Nia Bowers
In the rapidly changing world of digital media, the ability to capture an audience’s attention has become one of the most valuable skills a creative professional can possess. Zalina Bakhisheva developed this ability long before she began creating paid advertising for tech companies. Her professional path began with journalism and social media, where she learned how to find compelling stories, understand what audiences wanted to watch and turn complex information into concise, engaging videos. These days, as a Senior Performance Video Creator at the AI-powered video and audio creation platform known as Riverside, she applies those same storytelling principles to a very different objective: creating advertising that not only earns attention but also contributes to measurable user acquisition.
Bakhisheva’s career illustrates how skills which are developed in organic content can evolve into a sophisticated performance-marketing discipline. Her experience building audiences on emerging social platforms, producing viral videos and experimenting with different storytelling formats led her to the world of paid creative. Along the way, she learned that although the products and industries may change, one fundamental question remains constant: what makes someone care enough to stop, watch, and continue listening?
Learning the Language of Viral Content
One of the most important chapters in Bakhisheva’s development came during her work at TVC Plus, a digital news and media platform created by TV Center, one of Russia’s top-10 television channels.
It was during this time that she developed and managed video and social-media strategies across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Her work helped the media outlet grow to more than 2.5 million followers and generate more than 250 million total views but most significantly, Zalina helped launch a TikTok channel from scratch that eventually surpassed one million followers and reached as many as 15 million weekly views at its peak.
Her decision to invest heavily in TikTok was itself an example of the testing philosophy that would later become central to her performance-marketing work. When Bakhisheva began exploring the platform, TikTok was still relatively new. Rather than simply proposing that TVC Plus should establish a presence there, she tested the opportunity herself. She created videos for her personal account, including street interviews and survey-style content, and quickly saw that the format could attract an audience.
One of her first TikTok videos featuring TVC Plus content became a viral success, generating more than one million views. This gave Zalina something more valuable than an abstract argument about the potential of a new platform: she had evidence. She could bring the results to her team and demonstrate that the company’s existing content could find an audience on TikTok. Bakhisheva then developed a strategy that could scale beyond street interviews. News content provided a steady source of material that could be adapted into repeatable formats, allowing the team to produce content consistently. The results came quickly. Within the first week, views were already climbing into the thousands, and one video eventually reached five million views.
Making Complex Ideas Engaging
During Bakhisheva’s work with the Russian online education company Foxford, her tactics proved accessible to other industries. Here Zalina launched and developed the company’s TikTok presence from scratch, drawing on her experience as both a creator and host.
Because this company offered educational services to children, Bakhisheva had to find ways to make subjects such as Russian literature, physics, chemistry, biology, and general knowledge appealing to a young audience accustomed to fast-moving social content. The videos she created for this account were generally less than a minute long, combining educational information with entertainment and emotional engagement. The key was not to simplify the subject by removing what made it interesting, but to identify the detail that could make an audience curious. Zalina describes the process as taking a large amount of information, finding the element that makes someone want to know more and then building a short explanation around it.
A video about Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, required her to condense the writer’s life, accomplishments and influence into a very short format. Rather than attempting to tell everything, she searched for a compelling entry point: the role Dostoevsky’s wife played in his life and work. That detail became the hook that brought viewers into the larger story. The same philosophy shaped one of Foxford’s most successful videos, about axolotls. This video opened with the striking possibility that the unusual creature could survive even in an end-of-the-world scenario, then used animation, visual reveals, and pacing to maintain curiosity. Attaining nearly 10 million views, this video stands as a benchmark production for Zalina’s expanding storytelling style that resembled a Hollywood production more than simply status quo “content”.
The videos Zalina created during her tenure at Foxford exhibits the establishment of a creative principle that would later become central to her advertising work: complicated information can become compelling when it is presented through a clear story, strong opening and carefully chosen details.
From Organic Reach to Paid Performance
At Popixels, whose Temply and Vixer mobile video-editing apps has more than 20 million users, Zalina led creative strategy and production for Meta and Google campaigns across international markets. She produced more than 350 performance ads and worked closely with the Growth team to test concepts and improve creative results.
