This week is about the one thing my agency does that I'd stack against anybody: spotting the single person no ad in the account is speaking to, then building an entire layer of ads around them. This week's kit has the prompts plus a small script for finding your own:

Hey all, and happy Friday,

I'm writing this on Wednesday night, because I'll be at Andrew Foxwell's event in New York on Thursday and Friday. If anything below sounds like it was written before then, you know why.

Anyway, the nor'easter brought rain all weekend. Our street flooded, but we live in Park Slope, so the water mostly kept rolling downhill into Gowanus, where it joined the canal. RIP Sludgy the Whale.

Friday night we got a babysitter, who also happens to be James's favorite teacher, and went to see Primetime, the Robert Pattinson movie about the making of To Catch a Predator. It was good. It also felt like the start of Oscar season, which Maddie and I take more seriously than we should. We are C-list cinephiles: every year we try to watch every Best Picture nominee.

On Saturday James slept until 9 (what?!). The caveat is that he was up plenty overnight, so I'm not calling it a parenting win. My stepbrother and his wife came over that morning. They showed us photos of airplanes in San Francisco, and James quickly became engrossed. And by engrossed I mean enchanted. James's favorite word is now officially airplane. He says it constantly, like a tiny air traffic controller. He spent the rest of the visit curled up next to my stepbrother's wife with a book about airplanes, fully in heaven.

Saturday night we went to his friend Kitty's house. Kitty is the same kid from the playground a couple of weeks ago, and the two of them run on identical batteries: throwing themselves onto cushions, sprinting up and down the hall, pulling out every toy in the house. Kitty's parents fed the kids plain pasta (bc duh) and poured wine for the adults. It would have been a very civilized dinner party if not for the two small people body-slamming each other in the next room.

On Sunday, we went to Jersey City to hang with our new nephew, Maddie's brother's son. He's very cute, with a great head of hair. Honestly, though, our real value-add was James providing entertainment for his big sister. She mostly wanted James to play board games with her, which I respect. James did not grasp that board games are above his pay grade.

We all ate together (the grandparents were there too, helping with the baby) and finished with red velvet cake for my sister-in-law's birthday. Then James had his first real blowout in months. I happened to be doing the dishes, which is the best alibi I have ever had. I'll get the next one. I promise.

Q4 started this week. This is the time of year when the advice gets loud and vague. Go broad. Widen the audiences. Write copy for everybody and trust the algorithm to sort it out.

We run the other direction, and it has turned into the thing prospects bring up most. On sales calls, someone always says a version of "wow, you get very specific." Correct. That is the entire job.

The internal name for it is sniping.

Today's issue covers what a snipe actually is, four that landed this year, the step most teams skip after one lands, and where we go hunting for them. There's also an honest section on when broad still beats us, because sometimes it does.

A snipe is a single ad aimed at a single person. Not a segment. Not a demo. One real human with one real problem, described so precisely that nearly everyone else keeps scrolling.

The test takes one sentence. If the ad would land with anyone else, it isn't a snipe.

Here are some of ours, described by shape instead of brand:

The lab tech is my favorite. The hook on that ad is a verbatim customer review complaining about that exact thing. The account is B2B, nobody outside a lab would give it a second look, and it brought back roughly 10 times what the account's general-audience ads managed.

The side-by-side guy first. No one in that account had ever written a brief for him. We launched him in mid-June. He now sits at 3550 orders across 10 of our ads, plus 6 more the client's team made once they watched it work. Three and a half months later, he grew 23 percent last week. Most ads are dead by month three. This one keeps climbing.

The seasonal loyalist next. We put two ads live on September 1. Over 24 days that persona pulled in 3,300 orders, and the static came in about 43 percent below the account's average cost per order. Then the part I love: the client's team stacked 44 more ads on the same person. Two turned into 46. That is exactly what a snipe is for.

The adult with ADHD was our addition to the account. Since July, that single person has grown into a 55-ad layer split between their creators and our team: 2,911 orders and 4.38 million people reached. Our best static for them holds 433 orders by itself.

The razor one is simpler. 23 variants, running around half the account's average cost per order.

My favorite number isn't on that card, though. Break the ADHD hero ad down by audience in Ads Manager and about 97 percent of its spend went to people who had never bought from the brand. It didn't cannibalize the buyers the existing ads were already reaching. It went and found new ones. Which is why the client could keep raising budget without the rest of the account paying for it.

