Generate Demand, Then Capture It
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
This is the insight Rise at Seven was built on. Big brand campaigns create category demand, not just brand demand — and most advertisers never build the mechanism to capture it. Carrie tracked the John Lewis Christmas ad featuring Elton John and found searches for pianos roughly doubled, from about 250,000 to 500,000 a month, a 131% increase; when she searched 'pianos' herself, John Lewis was nowhere to be found. A campaign costing around £10 million had generated demand that competitors could harvest. The model is therefore to treat creative advertising and search/performance as one connected system: the campaign creates the search, and SEO and content sit on the other side to convert it. Structurally, this meant hiring people from advertising and people from search into the same business rather than keeping the two disciplines separate.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Track search behaviour around big campaigns
Watch what people search for immediately after a major ad runs — yours or someone else's. That behaviour reveals what the creative actually triggered.
Pro tip Tracking a competitor's or a famous brand's campaign is a free way to learn the mechanism before you spend anything.
- 2
Separate brand demand from category demand
Identify what the campaign made people want generically — the product category — as distinct from what it made them want from you specifically.
Watch out The category spike is usually far larger than the brand spike, and it's the part most advertisers ignore.
- 3
Search the category terms yourself
Type the terms your campaign will provoke into Google and see whether you appear at all. If you don't, you're funding demand your competitors will collect.
- 4
Build the capture layer before launch
Put SEO, content and landing pages in place for the demand terms ahead of the campaign going live, so the spike lands on something that converts.
Pro tip Sequence it: capture assets first, spend second.
- 5
Put both disciplines in one team
Creative advertising and digital performance normally sit apart. Staff them together — Carrie's founding bet was hiring ten people from advertising and ten from search into one business — so the demand-generation and demand-capture halves are planned as a single strategy.
Pro tip Judge campaigns on combined outcome, not on each team's separate metrics.
Watch out If the two functions report separately, the handover gap reopens immediately.
In the wild
Carrie tracked the John Lewis Christmas ad in which Elton John plays the piano, a campaign she estimates cost around £10 million. She wasn't working on it — she was watching how people behaved after seeing it. Monthly searches for pianos went from about 250,000 to 500,000, roughly a 131% increase. She then searched 'pianos' to see whether John Lewis appeared and captured the demand at the back end. They didn't rank at all, meaning the spend had generated a category-wide surge that the brand left on the table.
→ The observed gap became the business plan for Rise at Seven — an agency that both drives demand and captures it.
Traditional agencies keep creative advertising and digital performance separate. Carrie's structural test was to hire roughly ten people from advertising and ten from search and digital and put them into one business to see what happened. The combination meant a single team could design the PR or brand moment that created search volume and simultaneously own the content and SEO that converted it.
→ The combined model became the pitch differentiator that won Missguided and subsequent large brands.
Common mistakes
Measuring an ad only by your own sales
John Lewis spent millions to sell John Lewis products while actually driving demand for pianos. Judging the campaign purely on own-brand conversion hides the far larger category effect you paid to create.
Keeping creative and performance in separate silos
Because the two disciplines don't sit close together in most organisations, nobody owns the handover between demand created and demand captured — which is precisely where the money leaks.
From the transcript
“searches straight after that advert got released for pianos went up from 250,000 a month to 500,000 a month”
“So I just knew there's a massive gap where actually someone, an agency, could work in the brand PR, advertising, whatever, generating demand for products,…”
From the episode
How To Build A Million Dollar Marketing Agency In 1 Year - Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)
Carrie Rose (Rise at Seven)