark, which the template already prefers over published bands. Pull top performers over the last 30 days and 6 months, top hook rates, top hold rates with average watch time, and prior A/B results (Dara Denney's four-pronged research pattern: reputation, review mining, competitor analysis, past performance). A "past winner" cited without its numbers is nostalgia, not evidence. A new account has none, so this method drops out of the ranking rather than down it. **Negative reviews as the objection source.** One hour of reading fills the core-objection field that gates revision acceptance. 1. Pull the most common 1-2 star reviews for the product _and_ the category. 2. Identify the top 2 recurring objections. 3. Put them in the brief. Creative that addresses neither goes back for revision. **Scored review mining** (Motion's published method). A day's work, and the only method that fills the whole pain × persona matrix. Score each review 1-5 (1 = gibberish or bare "great product"; 5 = long, emotional, vivid). Discard the 1s. Extract the rest into five buckets: 1. Pain points - the problem before purchase 2. Trigger moments - what finally made them buy 3. Objections - usually past-tense in positive reviews ("I was skeptical, but...") 4. Transformations - what changed, in their words 5. Standout language - verbatim, ad-ready phrases, pulled unedited Each bucket feeds a different part of the brief: - Pains feed the matrix. - Triggers and transformations feed hooks. - Objections feed the objection field and objection-handling mechanics. **Competitor ads, filtered by longevity.** A few hours of boarding. 1. Pull from public ad libraries. 2. Filter to ads running 30+ days, sorted by longest-running - longevity, not recency, is the validation signal (Foreplay's Jack Kavanagh). Board them by hook type and angle: that board is the concept-hypothesis pool. Caveat for the brief: ad libraries are public - competitors see yours too. **Voice-of-customer beyond reviews.** A week, and coordination across teams that do not report to you - which is why it sits last despite generating the angles nothing else can. What they already believe, what they're tired of hearing, what they've tried, what stops them converting - from comments, community threads, surveys. B2B: sales-call notes, CRM comments, search terms, lost-deal reasons. Volume expectation to set with stakeholders: AppsFlyer's 2024 report indicates marketers typically test upward of 50 variations to find a winner - evidence raises the odds per at-bat; it does not repeal the denominator.