Creative direction · short-form ads

Some of it was filmed. Some was generated. The decisions were mine.

I work on short-form ads for DTC brands — sometimes cutting footage a brand hands me, sometimes generating the whole thing. What stays the same either way is the part that decides whether it works: which three seconds to open on, and what to leave out. Below, four campaigns opened up so you can see the calls, not just the output.

4 campaigns opened up 5 categories Open to full-time

The work, opened up

Four campaigns.
Every call explained.

Brands are described by category rather than named. What follows is the reasoning — the part that doesn’t change when the tools do.

01

Supplements · gut health

DTC · paid social · vertical, sound-on

Role — edit, hook structure, captions. Footage supplied by the brand.

The hook that shipped

“Regularity support.” · “Cravings: quieter.”

Both open on the outcome, not the product — the bottle arrives after the promise.

What I was handed

Creator footage, a product, and no script. My work started after the shoot: find the ad inside what was already filmed, and get more than one testable version out of a single pile of takes.

The hard part

Regulated category. The claims that would sell it hardest are the ones you aren’t allowed to make — no before-and-after, no promise, no number. The ad had to work on outcome language alone.

The call I made

The bottle doesn’t appear in the first three seconds. Both hooks — “regularity support” and “cravings: quieter” — describe a state the viewer already wants and leave the product out of it, so the jar arrives as the answer to something they’ve already agreed with. Two hooks over one body, so the brand gets a comparison instead of a single guess.

What it taught me

When you can't claim, the edit carries the persuasion. Order of information is the only lever left.

02

Pet · supplements

DTC · paid social · vertical, sound-on

Role — edit, hook structure, captions. Footage supplied by the brand.

The hook that shipped

A screen recording of someone asking an AI why their dog eats grass.

The ad borrows a behaviour the viewer already has — the answer becomes the product.

What I was handed

Product footage for the most interchangeable feed on paid social. Dog, owner, pouch — the same three shots every competitor is running this week.

The hard part

Pet content defaults to cute, and cute stopped working the moment everyone got there. Nothing in the footage was going to out-cute the feed.

The call I made

I opened on a screen recording instead of a dog. Someone types “why does my dog eat grass” into an AI — something the buyer has literally already done — and the ad answers the question they came for before it sells anything. The dog and the pouch only arrive once the viewer is in an information posture. Three seconds of no animal and no product in a pet ad is a real risk; that risk is the case.

What it taught me

Borrowing a behaviour the viewer already has beats inventing a reason for them to care.

03

Home care · detergent

DTC · paid social · vertical, sound-on

Role — edit, hook structure, captions. Footage supplied by the brand.

The hook that shipped

“But harsh chemicals…”

The ad opens on the objection, not the benefit — it argues with the viewer's existing belief.

What I was handed

Creator footage for a detergent — a category where every brand says clean, gentle and plant-based, and the viewer has stopped reading all three.

The hard part

No demo here looks different from the last thirty detergent ads. Whatever made this one worth buying wasn’t visible on camera.

The call I made

I opened on the objection instead of the benefit. “But harsh chemicals…” starts the ad inside the argument the viewer is already having with the category, so it reads as someone finishing their sentence rather than selling to them. The benefit lands second, as a reply — the only position where a detergent claim still gets read.

What it taught me

In a commodity category the differentiator isn’t the product. It's which sentence you start on.

04

Women's health · telehealth

DTC · paid social · regulated category

Role — edit, hook structure, captions. Footage supplied by the brand.

The hook that shipped

“A provider prescribed bioidentical HRT and shipped to…”

Written inside medical-claim limits: it describes a process, never promises an outcome.

What I was handed

Footage for a telehealth service in the most restricted category I’ve worked in — prescription hormone therapy, where the platform, the regulator and the brand's own legal all pull in different directions.

The hard part

Everything a person actually wants to hear here is an outcome, and none of it can be said. The ad had to sell without a single promise.

The call I made

I built the whole thing on process instead of result. “A provider prescribed bioidentical HRT and shipped to…” — every beat is a step that happened, not a benefit that's coming. It describes how the service works, in order, and leaves the relief implied. In a regulated category that isn’t a compromise: showing the mechanism is the proof.

What it taught me

Compliance limits don't tax the idea, they tell you which idea is available — and the process-first version usually converts anyway.

How I work

Same order, every time.

The tools change every few months. This doesn't.

  1. 01

    Brand voice before script

    Every script starts from how the brand actually talks, not a reused UGC template. If it could run for a competitor, it isn't finished.

  2. 02

    One character, one world

    One character and one world held across a whole campaign, so a testing batch reads as a single brand instead of ten strangers — whether that character is generated or already on the brand’s payroll.

  3. 03

    Compliance is a writing constraint

    In regulated categories the limits are set before the first line — no unsupported claims, and the persuasion has to work anyway.

  4. 04

    Cut for retention, not for taste

    Paced against how the ad actually gets watched. The first three seconds earn the next twenty; everything that doesn't serve that goes.

More work

Everything else, unannotated.

Short-form ads across apparel, eyewear, fragrance and beverage, plus character-led 3D animation. Click any to play with sound.

Contact

Looking for a full-time seat.

Creative, content or performance-creative team building short-form at volume. I work both sides — cutting what a brand shoots and generating what it can’t — and I’d rather do that inside one brand than across twenty.

Email [email protected] LinkedIn in/miguel-bomrruk WhatsApp +55 41 99154-2537