A creative campaign can give people a reason to talk about your business. The operating question is whether that conversation brings the right people closer to something they value—and creates enough additional business to cover the work.
A growth-ideas collection shared by Lenny Rachitsky includes a case attributed to Tom Orbach: a fictional toy store aimed at cybersecurity executives. The useful idea is the combination of a familiar format, an unexpected audience, and details that make that audience recognize itself.
The available excerpt does not establish that this approach produces profitable growth. It does support a hypothesis worth testing: audience recognition plus surprise can create a reason to share.
Here is how to turn that hypothesis into a bounded experiment.
Start with the audience truth
Before choosing a quiz, report, game, or fictional storefront, write down something specific your intended audience recognizes about its own life.
A useful audience truth describes a situation: a recurring workaround, an awkward decision, a ritual, or a frustration people struggle to explain to outsiders. Broad labels such as “busy professionals” offer little creative direction.
Collect supporting language from customer research, support conversations, or observed product behavior. Then ask whether the idea depends on that insight. If you could swap in another audience without changing the execution, it probably needs more work.
My recommendation is to require a clear answer to three questions:
- What will the intended person recognize?
- What makes the format surprising?
- Why would they send it to someone else?
The sharing motive deserves its own sentence. Someone might share because the experience expresses their identity, helps a colleague, or captures a frustration better than they can. “It is fun” leaves too much unexplained.
Build the next step into the idea
Attention needs somewhere useful to go.
Consider a hypothetical software company creating a playful assessment about meeting habits. A result could lead to a relevant workflow template that helps the participant address the problem the assessment surfaced. That connection is stronger than sending everyone to a generic homepage.
Write the path before commissioning production:
Audience situation → unexpected experience → useful result → relevant product action.
Each transition should make sense to the participant. A strong joke followed by an unrelated sales pitch can attract attention while losing the people you hoped to help.
There is a tradeoff here. Aggressive lead capture may interrupt participation and sharing. An experience with no clear next step may be enjoyable but commercially difficult to justify. Choose how much friction to introduce based on the action you need to learn about, and measure where people leave.
Write a brief that can fail
A useful creative brief includes more than the concept and launch date. It makes the business hypothesis explicit.
Record the audience, supporting insight, format, sharing motive, product connection, distribution plan, cost ceiling, and outcome window. Name the commercial outcome that would justify continuing.
For example, a hypothetical brief might ask whether an interactive experience generates more contribution after campaign costs than a straightforward campaign promoting the same product use case.
Keep the conventional alternative credible. A weak comparison tells you little about whether the extra creative effort was worthwhile.
Also separate creation from distribution. If an experience receives paid promotion, record that spend. Earned sharing may be one effect of the campaign; it does not make the whole campaign free.
Choose a comparison that answers the decision
Where feasible, use three groups:
- The audience-specific creative experience.
- A conventional campaign with equivalent products, offers, distribution budget, and dates.
- A holdout receiving no additional campaign.
The creative-versus-conventional comparison asks whether the experience deserves the extra effort. Comparisons with the holdout ask whether either campaign creates additional value.
Choose the assignment unit around how exposure can spread. Individual assignment becomes difficult to interpret when people routinely share the campaign with one another. Geographic or account-level groups may be more suitable in some settings, but they introduce their own comparability and sample-size constraints.
Define the assignment, required sample, outcome window, and analysis before launch. Include eligible people according to their assigned group, rather than analyzing only those who clicked or participated. Participants have already selected themselves into engagement.
If the available audience cannot support a useful comparison, run a smaller feasibility test. Use it to learn whether people understand the concept, complete the experience, and reach the intended next step. Keep the commercial question open.
Count the work as well as the response
For a transactional business, one possible primary measure is incremental contribution per eligible customer or household, after campaign costs. Use consistent cost definitions across groups and avoid subtracting an expense twice.
For a longer sales cycle, qualified opportunities may provide an earlier signal, but they do not establish realized revenue. Choose an observation window that fits the buying process and make the remaining uncertainty explicit.
Track shares, relevant visits, completion, and product actions as diagnostic measures. These help locate the break:
- Strong sharing with little relevant traffic may indicate that the idea attracts spectators.
- Relevant traffic with weak product action may indicate a poor transition or offer.
- Product action without downstream value may indicate a mismatch between the promise and the customer experience.
Set guardrails for complaints, unsubscribes, operational capacity, and spending. Attention can create work the business is unprepared to handle.
Decide what the next result permits
A commercially promising result supports another test, ideally with a new audience or a repeated exposure. Novelty may fade, and the first execution does not establish a durable channel.
A result with attention but weak commercial value calls for inspecting audience relevance and the product connection. More distribution alone may amplify the same problem.
An imprecise result is inconclusive. Avoid turning a favorable point estimate into a winner when the plausible outcomes still include a meaningful loss.
Keep the artifact, full cost record, comparison design, and outcome together. That makes the next creative decision easier to defend, including a decision to stop.
Evidence and limitations
The source material is a partial growth-ideas excerpt shared by Lenny Rachitsky, with the highlighted toy-store example attributed to Tom Orbach. It describes attention and lead generation without supplying a controlled comparison, complete costs, or downstream sales evidence.
The audience-recognition mechanism is an interpretation of that example. The experiment structure and operating recommendations here are proposed ways to evaluate it, not reported results. The available evidence does not establish profitability, persistence after novelty fades, or transfer across industries. A collection of memorable successes also leaves failed attempts largely invisible.
Source basis
- Partial growth-ideas excerpt shared by Lenny Rachitsky, including an audience-specific creative example attributed to Tom Orbach.
- A proposed comparison of creative, conventional, and holdout campaigns, with explicit cost accounting and evidence limitations.