At TVC Plus and Foxford, success could be measured largely through audience growth, views, and engagement but at Popixels, creative also had to contribute to acquisition. An advertisement had to capture attention while communicating why a viewer should use the product. Bakhisheva approached this challenge by beginning with the product and its users. She researched which features people used most, spoke with users about what they liked and what problems the applications solved, and then translated the insight into creative concepts. Her experience as a social-media creator helped her recognize trends and familiar formats that could make advertisements feel more native to the platforms where they appeared.
For Temply, one successful concept demonstrated how small-business owners could create product content using one of the app’s templates. The format resembled the short “how-to” videos that were already popular on social platforms, while also showing a practical reason for a small-business owner to use the application. Her approach for Vixer, saw Bakhisheva building an advertisement around the idea that creating and editing video did not demand hours of work. She appeared on camera and used a direct opening to introduce the problem before demonstrating how the application could make the process faster and easier. These projects represented a significant shift in Zalina’s approach to storytelling. The skills she’d developed through viral organic content remained essential, but the objective changed. Instead of simply asking whether people would watch, she was increasingly asking whether the creative communicated a product benefit clearly enough to encourage someone to take action.
Bringing Storytelling and Performance Together at Riverside
Presently, as a Senior Performance Video Creator at Riverside, Zalina focuses on paid video advertising for YouTube, developing creative from concept through iteration. Her process includes researching audiences and competitors, identifying concepts and messaging, writing scripts, guiding production, reviewing performance data, and using those results to inform subsequent creative.
The work requires a combination of creative intuition and analytical thinking. A strong concept may begin with an audience insight, but the creative must ultimately communicate a product’s value quickly and clearly. This is particularly important when marketing a sophisticated SaaS product, where simply listing features may not give potential users a compelling reason to care.
One Riverside campaign shows the benevolent practicality that most all users are looking for: namely, how to make the use of technology easy and friendly while still being highly effective. The inspiration was a simple audience problem: people wanted to start podcasts but felt overwhelmed by the process. Bakhisheva found evidence of this concern while researching conversations on Reddit and used those audience insights, together with lessons from previous creative, to develop a creator-led concept centered on making podcast creation feel accessible. She wrote the script and developed the creative direction around a straightforward message. If the advertisement was telling viewers that starting a podcast could be easy, the advertisement itself needed to feel easy to understand. Different hooks were tested, including a more cinematic opening and a more direct presentation of the viewer’s problem. The underlying product and message remained consistent, but the first few seconds offered different ways to establish a connection with the audience. Zalina also incorporated a cinematic sensibility into the production.
Effective advertising does not have to look like conventional advertising. The strongest commercial creative can sometimes borrow qualities from entertainment, creating an emotional response or reminding viewers of something they already enjoy watching. Another Riverside project involved the launch of a social-media scheduling feature. Bakhisheva approached the concept by first considering the problem the feature was designed to solve and then developing a way to communicate its value quickly. The resulting brand video was subsequently scaled across Riverside’s paid social campaigns, extending the product launch concept into performance advertising.
Together, these projects demonstrate the breadth of her current role.Performance creative can involve a highly targeted paid advertisement built around an audience insight, but it can also involve a broader brand video that introduces a new product capability. In both cases, the central challenge is communication; finding the story that makes a complex product understandable and relevant.
The Continuing Importance of Storytelling
Even though Zalina Bakhisheva has moved from journalism and organic social media into paid advertising, she does not view these as disconnected stages of her career. Instead, each has contributed another layer to the way she approaches creative work. Journalism is about looking for the story. Social media focuses on understanding attention and audience behavior. Viral content identifies hooks and formats that can make people stop scrolling. A compelling story cannot compensate for a product that does not solve a meaningful problem. Bakhisheva insists that the product itself must be the most important factor but even a useful product needs to be communicated effectively. The challenge is to connect the product’s capabilities with something the audience actually cares about; a problem they want to solve, a goal they want to achieve or a process they wish were easier.
That perspective has allowed Bakhisheva to work across industries without making a particular product category the center of her professional identity. Her specialization is communication and engagement. She begins by understanding people, then searches for the part of a product or story that matters to them and turns that insight into video. The result is a career path that reflects the changing nature of digital marketing itself. The distinction between content creation and advertising has become increasingly fluid, while audience attention has become increasingly valuable. Zalina’s experience demonstrates how the instincts of a journalist and storyteller can evolve into the methodology of a performance marketer. Research the audience, find the hook, make the message clear, create something people want to watch, measure what happens and use what is learned to make the next creative stronger and the results can be incredibly fruitful.