Dispatch № 7 - Creative Cont.
A continuation in our series focusing on the creative importance within advertising.
Hello and welcome to another free dispatch with me, Jake the Ad Nerd 🤓 (< not me)
The science of advertising works because of the art of advertising.
It’s a simple statement, but one that will be woven into the angles of discussion in this dispatch. Which took us some time to put together. Most of you know the reasons why.
For those that don’t… The main reason was so that I can focus on delivering value instead of noise.
I have a dear friend, David Herrmann joining me today.
We kind of broke this down in a podcast/interview-style format. I think it reads well and we’re both really proud of what we’re putting forth to you, the reader.
So, thank you for being here as we kick off the last month of Q3. This space in your inbox, or time out of your day, is not taken for granted by David and me.
The science of advertising works because of the art of advertising.
How can we explore that further?
For me, it’s clear that in nearly all aspects of life, there is both an art and a science to everything. Advertising is no exception.
Before we marinade in that a bit more, I want to stay clear on the fact that these dispatches do not exist to deal with every unique scenario. That’s the beauty of them.
That’s on you.
Remember, I’m not here to deliver answers. I’m here to challenge you.
The newest challenge is to start thinking about how you can continue to evolve your understanding of advertising past the stage of automation and into the reality that it's all an orchestration.
This is where refocusing on advertising fundamentals, data that is accurate and actionable, creative ideas using historical principles but with fresh spins, and the belief that there is an order-of-operations between each and every step in the system… will help you grow.
I'm recommending a block of 15 minutes to consume everything here.
If you're new, I always provide two disclaimers before we get into everything:
1. There is no one unicorn source (including this one) that will teach you everything you need to know about advertising. If that’s why you’ve decided to be in this community, you’ll soon be disappointed.
2. What works for one advertiser, might not work for you. These are merely observations on what myself and others see is working across platforms, accounts, and verticals. And, our interpretation of ideas. You need to test responsibly, at your own discretion, and ideate individually.
⁉️ What Are We Nerding Out On?
Some of you may be working on new ads today. While you’re working on those ads, take a moment to stop and think about all of the factors that are working to change the brand that you’re advertising for. Think about how this new ad plays in that world.
It takes guts to stick to a coherent strategy, structure, and creative, when advertising.
Especially when everyone around you is touting the “next best thing” and force-feeding you the idea that you need something new. Every day, every week.
Sometimes it’s not the next best thing that will help you propel a brand forward, just the courage to tell a story in your advertising that no one else will.
With that, I choose to believe that we are not in some advertising nightmare but instead a new reality. I see it every day. The tweets, the account audits, the conversations with fellow advertisers…
All hyped up on this idea that advertising will never be the same. It must be a nightmare that we’re in.
For me, there’s a peace and beauty in understanding one simple thing…
It’s always been the same.
What’s your response when you hear the hub-bub that we’re in an ad nightmare, David?
“Advertising has never changed, it’s telling stories through whatever means you’re selling through. Print ads were direct response to call or mail in, tv commercials encouraged you to dig deeper by visiting a store, banner ads wanted you to “click now”.
We have never had a nightmare, we’ve had networks and users changing habits, that’s what we’re seeing today.”
100%. Your role as an advertiser has not changed, but you are now on an accelerated course of navigating the reset consumption patterns for the consumers that your brands wish to serve.
Keep in mind that the world we advertise within has always been about perception.
Yet, as challenges arise, accounts crumble, and shiny objects rob us of our focus, many of you have lost hold of the simple truth that the only thing that matters is the customer’s perception.
Therefore, in this new reality, whether you like it or not, you’re rebuilding relevance to new needs, values, and behaviors. Our advertising must re-energize consumers for the brands that we service.
How can that be done, David? On a very macro, zoomed-out level?
“Delight and inspire in your creatives.”
K.I.S.S.
🍯 The Good Stuff
As we run into the ‘Good Stuff’ section, can you unpack that a bit more David?
“Yeah. It’s all about selling without selling.
It’s about showcasing a potentially different value than your product’s original intent.
For example, we serve a hiking boot company. When the pandemic went into effect, we switched our marketing to talk about how the hills will be open again soon, and there has never been a better time than now to buy and break-in boots at home before the big day. We emphasized comfortable feet and planning ahead.
It worked incredibly well!
That’s how creative and messaging needs to be during an era of uncertainty.
We’ve got our ads appearing between terrible videos of racial injustices, pandemics, fires, etc. The question you need to ask is, “how do I get a person to stop scrolling while their mind is clearly already dominated by these other moments?”
Get them to think differently.
Stop the scroll.”
Yeah, I think the end there about what else the consumer is focused on, will be something that I’ll touch on a bit more later on in this dispatch. These outside forces. There’s something there in terms of value and our responsibility.