This would be a suspicious newsletter if I only showed you results that flatter my argument.

The two largest seven-day spend runs my team has ever put up were both broad. Both were "here's why everyone's switching" listicles in the same account, and both landed below that account's average efficiency. They spent big because Meta found a huge crowd to show them to, not because they performed better.

The razor snipe in that account never touched that spend level. It did, however, run at half the account's cost per order.

Snipes aren't automatically cheaper either. Our ADHD ads convert 38 percent better than the rest of that account, but the clicks cost more, so the cost per order nets out dead even. That one is a volume play: brand new buyers arriving at the same price as the old ones.

Plenty of snipes also just miss. The most snipe-shaped ad we launched this month is for the owner of one specific vehicle model, and after a few weeks it is costing nearly three times the account's average per order. It checks every box in this newsletter. I am giving it two more weeks before I admit anything in writing. (Too late.)

So the argument isn't that snipes always run more efficiently. The argument is that they're new. Broad ads elbow each other over the same buyers every other ad in the account is already chasing. A snipe opens a door nobody knew existed, and then you get to bring a lot more ads through it.

This is where I think teams leave the most money sitting. A snipe lands, everybody celebrates, and then it just runs until it flames out.

When one lands, we expand the person. Same human, different problems. Same problem, different formats. For the ADHD persona that meant a sensory-overload angle, a "did I brush?" flowchart, a doomscrolling version, one aimed at the parent of a kid with ADHD, and an animated video. 24 of our ads, all pointed at one person through different doors.

It's also why our dashboard has an emerging-persona radar. Every client's action plan includes a section that flags a new persona whose first ad is picking up steam, then lists the formats it hasn't touched yet. The one below is live on the side-by-side account right now: one ad for a trail veteran who wants the factory look, 43 days old, and already the account's breakout.

Two real dashboard screenshots from the same account, with spend, costs, brand and ad blurred. Left is the no-wires vein and its next move. Right is a new persona flagged as a breakout off a single ad, plus the four formats it hasn't run in yet.

The bottom of that card is literally the brief. Build out the funnel: a headline ad, UGC, a founder's story, a bullet-point static. Four more doors for the same person.

I messaged my team this week with the shortest version I have: "Where is the best place to find net new personas? Reddit answers and subreddits!" TikTok is the other answer.

Our dashboard drops Reddit threads into a column called Test something new. The current top bet on the side-by-side account came out of r/electricians: a tradesperson jumping from residential to commercial work, in a thread called "From resi to comercial. I look like an idiot." The thread has 3,945 upvotes. That is a person with a specific fear, in their own words, with a crowd nodding along.

The second bet, also flagged high priority, for a company that sells vehicle lighting, is "Prepper Anticipating AI-Driven Societal Collapse."

Which is exactly what I keep saying about the dashboard. I told the team it is "a compass pointing you in a certain direction," not a map. It surfaces the thread. A human still has to decide whether the doomsday prepper is in the market for turn signals. (Honestly, he might be. The collapse will be poorly lit.)

Sometimes the source is a single post. A customer on the ADHD account described the product as "almost like a fidget toy," and I turned that post into an ad basically as written. When I pulled the data afterward, ADHD ads in that account were minting winners at nearly three times the rate of everything else. So the data confirmed it. The post is what supplied the words.

If this is all new to you, here is the path from Reddit thread to brief.

Step five is the one I won't shut up about. I sent this to my team the same day: "Don't list specs, list the specs that matter to the persona." Here's the example I used.

Machine washable, stain resistant, 100 percent non-toxic reads like a spec sheet. "Accidents just go in the wash. Muddy paws wipe right off. Safe for the ones who lick everything." gets a pet owner nodding. Those are the same three facts.

Q4 is when everything gets more expensive, which makes it the worst possible moment to start hunting for new people. You want to arrive in November already knowing who they are.

So I asked the team to shift from our usual 60/20/20 split (iterating on winners, reskinning winners, net new) toward 40/20/40 for the next few weeks. Hunt the snipes now. Bank some singles and doubles in October. Scale whatever lands when it actually counts.

This week's kit is three prompts plus one small script:

Have a great weekend,

Will

P.S. What's the most specific person you've ever written an ad for? Hit reply. If it's weirder than the doomsday prepper, you win, and I will probably steal it.