Shekhar Kakade

Next, shape those findings into copy and a script, then edit. The goal is to improve on what is already working rather than start with generic copy.

Kakade says to gather research in a blank document before writing the copy, caption and script. Attention, the post argues, is scarce in a crowded feed.

Read original

An unfamiliar product may need more explanation; a market that already knows the category may lose interest if the ad runs on. Rather than cut to a stopwatch, read the script aloud and remove sentences that do not add a pain point, address an objection or move toward the call to action.

Kakade observes that many ads lose viewers around 30 seconds, some hold attention to 40, and few last beyond 60 unless the story earns it. They present these as observations, not universal thresholds, and argue that strong editing cannot rescue a weak script.

Read original

They treat the ad’s long run in the brand’s ad library as a possible sign that it is meeting the brand’s goals, though not proof of conversions.

Kakade questions whether an 82e.com ad featuring Deepika Padukone explains the product’s problem or features, then notes that it is among the longest-running in the library. They also flag a small glitch at 0:08.

Read original

One short post asks whether readers use AIDA but does not explain how they apply the framework in practice.

A brief post boils the idea down to grabbing attention, keeping it and making viewers click. It ends by asking readers about AIDA rather than developing a worked example.

Read original

This is the clearest statement of the working method assumed by the other posts.

Shekhar Kakade draws on four years and more than 500 video ads to lay out a sequence, not just a tip.

• The steps: decide who the target audience is and what will stop their scroll; study competitors’ ads and identify where a small improvement is possible; draft the copy, caption and script in a blank document; then edit the ad.
• The blunt commercial framing is that cheap, generic creative puts a business’s payroll and a family’s income in unqualified hands.
• Kakade calls attention the scarce resource in this market, which is why, in their words, YouTubers now charge more than film stars.

For brands planning a campaign

A useful intake checklist for a consultation: an agency can compare its process against these four steps and quickly see where it skips research, scripting or editing.

The argument: that is the wrong question. It is the most reusable single post in the set.

After editing hundreds of e-commerce video ads, Shekhar Kakade says there is no flat answer to how long an ad should run.

• Length depends on the market: a new product in an unaware market needs more explanation and can run longer, while a sophisticated market already knows the category and extra seconds bleed attention.
• In their observation, most ads lose people around 30 seconds, some hold to 40, and almost none survive past 60 unless the story earns it.
• Their proposed fix is a script test, not a stopwatch: read the script aloud and cut any sentence that does not introduce a new pain point, kill an objection or push toward the call to action.
• Kakade also claims minimal editing can carry a great script, while the best editing cannot save a bad one.

For brands planning a campaign

Before briefing an editor, a brand should state how aware the market is, choose a length accordingly, then read the script aloud. It reframes a production-budget question as a script question.

A good first stop for assessing their reviewing eye.

This post dissects an ad from 82e.com built around Deepika Padukone, with Shah Rukh Khan appearing alongside the product.

• Shekhar Kakade grants that celebrities draw attention and interest, then asks whether that converts.
• They note that the ad never shows the problem the product solves or its features, but go beyond dismissing it: the ad is among the longest-running in the brand’s ad library, which Kakade treats as a hint that it is delivering the numbers the brand cares about.
• They also flag a visible glitch at the 0:08 mark.

For brands planning a campaign

Two habits worth borrowing: check how long a competitor has been running an ad before judging it, and separate the attention a face buys from the reason to buy that the creative may or may not supply.

A short read with one idea.

The tip: dial up the expression meter at the beginning of a video ad to improve the scroll-stopper ratio, with a claimed gain of more than 40% in e-commerce. Ask for the test setup, sample and evidence behind that figure; without them, it is a working rule of thumb from someone who edits these ads, not a measured result.

For brands planning a campaign

An inexpensive first experiment for a client: change only the opening delivery, keep everything else fixed, and see whether the scroll-stopper rate moves before paying for a full re-edit.

Read it last: there is no worked example, and it mainly confirms the framing used elsewhere.

A brief post says whoever grabs attention, keeps it and gets the click wins big, then asks readers whether they follow AIDA in their ad creatives. The post does not develop the idea, and the AIDA question is left hanging alongside the hashtags.

