Whisper gets its best ads by giving creators no script at all

The keyboard was sitting outside a window, on a roof, in the rain.

Raindrops were hitting the keys, and the camera lingered just long enough to make a viewer stop scrolling. Then the video panned to a laptop screen, where the drops seemed to be typing random words on their own. On-screen text asked what message the rain was typing, before it cut to a pitch to download Whisper Flow.

The ad was made by an outside creator for Whisper, an artificial intelligence company that sells a tool that turns speech into text. It became one of the company's best performing ads. Hector Serrano, the 19-year-old who runs Whisper's creator ad program, said he had no idea how the creator came up with it.

That is exactly the point, Serrano said. He does not give the creators briefs.

Serrano learned the problem firsthand as a creator himself. Many brands hand creators a 10-page guideline that tells them what hooks to use, what words to say, and how to film the product. He said that kind of instruction removes the creative part of the job, and that there is nothing more demotivating.

At Whisper, the approach is the opposite. The company keeps a small, tight knit group of creators who already use and like the product, pays them based on how much Whisper spends running their ads, and lets them experiment with whatever idea they think will work. Serrano said no two ads in Whisper's library look the same.

The freedom compounds over time. Because the same creators stay for months, Serrano said, some now understand the product better than he does and pitch ideas he would never have imagined. When Whisper releases a new feature, he just drops a note in a group chat on Discord, a messaging app popular with young internet communities, and the videos start coming.

The rain on the roof would never have survived a brief. It worked because nobody tried to control it.