But, I think the KEY way that we can get consumers to think differently, is by specifically shifting our focus back to truths that have been in advertising for decades.
Let’s use that to drive the idea behind how you should be thinking about the importance of creative.
Are you ready?
Essentially, we can break it down in two ways, in terms of a path to purchase:
How can your creative drive the consumer down a rational path?
AND/OR
How can your creative drive the consumer down an emotional path?
Nail those two, with proven audiences and an account structure setup for horizontal scaling, and you will be less affected by the current volatility of markets, patterns, and platforms. Especially on Facebook.
When it comes to the goal of advertising for the rational path, there’s a pretty simple framework that can be used for that.
I don’t mention it often but once you see it, you’ll realize that it can be effective with almost any brand, product, and service.
How? It’s built on principles of human psychology and elements that rarely change.
Que… The Rationality Ladder.
So, start with this idea that your consumer or ideal customer, is stuck at the top of a ladder, with a fear of heights… They climbed up a rickety old ladder to get a view of the unknown at the top, and your task is to get them back down safely.
Therefore, the bottom of the ladder is the problem that the consumer is trying to solve.
Now, step them down the ladder into the warm and fuzzy zone where their feet are safely on the ground, and you’ll be rewarded.
At each rung of the ladder, you’ll pick up acquisitions as a residual, and each rung of the ladder or ‘stage’ will serve a purpose towards the final goal.
Driving a consumer down a path to purchase.
On the first step down, the top step, drive them to awareness by shedding light on the rational benefits.
On the second step down, drive them into consideration by describing the functional benefits.
Lastly, on the final step down, as you take their hand… drive them to purpose by blending the two rungs before into your product/service features.
Without doing anything more, you’ve now simply outlined a clear path for a consumer that addresses THEIR problems.
Your reward for getting them to safety, and explaining everything along the way? A purchase (and some loyalty if you were nice).
Each one of these steps, as I’m sure you can gather, then leads to variant creative.
This is where you or your creative team/partners get to truly shine. If you’re a buyer, this is the approach needed to ask for creative from the brand. This is the roadmap that will lead to a structure for your creative. It will help you figure out the narrative.
A narrative that is built to help the customer.
Pretty cool, aye? I thought so ;)
So, we’ve outlined that rational path.
David, can you speak more about driving the consumer down an emotional path?
“Every piece of creative should have the same mindset, “sell a product or service” as it’s end goal. However, every piece should also have the right user in mind for it.
Generally, the pathway goes something like this:
Awareness - this type of creative will always be about a general problem and solution that your product/service solves. These types of creatives generally will answer questions like: “Why do I need this?”, “Who is it for?”, “What does it do?”. If your creative doesn’t answer these basic Qs your creative may not be primed for performance.
Consideration - these types of creative need to rope the user who’s expressed interest to move to that zero moment of truth. Generally the creative from these will answer the hesitations one may have when on the fence. The types of creatives that work well in this phase answer these questions:
Why should I pay this much for this?
Why do I need this now?”
What are others saying about this?
Oftentimes these types of creatives will contain user-generated content that showcases customer feedback, unboxing videos, reviews, etc. Aim to focus more on the product than the awareness stage with some type of social proof.
Conversion - these types of creatives will answer the final hesitations and showcase an offer. Imagine it like this, someone has visited you twice and on the second time picked up your product, looked it over, then put it back. How do you get them to buy? Barter? Maybe. Buy more? Oh yeah.
I’m all about multiple offers on this level. You’ve got them coming back multiple times already, you don’t need to showcase the product again, they know it. You don’t need to show more testimonials, they’ve read them. Focus your efforts on static images with offers here in this phase. Too many people focus too much on video here, the data always shows static does the trick and gives you an easier time to test offers.”
Pro-tip interjection on TOF on FB right now… ABO>BROAD>STATIC. Test it.
In the end, your ads need to help people. Plain and simple.
Until you deliver on that, you’ll miss the mark and continue paying an ass load of money on wasted traffic in your pursuit of a healthy acquisition cost and stable return.
And above all else, avoid the urge to be boring. PLEASE!
If you refuse to invest time into creative or the understanding of its importance, then you are buying into the machine of incompetence in the advertising world.
There are many creative situations in which human behavior does not work in our world. What is breathtakingly refreshing, is how often it does.
You can easily answer the question(s) regarding ‘How this creative can drive a consumer down a path’ if you lean into consistency and personality.
Will I break those two down? Most likely not, because this is not the one-stop-shop for answers. Your research, on your own time, holds value. But, you know that already. It’s why you’re still here. Because we do things differently.