For brands planning a campaign

A conversation prompt, not evidence. Raise this topic directly in a consultation if you want this person’s view on persuasion structure.

The symptoms named are a high CPM and a low click-through rate, both traced to ad creative rather than audience, budget, or bidding.

• The argument is that attention is scarce in a crowded feed, so whoever grabs it makes more money.
• Kakade illustrates where attention now sits with the pay gap between YouTubers and film stars.

For brands planning a campaign

An agency hiring Kakade for consultation should expect the first pass to be a creative critique framed in auction terms—cost per thousand impressions and click-through rate—rather than a review of media plan targets or channel mix.

Examples: Source 1

First, define the target audience and work out what will stop the scroll, earn engagement, and produce a click through to the landing page.

• Second, review competitors’ ads and offers, then find what could be improved by even one percent.
• Third, turn the research notes into copy, caption, and script in a blank document.
• Fourth, edit the video ad.
• Kakade warns that cheap Fiverr ads and generic copy put a business’s payroll and a family’s welfare in unqualified hands.

Audience and competitor research comes before any script is written. Kakade shapes the script from gathered notes in a blank document, rather than adapting an existing template.

For brands planning a campaign

A consultation built on this process needs raw material from the brand: the intended audience, the current offer, and competitor ads. Without those inputs, the brief will stall at step one.

Examples: Source 1

The deciding factor is how much the market already knows.

• A new product in an unaware market needs more explanation and can run longer, while a sophisticated market that already knows the category loses attention in extra seconds.
• Kakade observes that most ads lose people around 30 seconds, some hold fine to 40, and almost none survive past 60 unless the story earns it.

Kakade presents 30-second, 40-second, and 60-second figures as a pattern observed across hundreds of edits, not tested thresholds. No single number decides the outcome.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand should brief Kakade on how aware the target market is and what the ad needs to explain, not specify a required runtime. That determines whether a longer cut is defensible.

Examples: Source 1

Read the script aloud and cut every sentence that fails one of three jobs: introducing a new pain point, killing an objection, or pushing toward the call to action. Kakade distinguishes script quality from editing, noting that minimal editing has carried a great script the whole way and that the best editing in the world cannot save a bad one.

Read the script aloud. Keep a sentence only if it introduces a new pain point, removes an objection, or moves the viewer toward the call to action.

For brands planning a campaign

Agencies can use this as a review standard before commissioning edits: Kakade treats a weak script as the root cause, not something a better cut can rescue.

Examples: Source 1

They accept that celebrities draw attention and generate interest, then question whether that converts.

• Their criticism is that the ad never shows what problem the product solves or what its features are—it only shows that a well-known actor uses it.
• Kakade notes that the ad is among the longest-running in the brand’s ad library and treats that longevity as a hint that it is delivering the KPIs the brand wants.
• They also flag a small glitch at 0:08 and invite readers to comment on it.

Ad-library longevity is a hint about performance, not proof of conversion. Ask Kakade how they assess whether celebrity-led ads convert.

For brands planning a campaign

Kakade evaluates others’ work by asking what problem the ad states, whether the creative does direct-response work, and how long the ad has survived in the wild. Agencies can use the same questions to judge whether this diagnostic approach matches their standards.

Examples: Source 1

The advice treats the ad’s opening moments as a separate craft problem from the body of the script.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand should expect hook performance to be discussed as a measurable rate, not a matter of taste: roughly 40 percent scroll-stopping is the working benchmark for e-commerce creative.

Examples: Source 1

The post asks whether readers follow AIDA in their ad creatives, positioning the classic attention-interest-desire-action sequence as the framework creative teams are assumed to use.

This short statement and question show the vocabulary Kakade uses, but not how the framework changes their work.

For brands planning a campaign

An agency that plans campaigns using AIDA terms will share Kakade’s vocabulary. Ask how they apply the model in practice.

Examples: Source 1

The post presents editorial commentary, not a stated commercial relationship with the brand.

View example

The argument that a talented editor may still be editing videos rather than direct-response ads echoes Kakade's warning that cheap creative and generic copy waste a brand's money. Both see script and structure as the layers that decide the outcome.

