Hey, it's Simon
I’m writing this from Austin, TX, where I acquired new boots (as you see in the pic below). I’m here to meet with some clients, and then I’m going to San Diego for the annual commerce roundtable. I’m returning next week to work, so if you have a brand, and you’re spending on Meta and wanna meet, book a call here!
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Simon says: congregations & contradiction
Here's what you're walking away with today: the mental model that explains why your customer can hold two beliefs that flatly contradict each other and feel completely fine about it, why that used to be television's job to prevent and now it's nobody's job at all, and the one brief you can write once you understand it.
Meet Maeve
Maeve reads Lacan. She can explain why the demand for perfection on women's bodies is structural violence. She also has a filler consult booked for Thursday that she hasn't told her group chat about.
She watches the Kardashians. She does pilates three times a week. She believes all of it, at the same time, and she knows that’s kinda contradicting. She's fine with that.
For most of the last century that person didn't exist. Belief was centralized. TV owned the truth, and the trust: a few channels, one source, everyone believing roughly the same things. Comfortable for a brand: you didn't have to figure out what people believed: segmentation and culture consumption were mainly the same for every audience group.
That's gone. Truth now gets built in a thousand small rooms, and each room runs its own service: its own vocabulary, its own villain, its own source of authority. The cortisol congregation. The peptides congregation. The woman who fired her dermatologist and now takes her orders from an esthetician on TikTok.
Everyone belongs to several at once. None of them agree with each other. Nobody minds.
So, how do you capture the Truth?
Attention you buy. That's literally what we do every morning in Ads Manager, and it's not the hard part anymore, it never really was.
The hard part is knowing what the person already holds as true before your ad ever shows up.
Because she's not walking in empty. She's walking in with beliefs already stacked, layered on top of each other in an order that makes no logical sense and total emotional sense, and your ad has to enter through the correct layer, or it won’t land.
Foucault called this decades before "congregation" was a marketing metaphor: control doesn't arrive through law, or a rule, or someone telling you what to think. It installs itself quietly, through routine: what you check first thing in the morning, whose voice you trust by default, which explanation feels true before you've even evaluated it.
The ad we'd actually run on Maeve
Say hi Maeve
Product: a pilates mat.
Format: native static, straight to PDP, no advertorial in between
The photo is her, on the mat, home, mid-morning. What stops the scroll is the mat and the POV. Somebody took this pic, but who?
The caption answers it. It's the woman’s story, told by her: the boyfriend who cheated, the months after, the guy she met in her classes who was deep into pilates, the mat he gifted her, the apartment they share now, the fasted session they do together every morning.
Notice everything that ad refuses to do. It never argues that pilates will change her life: a man telling a woman what to do with her body is a dead ad on arrival. It doesn't try to resolve the contradiction between the structural-violence Maeve and the filler-consult Maeve either. It doesn't pick a side.
It walks in through the layer she'd never post about: being chosen.
Steal this for your next brief
Stop trying to figure out which belief your customer "really" holds. She holds all of them, stacked, and picking one to argue against is how you lose her.
Map the congregations she's actually in, not the demographic she's in. Cortisol-pilled is a congregation. 32-year-old woman, $80k+ household income is a Nielsen category. One of these tells you what to write.
Don't resolve the contradiction in the brief. Maeve doesn't need your ad to explain her to herself. She needs it to speak to the layer she doesn't say out loud.
Find the private room, not the public feed. What she'd think but never caption is worth more than what she'd repost.
If your ad only works when she agrees with all of it, it's not going to work. Nobody agrees with all of it, including her.
That's it for this one.
Reply and tell me: what's the congregation your customer is in that you've never once written copy for? I read everything, and the best answers become future editions.
Talk soon, Simon
Stop guessing what works on Meta. We already know. Book a call with me and my team!