With patterns shifting, change in daily routines, it’s allowing consumers to strike a better balance between working and living their best lives. We need to celebrate that as advertisers!
As you uncover how you’ll move a consumer down a path to purchase, remember that you also exist to aid in the consumer's conservation of cognitive energy so that they have the capacity to deal with the rest of their environment.
The moment you overload that, you have lost trust, authority, and influence.
So, as you think about creative, whether building that yourself or outsourcing it. The recommendations you make to clients should be the recommendations you would make if you owned the brand. AND include what you’ve consumed here today.
Avoid the infestation of creatives who try to impress by using jargon.
I mean… just take a look at this:
Deceptively easy pants.
This probably could have been solved by testing for creative effectiveness.
An area of creative advertising that gets skipped all too often. Many advertisers, the worst ones, think that research takes too long.
I promise you. It takes much longer to figure out how to be effective on an account without it. Learning through trial and error is a novice and costly mistake.
You MUST understand how people buy the things you’re advertising.
That whole customer journey thing, yeah it’s fucking important. Without it, you’re blindly slapping ads together and adding to the noise.
Instead, figure out how consumers shop, look at all of the different channels, map out the consumer bouncing around to piece together clues about a brand and figure out what led them to eventually land on you.
Then re-create it inside your preferred platform.
So. Why is this so complicated?
Why do so many fail (and then blame the platform for their troubles)?
Because there’s no script ladies and gentlemen!
There are no hand-holding, step-by-step instructions that you can paste into your business. Well… back-up. There are, and you shouldn’t. But, you get my point ;)
The only way to figure it out is through iteration. Testing. Not just A/B testing CTAs. But entire campaigns, audiences, and creative ideas. Think macro, not micro.
Don’t just consume this dispatch. Act on it!
Another Guest…
To dissect creative testing a little further, I turn to a friend of mine, Jeromy Sonne.
Jeromy, can you take a moment to speak to creative testing?
“Most people, marketers included, don’t properly think through creative testing that is meaningful in my experience.
I’m not saying that they do a bad job, or the creative they make doesn’t resonate or anything like that, but rather that the tests they run don’t pass muster.
Let me explain.
Basically many marketers will just have a creative test campaign and they drop new ads in. If the ad beats some KPIs they move it to their “main” campaigns and let it run.
I myself did this for a long time until I took a deeper look at things and realized where I was messing up.
Like most things in marketing, it’s pretty much all about the context. A lot of us talk about “understanding the user journey” but how many of us actually take the extra minute to really get to the core of what’s going on?
With creative testing it isn’t just about looking at the sorts of ads that work, but in what context and to whom do they work?
When you set up a creative test you need apples to apples comparisons. With that in mind, when you test a piece of creative you need to test it to the audience that is intended to receive it.
If you’re testing at the middle of the funnel, run it to an audience in your middle of the funnel. If you’re testing it at the bottom-funnel run it against a custom audience of people that abandoned cart.
It seems simple, but so many people don’t do this and simply run ads head to head against cold audiences without any thought of what context they have with their brand (if they have any knowledge of the brand at all).
Further, when you divide up your cold audiences or other audiences in your funnel… does a middle-aged woman from the midwest react the same as a young man from New York City? Maybe in some cases, but not always.
I’m not against broad audiences, but when you’re doing creative testing you need to think about specifically not just where in the funnel people are, but the kinds of people they are and the sorts of messaging that will resonate better with them.
Taking a step back, setting KPIs is important. But, there is no universal number as every account, every brand, at different times of the year, etc. all have different KPIs. So, any goal you need to be setting for creative testing needs to be done in the context of the account(s) you’re working on.
How do I do it on Facebook?
I set a goal of 10% improvements for both CTR and ROAS as compared the past 14 days of the existing creatives I’m running it against. In addition, I go for at least 10,000 impressions before making any sort of call and ideally 72 hours if not a week long.
Someone saying something like 4x return on ad spend as some sort of arbitrary benchmark basically doesn’t mean much to me.
Lastly, I wanted to make a quick note on statistical significance.
With all the machine learning that goes in behind Facebook, the “algorithm” ends up making a lot of choices that make it near impossible to run a truly statistically significant head to head test.
Of course, the idea is to hit a % of the audience that will give you a decent confidence level. I am not promoting bad math here…
What I am saying, is that you should let go of the idea of perfectionism with Facebook and let the art meet the science at some point.”
🛎️ Ding, Ding
Jeromy’s point(s) speak to that core idea of art meeting science. Automation morphing into orchestration. Are things lining up? Of course, they are, you’re smart as hell and you know exactly what we’re talking about here!
Carrying on…
After testing has been done and you understand the journey, you’re ready to finally create. Right?
Hold that thought. Before you do…
Did you think about the personality of your creative?