Ganzina frames the issue as a hiring and team-structure bottleneck, contrasting two kinds of editor and looking ahead to the volume of AI- and UGC-made video DTC brands will produce. Kakade works at the level of the individual ad, teardown by teardown, using a research-to-script process and named measures such as CPM, click-through rate, and scroll-stopper ratio.

Read original · Original 2 · Original 3

Their warning that a winning ad can be an account's biggest risk—because building everything around one hook, one angle, and one message leaves the whole account fragile—matches Kakade's preference for improving what already works and asking what is being tested next, rather than defending a single winner.

Shakoor writes from the account and media-buying side, using spend, CPA, and ROAS as signals that something has gone wrong; one post is a career reflection rather than a craft argument. Kakade stays with the creative itself: how long it should run, which sentences earn their place, and whether a celebrity-led ad makes a selling case.

Read original · Original 2 · Original 3

Chaudhary's chain from business goal through offer, audience, creative, funnel, and measurement covers the same customer-acquisition path Kakade explores by asking what will stop a specific audience's scroll.

Chaudhary's framework-shaped posts lean toward media buying and account strategy, including what automation does and does not take off the buyer's plate. Kakade's are narrower and more concrete, built around individual ads, scripts, and the first seconds of a video.

Read original · Original 2 · Original 3

The two posts draw a hard line between video editing and direct-response editing: a performance ad has to stop the scroll with a hook, introduce the problem quickly, make the product and its value obvious, give a reason to trust the storytelling, use social proof to reduce scepticism, handle the objections blocking a purchase, and finish with a clear reason to act.

• Ganzina accepts the costs that follow — cutting a beautiful opening shot because it takes four seconds to reach the point, or putting an unattractive customer quote on screen because proof beats aesthetics — and deliberately makes the edit feel native to the feed rather than like a commercial.
• That is the right conversation when the need is to understand how an edit should serve the conversion structure and how to brief the editors delivering it.

The pre-production half of Kakade's method is absent: defining the target audience, studying competitor ads and the offer behind them, drafting the copy, caption, and script in a blank document, and reading aloud to keep only sentences that introduce a pain point, kill an objection, or push to the call to action.

• Their position on ad length — no fixed number, longer for an unaware market, shorter for a sophisticated one — is also not covered.
• Agencies seeking their script-level diagnosis should ask whether it is available; the edit is expected to follow that diagnosis.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Both posts argue from that angle: boosting a post is a symptom of not having a strategy, and the working chain runs business goal, offer, audience, creative, funnel, measurement, optimisation.

• The questions Chaudhary puts before any budget goes behind a post are the ones the agency would need answered — what the objective is (sales, leads, acquisition, awareness), who the campaign is actually trying to reach rather than who might engage, what the offer is, whether the creative drives action rather than attention, where the traffic lands, what happens after the click, and what success looks like in numbers.
• The second post applies the same reasoning to Advantage+, where automation handles finding opportunities, delivery, bids and budgets, testing and learning, while a person still decides what to test, which creative angle fits, whether the problem sits in the audience, creative, offer, or funnel, what the numbers mean, and when to scale or stop.

The ad itself is not covered: there is nothing on writing a script that carries a whole video, timing the opening seconds, or cutting a script by reading it aloud.

• If the client's actual request is consultation on the creative — the script, the edit, the hook — ask whether that service is available.
• This account is more useful for deciding whether creative is the right place to spend than for making the creative itself better.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The account post walks through the pattern directly — the same creative scaled from $1K to $10K, then a rising CPA, a falling ROAS, and slowing sales, with the blame landing on the platform — and reframes the cause as a structure built on one hook, one angle, one message.

• The working habit that follows is asking what is being tested next: different hooks, different angles, different customer problems, different formats, so a pipeline of winners exists before the current one dies rather than starting from zero when it does.
• That is the right consultation when the need is to build a testing cadence and account resilience instead of a single new asset.

This is an account-level argument, not a creative-craft one.

• Changing a script, rebuilding an opening, or judging whether an edit is doing work for the ad are not addressed.
• One of the two posts is a career reflection about a five-year run in DTC and Meta Ads rather than a craft or testing argument, so the case for consultation rests on the testing-pipeline post.
• Ask whether consultation also covers the established creative method Kakade sets out — audience definition, competitor and offer review, blank-page script, and read-aloud cuts — which has no counterpart here.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2