# Kevin Viet Tran

Kevin Viet Tran is a creative strategist and boutique-agency owner who develops scripts, hooks, and video sales letters for e-commerce ads. Kevin also shares advice on building creative skills and hiring junior strategists.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kevin-viet-tran/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-creativestrategy
- LinkedIn followers: 2,028
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, sales, paid-ads, creative-strategy, paid-social-advertising
- Based on 10 dated posts, latest 2026-10-09

## Summary

Most useful for e-commerce ad scripts, hooks, VSLs, and creative-strategy hiring advice.

- Best for: Paid creative-strategy or hiring-system pilot for DTC e-commerce brands scaling ad output.
- Not for: Sponsorship-led consumer awareness campaigns needing guaranteed reach, audience demographics, public rate cards, disclosure.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship availability, pricing, deliverables, disclosure, and any documented ad results.

### Takeaways

- Kevin wrote about ten scripts a week and recorded a hypothesis for each test.
- A first five-minute VSL took three hours; a later seven-to-eight-minute VSL took about 30 minutes.
- Juniors should send product-specific campaign plans and scripts instead of a CV.

## Main ideas

- **Skill comes from daily reps, not copywriting courses**: Kevin argues that creative strategists improve by writing constantly, taking hard critiques and checking every test against the data — not by collecting courses. They report writing ten scripts a week under two mentors, logging a stated hypothesis for each test and reading the numbers on every ad. That feedback loop, not course material, was the training that mattered. Of the standard copywriting canon, Kevin says they read only The Boron Letters in full and abandoned Breakthrough Advertising after fifteen pages because it was boring. They recommend one focused hour a day: one idea, one piece of copy and one ad breakdown.
- **Speed at hooks and long-form VSLs is a byproduct of repetition**: Kevin treats drafting time as a visible marker of experience rather than talent. A good hook now takes about a minute, and a really good seven-to-eight-minute unaware video sales letter takes about thirty minutes, excluding research; their first five-minute VSL took three hours. People Kevin is currently training stall on hooks for twenty minutes or more. They attribute that gap squarely to repetition.
- **Juniors should send work instead of a CV**: Kevin argues that with no experience, a CV has nothing to show and no brand owner will bet on an empty page, so the application itself has to be the sample. Their proposed method: find the people who own brands, write example campaign plans and scripts for their actual product, show how the campaign plan was built and why it should work, then offer to write their next scripts free for a one-week test and ask for the chance to prove they perform. Then repeat: send lots of outreach, new campaign plans and videos every day until the brand sees someone worth investing in.
- **Hire for hunger over skill**: Writing from the owner's side of the table, Kevin calls hiring the most important thing a brand or agency owner does. They say the deciding factor is whether a candidate is all in on the brand's vision and shares the company's goals. Given the choice, they prefer someone with no skills and no experience whose commitment is clear over a technically stronger candidate without it, and say a gut no ends the process. Kevin has hired wrong several times, describing the result as expensive, stressful and unending; they also note that some people working on the side take the brand's learnings and leave. The hunger filter is a personal rule formed under those conditions.
- **Use AI to make ads, not to do the thinking**: Kevin's advice to junior strategists is explicit: AI should not do the thinking. They warn that outsourcing the thinking that makes money brings later costs in time and headaches — scripts, hooks and test hypotheses stay human work. Their hiring posts show AI as a required production skill, not a substitute for judgement: the editor they recruit is expected to be fluent in named AI tools and work across AI cartoon, claymation, movie-style and Suno-music ads. The two positions fit together: AI multiplies the number of ad variants that can be produced, while strategy and test reasoning remain manual.

