The first question we ask on any project is "who's your target audience?" We almost always get an answer. Confident, specific, a sentence or two. And honestly, we don't always trust it. Not because the client's hiding something, but because we can't see where the answer came from. A lot of the time it came from a hunch, or a hope, and not from data.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. When a video misses, people blame the video. And sometimes, sure, it is the video. But more often the video is doing exactly what it was told, it was just built for the wrong person. A target audience isn't a line on a brief, it's where every real decision comes from: who this person is, what they find funny, what they actually care about, what makes them trust you. Get the person wrong and every one of those choices is slightly off, and "slightly off," multiplied across a whole video, is the difference between something that lands and something that just sits there.

We had Mike Rizzo on our podcast to dig into why this keeps happening. He runs MarketingOps.com, and he spends his days inside companies' data, under the hood, before anyone hires a creative team. His reframe stuck with us: most companies don't have a creative problem, they have a source-of-truth problem. Sales pictures one customer. Marketing wrote the brief for another. The CEO walks in and says "actually, it's really this." And we're standing there with a camera going, wait, so who are we making this for?

Everybody has an answer. Almost nobody has proof.

Ask who the customer is and you'll get an answer, fast. That's the problem, not the solution, because the answer usually comes from one of three places, and none of them is data. Sometimes they're telling you who they wish bought the product. Sometimes they're squinting at last month's sales report and calling that an audience. And sometimes, honestly, nobody has actually looked. On top of that, a real target is a lot more than an age range and a state. Two people who are both "women, 35 to 44" can be completely different humans: different senses of humor, different pressures, different reasons to buy. If your definition of the audience stops at demographics, your creative will too.

And here's the honest complication: sometimes the aspiration is the point. Plenty of people buy the brand from the place with palm trees precisely because they don't live there. So "make it for where they actually are" isn't a rule, it's a question you answer with data. We've been told, "no palm trees in the location, because everyone who buys this is in Kentucky and california-leaning content doesn’t perform as well.” That was a great note because it came from their numbers instead of a hunch. The real skill is knowing which game you're playing, reality or aspiration, and knowing it because the data pointed there, not because someone in the room had a feeling.

You probably already have the answer. It's just scattered.

Here's the good news Mike kept coming back to: most companies that have been around a few years already have enough data to know who they're talking to. The problem isn't missing data. It's disconnected data. The CRM knows one thing, the ad platform knows another, the website knows a third, and nobody's put them in the same room. Get to a single source of truth (a real system of record, "please not a spreadsheet," as Mike put it) and suddenly you can actually see your market instead of guessing at it.

And if you're genuinely too new to have the data yet? That's fine, but be honest that you're starting from a hypothesis, not a fact. You can't measure a target you haven't defined. So define one on purpose, then let the first few campaigns tell you where you were right and where you were guessing.

And you don't need a hundred data points. You need a handful that give clear signal: company size, revenue, industry, the product they're actually after, the title of the person who buys. Get those lined up and you're already ahead of almost everyone else making ads in your category.

Measurement shows you what you'd otherwise kill

If the only definition of success is "did we sell more this month," you'll miss almost everything that matters. We saw this firsthand with a supplement company run by a vein doctor, two products: one for varicose veins, one for hemorrhoids (which we weren't cleared to say in the ad). The vein product was the "best seller," so that's the one they wanted to push. We suggested they make one for both. Same budget, same crew, two ads in one day.

The vein ad did fine. No surprise, people already knew that product from doctors and mailings and newsletters. But the hemorrhoid ad, the one they almost didn't make, lit up the website. Tons of visits, tons of add-to-carts, people intrigued by something they'd never heard of. Look only at monthly sales and you'd call it a flop and kill it. Look at the actual data and it's the opposite: it's the biggest untapped opportunity they have, and it's pointing at exactly which channel to fund next.

Good data is the start of a story

Here's the part marketers don't expect a production company to care about, and it's the whole reason we do. When a brand actually knows its audience, that "nerdy" data stops being a spreadsheet and becomes the building blocks of a story. Mike rattles off data points: company size, revenue, industry, the product, the buyer's title. We hear the same list and go: that's the character, that's the conflict, that's the setting, that's the wardrobe. "It's got to read like a mid-size business, so we're in a corporate office, they've got a nice car, nice clothes." The data did the first round of creative direction for us. Your audience definition and the bones of your story are the same thing. And that's a starting point, not a finish line. We're here to be creative well beyond the data, but now the creativity has somewhere to start from instead of a blank page.

That's what Mike means when he says creative is made better when it's backed by data. Not replaced by data. Not turned into a dashboard. Made better, because the ideas finally have a foundation to build on.

The one move underneath all of it: set the ego aside

We asked Mike for the single thing any team can do, and his answer was almost annoyingly simple: set aside ego. A company exists to serve its customer, not to flatter itself. It all goes sideways the moment someone protects their number, or their taste, or the customer they wish they had, instead of asking the only question that counts: what's the promise we make to the person who actually buys this, and does this work deliver on it?

That's a marketing question and a creative question at the same time. Most rooms treat them as two conversations. They're not.

The takeaway

Before anyone picks up a camera, get three things on the table, and make sure they came from your data, not a vibe: who you're actually talking to, the one message, and how you'll know it landed.

Get those right and the creative gets easy, because it finally has a target. Skip them and it won't matter how good the video looks. You'll just be guessing in higher resolution.

You probably already have what you need to answer this. Go connect it, before you spend a dollar making something for a customer who might not exist.

This came out of our conversation with Mike Rizzo of MarketingOps.com on the Call Us Disruptors podcast.

Watch or listen to the full episode → 002 - Your Creative Problem is Actually A Data Problem