That’s right, personality.
Damn, Jake! There’s another element I have to consider?
Yep. And those that consider it all, are the ones that brands trust to run point.
Full stop.
There’s a remarkable quote by David Ogilvy that I think can help me save your inbox from a few more paragraphs, regarding personality...
“There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.”
I want to wrap up with something that has come up in a few conversations recently.
So, maybe it’s relevant to you as the reader. I hope.
There’s this question surfacing as brands begin to think about BFCM, wondering whether it’s foolish for them to just expect consumers to simply come back?
How can brands navigate this with creative? The idea that post-lockdowns, things will just be back to normal and you’ll have the same customer base, cannot be true… can it, David?
“Yes and no. I think it’s foolish to assume anything.
You care more about your product than anyone else.
Most of us are not thinking about (insert product) more than .00001% of our days.
Unless your Apple. You miss it when it goes away. That’s why they are a trillion-dollar company. However, most of us are not working with trillion-dollar companies (and if you are, awesome). But Apple isn’t running performance ads on FB. They don’t need to. They focus on the brand.
For the rest of us, we always need to focus on retention.
I may be in the minority here, but I simply hate paying to advertise to our current customers on FB, or any ad platform. We paid for them already, why keep doing it? The smart response here is to focus on retention, retention, retention. Your email is creative, right? Emphasize your messaging and flows around a user, segment them enough to understand where they are in their lives.
If you’re paying over and over again to “acquire” the same user you’re overpaying.”
🎁 Bonus Content
Some of you were eager enough to ask some questions on Twitter.
While we tried to weave some of those responses into the main dispatch, David wanted to address a few specifically.
Matt C. asked specifically about Pinterest.
“Creative on Pinterest must be incredibly clear of what your value prop is. You must have a clear headline that pops. Focus on product with a headline that answers a question someone is planning for. For hiking shoes: "These boots will....." For clothing: "The shirt that every patriot is wearing this July 4th" etc. Pinterest is a planning tool, make creative that follows this.”
Nick Boyce asked about lifecycles.
“When a creative falls out of life, retire it for a bit. Often times what works well is to re-edit it based on the data you now have. Meaning, change the first 3-5 seconds (aka the hook) on the winning creative. Then relaunch the original piece of creative as a new ad and test it against the new hook ad. This is the micro-testing your creatives need and it can help you scale them quicker on minimal ad changes.”
Finally, Andy was wondering… what’s working?
I think there’s a clear winner across multiple platforms for us.
Wouldn’t you say, David?
“Yeah. UGC / Testimonial / Awareness ads. Something that answers those three questions we mentioned before: What does this do? Why do I need it? Who else loves it?”
🏁 In Closing
As you go on your new journey of tackling the challenge presented here, to get back to fundamentals and re-evaluate WHY you’re creating something for an ad… Remember that as advertisers, we are ultimately only doing three things:
Amplify/Accelerate PMF
Discovery of new audiences
Keeping audiences engaged
As I mentioned, if there’s product-market-fit, the challenge today is to rebuild relevance for new needs, values, and behaviors for the brands that we service.
A simple way to approach that in creative, is to answer three questions:
What does this product do?
Why do I need it?
Who else loves it?
Not rocket science, is it? Nope. And, you can use some processes to help you figure it all out. Including, The Rationality Ladder.
The end-game with the recent dispatches focusing on creative, stems from my understanding that people learn something by understanding it's parts.
Mastery is when you learn the parts and the interconnections between the parts.
The full structure.
Now that we’ve uncovered the basic understanding of parts, we’ll jump into the next step. It’s most likely exactly what you’ve been waiting for. I hope.
Ie. You’ve landed on the correct account structure, you’ve tested audiences, and proven creative. You’ve seen what myself and others in the industry are doing. You’ve built a playbook…
What’s your next goal?
Horizontal scaling!
Which, lucky for you, will be the ENTIRE theme for the next dispatch. The goal is to teach you how to increase spending without increasing prices. We’ll uncover the subtle art of distributing load-bearing spend across multiple dimensions, keeping your account(s) stable at scale and on the offense for account entropy.
In closing, for anyone struggling with the “new reality” we face as advertisers, please remember…
Be careful with considering the labor (and advertising results) to be the measure of yourself. Keep your mind healthy, refocus your efforts, and carry on.
With gratitude.
Your next dispatch will be delivered on 10/1. We’ll be breaking down horizontal scaling at a very tactical level, AND beginning our talks on BFCM strategies.
As always, I’ll sprinkle in some goodies along the way. Including our State of Accounts update at the end of this week!
Until next time.
Cheers,
Jake the Ad Nerd 🤙
Incredible work, guys! Well worth the wait.