There's a version of the creative research process that most agencies run on autopilot.

A brief comes in, someone books a focus group or pulls a trend report, the team brainstorms, and a direction gets chosen based on a combination of data and instinct. It works well enough, but there's a step missing from most of those processes - and it's sitting in plain sight.

Comment sections are where audiences say what they actually think about a brand, a product, a campaign, or a category. Not what they said when prompted in a research session, and not what a trend report implies they feel. What they actually typed, publicly, in their own words, in response to content they chose to engage with. For agencies building creative strategy, that's one of the most underused research inputs available.

Here’s how you can make it a part of your process:

Before a brief gets written, it's worth spending time in the comment sections of a client's top-performing content. The goal is to identify patterns. What are people latching onto? What language are they using to describe the brand or the product? What are they conspicuously ignoring? Those patterns tell you where there's genuine audience energy, and where there isn't. A brief built on that foundation is starting from a much more grounded place than one built purely from internal assumptions about what the audience cares about.

This is especially useful for agencies coming into a new client relationship. Comment sections give you a fast, unfiltered read on how an audience actually relates to a brand - which is often quite different from how the brand sees itself.

The instinct when mining comments for creative input is to look for the positive signals: what people like, what they're praising, what's resonating. But the more interesting creative territory is often in the friction:

Cultural tension is where a lot of the most interesting creative work lives, and comment sections surface it more honestly than almost any other source. A recurring complaint about price or a running joke about the brand's identity are signals that something is going on beneath the surface.

Spotting that tension early and building a creative response to it puts you in a very different position than those that only reinforce what the client already believes about themselves.

The third place comment sections are useful is at the pitch stage itself. When you're presenting a creative direction to a client, you're typically asking them to take a bet on your read of the audience. That's a lot to ask. But if that direction is grounded in things real people have actually said - in the client's own comment sections, or in the category more broadly - you're showing that the audience is already there.

That's something no trend report can replicate, because it's evidence. And for clients who are cautious about creative risk, it changes the nature of the conversation entirely.

The comments won't hand you a finished brief. But they will tell you things about an audience that no internal brainstorm will surface, because they're not filtered through a brand's assumptions about itself.

For agencies that are willing to start there, it changes what the pitch looks like before anyone's opened a deck.

Remember how Levi’s turned World Cup censorship into a viral moment? Well they’ve also managed to turn it into a product launch - thanks to the comments.

After the original video went viral, commenters immediately started asking for merch with the covered up logo. Levi’s proved that they do in fact read the comments (👏) and launched a limited edition tee.

And they didn’t need a focus group to know people wanted it.

What the Siftsy team has been reading, saving, and talking about this week.