## Work to read

- [How Kevin Viet Tran learned creative strategy without a copywriting course](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevin-creativestrategy_i-faked-my-cv-to-get-my-first-creative-strategist-activity-7511421586126774273-xFbG)
- [Why Kevin hires hunger over a CV—and how juniors get in](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevin-creativestrategy_nobody-hires-a-junior-creative-strategist-activity-7511426544037150721-TLFL)
- [The video-editor role Kevin recruits for at an eight-figure e-commerce brand](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kevin-creativestrategy_were-hiring-a-performance-video-editor-activity-7503891632078020608-UF89)

## Brand relationships

- **Dante Timpano** (mention)

## Partnerships

Kevin Viet Tran’s posts show how creative work gets staffed and delivered, useful context for buyers planning paid social creative. They do not publish a media kit, rate card, sponsored-format description, partnership policy, or official partnership inquiry route. Ask whether paid sponsorship placements are available and, if so, for pricing, deliverable specifications, disclosure practices, and terms. Two hiring posts describe a remote performance video editor role for an 8-figure e-commerce brand. Requirements include experience editing for 7–8 figure e-commerce brands, judgement about what makes an ad perform, and fluency in AI tools including HeyGen, ElevenLabs, and Higgsfield, as well as AI cartoon, claymation, movie-style, and Suno-style ad formats. The German-language version adds native German and a portfolio containing AI cartoon ads in German. Applications run through LinkedIn: like the post and send a connection request. The working relationship is initiated and maintained directly on LinkedIn, rather than through a public booking or partner form. The advice posts describe the operating model behind the work: a boutique agency produces scripts, hooks, and video sales letters, tracks ad-level performance through hypothesis-driven testing, and trains creative strategists to write scripts weekly without AI assistance on hooks, scripts, and video sales letters. For a brand campaign focused on scaling ad output, the practical read is that creative capacity is built by recruiting and coaching writers and editors, rather than by selling named sponsorship placements.

## Alternatives

- Sava Vacic: Consider Sava Vacic over Kevin Viet Tran when the binding constraint is the cost and job design of the editor role, not the scriptwriting and strategist pipeline. Sava Vacic's posts describe US DTC brands paying around $500 per video or a large full-time salary and still not getting ads that perform, and argue the real problem is that most editors, including US-based ones, are not performance editors. The proposed fix is to bring one performance editor in-house at roughly five times lower cost, working directly with the brand's team. The hiring post sets out what that role covers: multiple short-form ad variations each week built from UGC, raw footage, product clips, testimonials, voiceovers and AI-generated assets; performance ads across Meta, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube; UGC, mashup, product demo, testimonial, founder and short-form VSL formats; AI tools used from asset creation and voiceovers through editing and iteration; and iteration on winning ads from performance data. For a brand whose creative spend is the problem and whose strategy layer already exists, this is the more directly applicable half of the same decision.
- Nikita Ganzina: Choose Nikita Ganzina over Kevin Viet Tran when the ads already exist and underperform at the edit rather than at the script. The posts draw a hard line between making video look good and making a direct-response ad convert, then list what a performance ad has to do in sequence: stop the scroll with a hook, introduce the problem quickly, make the product and its value obvious, give people a reason to trust the storytelling, use social proof, handle buying objections, and finish with a clear call to action. They also give concrete editing calls a brand can hold an editor to: cutting a beautiful opening shot because it takes four seconds to reach the point, putting an unattractive customer quote on screen because proof matters more than polish, and making the edit feel native to the feed rather than like a commercial. The second post extends this to volume: AI is making production cheaper and fifty variations of an ad easier than ever, but more ads do not automatically mean better ads, and the scarce skill is turning raw material into ads people want to buy. For a brief where the creative bottleneck is frame-level judgement and the volume-versus-care question, this is the closer match.
- Jim Schroën: Consider Jim Schroën over Kevin Viet Tran when the brand would rather join an established team than build one, or wants distribution and AI-search visibility alongside paid social. The hiring post describes a full-time remote editor role inside a team of editors and creative strategists producing winning ads for ambitious DTC e-commerce brands: editing short-form and long-form paid-social ads, turning concepts into winning ads with strategists, editing UGC, VSLs and direct-response creatives, and improving from performance data. The stated requirements, including DTC experience, having worked on brands spending EUR100k+ per month on paid ads, and agency or pod experience, function as a public standard a brand can measure a prospective partner or hire against. The second post, from GoViral, adds a different job: UGC ads for DTC brands, plus the argument that 58% of shoppers now use AI tools instead of regular search to find products, that 85% of what AI says about a brand comes from other websites including creator content and reviews, and that affiliate, reviewer and creator networks are what get a brand cited in ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI. A brand whose brief includes an affiliate or creator-network program, or that wants an agency-side pod rather than an individual, will find more here than in their posts.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/