CONTEXT

When Grounds for Promotion founder Jonathan Sackheim needed creative help for a new client, he turned to a freelance copywriter who had messaged him on LinkedIn just days earlier.

PROBLEM

Grounds for Promotion is a small agency without a dedicated creative. Its AI phone-answering startup client wasn’t getting results from Meta ads built in-house. The agency could run the campaigns, but it was stuck with weak, client-supplied creative that ignored the biggest objection: Small-business owners are understandably wary of letting AI answer their phones.

The company’s response to this objection was to hide from it, even though the creative brief suggested this was a hurdle they wanted to clear.

The result: wasted time, wasted ad spend, and no clear way forward.

SOLUTION

Enter freelance copywriter and creative strategist Nick Mistretta.

Mistretta collected the startup’s existing campaign creative, messaging, and brand materials, then researched its competitors. He quickly noticed a major disconnect: The ad briefs acknowledged the prospect’s biggest objection and even the company’s desire to overcome it, but the actual creative and copy avoided it.

The broader problem was clear, too. The messaging was unpersuasive, poorly matched to the target audience, and failing to communicate why small-business owners should trust AI to answer their phones.

What began as a simple tuneup became a full creative rebuild.

Step 1: Lead with the objection, rather than avoid it, and overcome it with sharper ad copy and clearer messaging.

Step 2: Develop UGC-style ad concepts and scripts showing real people why the objection was overblown and why AI voice services were worth trying.

OUTCOME

The AI startup got a clearer, more persuasive creative direction built around the exact objection its previous ads had ignored. And the new messaging and creative gave the company a stronger way to communicate the value of AI phone answering to the small-business owners it was trying to reach.

Grounds for Promotion was able to give its new client the stronger work it needed to feel confident in the campaign.

You can see the campaign creative here. Need some help with your marketing? Reach out!