At least, that’s what the team said.
“Letting strangers rewrite our ad? What if they ruin it?”
“Exactly,” we said. “That’s the point.”
Because if they can’t connect with what we say,
maybe it’s time we let them say it instead.
It was a campaign for a mid-sized streetwear brand.
Cool visuals. Solid concept. But no traction.
The ad said everything right —
great copy, bold visuals, perfect pacing —
and still, the audience scrolled past like it didn’t exist.
That’s when we asked the question that changed the entire campaign:
“What if we stop guessing what they want… and let them tell us?”
So we did something no one in the room had the guts to predict would work —
We gave the audience the creative control.
We launched a post titled:
“Think you can write a better ad than us? Prove it.”
Within 48 hours — over 3,000 comments.
People rewrote our hook, roasted our visuals, suggested wild captions.
Some were terrible.
Some were hilarious.
And a few — hit something deep.
Lines like:
“We don’t wear it to flex. We wear it to feel like ourselves again.”
That one stopped us.
Because we saw something more inside this.
We took those comments — and rebuilt the ad from scratch.
Real user lines.
Real captions.
Even real photos that people shared under the hashtag we created: #YourTurnToWrite.
The new ad didn’t look like a campaign.
It looked like a conversation.
And when it went live — it exploded.
That of course we know going to come up a lot
“Wait, did they actually use our lines?”
“This feels like I wrote this ad.”
“I don’t even like ads, but this one hits.”
We didn’t just build engagement —
we built ownership.
People weren’t watching the brand anymore.
They were the brand.
And when that happens —
sales stop being numbers.
They become participation.
But more than that — the brand suddenly belonged to people.
Because they helped make it.
People don’t hate ads. They just hate being left out of them.
When you let your audience co-create,
you don’t lose control — you build belief.
Because in 2025,
the most powerful story isn’t the one a brand tells — it’s the one people help finish.
We didn’t just rewrite the ad — we rewrote the relationship.
And that’s the part no one tells you in marketing school:
And to fix that issue I summarized all the top tiers strategies apple, netflix, nike and other companies used in my latest case study.