From Concept to Conversion Proven Direct Response Ad Types

Webinar Replay

June 14, 2023

Mirella Crespi

Founder of Creative Milkshake

Mirella Crespi is a creative strategist, expert media buyer, and founder of Creative Milkshake, one of the largest performance creative studios in Europe. In the last decade, she’s helped 200+ brands maximize profit and scale across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube.

What you'll learn

Learn from a team that excels in research, strategy, and in-house production, delivering ads that significantly boost revenue and ROAS. Whether you're a brand, marketer, or creative professional, this webinar offers valuable insights into creating high-impact ads.

Key Takeaways

Deep-Dive Research for Tailored Strategies
Creative Diversity and Direct Response Techniques
Data-Driven Iteration and Optimization

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;18;15

Hi, everyone. All right, thanks for having me, Zach. Like you said, we use foreplay a lot and I'll talk about this a little bit today. All right, let's get this party started. So nice to see so many of you tuned in from so many different places in the world.

00;00;18;18 - 00;00;52;22

I'm going to open the chat so I can see. Hi, Chloe. All right, let's do this. You can see my screen, right? My slides. We should be good. So I have a lot to cover today. I hope you guys are ready. We're going to talk about from concept to conversion, proven direct response ad types and iteration principles to drive sales on metta and take talk just a quick introduction about creative milkshake and who we are.

00;00;52;24 - 00;01;17;10

We're a direct response creative strategy and production studio. We are Metta and Tik-tok Creative Partners and we deliver the ad that Peyton Media teams need to drive revenue and RO as an umbrella. I'm the founder of Creative Milkshake. We will work with a wide range of brands from all around the world, across many different verticals. So we've learned a lot about along the way.

00;01;17;10 - 00;01;52;20

And I'm going to share with you some things that we learned. So we specialize in in-depth research and strategy. We dive into trends. Competitors target audiences to outline the creative strategy brands need and match them with the perfect challenge to produce their ads. We pride ourselves in world class creative execution. We shoot script and edit all of our content in-house following performance, best practices, and we continuously test and iterate to support scale.

00;01;52;23 - 00;02;22;14

So this is what our performance creative flow looks like. It all starts with creative strategy and production. We always deliver ads with multiple variations for testing. We then analyze their performance, deliver the iterated versions, optimize based on the data, analyze again, and that will then inform the net new content that will be produced to keep feeding this continuous cycle.

00;02;22;20 - 00;02;51;01

And I'll talk more about this throughout the rest of this presentation. So today we're going to cover four key things researching concepts, reporting and iterations. So starting off with research, I could spend so much time talking about research because it's arguably the most important step of developing a really strong creative strategy. But for us, there's three types of research that we do.

00;02;51;04 - 00;03;21;03

We research trends, we research the audience and the competitor landscape. So let's talk about trend first. It's really important to have a great finger in the pulse of social. If you are creating content for paid social channels, we find that the tip Top Creative Center has a lot of incredible tools to help you get a good gauge on what kind of content is being created and kind of what's working now.

00;03;21;03 - 00;03;54;23

So looking through their hashtags, filtering through your product categories or your regions paying attention to audio as matter moves towards reels and take talking YouTube shorts, audio is so important across all of these platforms. So looking through trending audios and what kind of content is being created with that, looking at the biggest content creators in the world and understanding how they reach their audiences and how they communicate and the top videos on these platforms as well.

00;03;54;25 - 00;04;22;26

And I also want to take a minute to talk about trends and what I mean by that. So Tik Tok put out an incredible report. If you haven't seen it go check it out. It's called What's Next 2023 Trends Reports. And I love the way that they talk about trends, because when you think of a trend, you likely think of a popular sound or hashtag or format that suddenly everyone is using.

00;04;22;28 - 00;04;47;24

They classify that as the moment and it does have a very short lifecycle. It lasts only a few days or weeks. So there's no point in really trying to chase those trends for your creative strategy, especially when it comes to paid social, because you want to create content that is evergreen and can scale. But these moments eventually evolve and solidify to become signals.

00;04;47;26 - 00;05;15;27

These signals are what they describe as the constant patterns that reveal shifting behaviors within specific categories and verticals. So these last a little bit longer months to years, and these signals eventually solidify themselves as forces. And these forces are the major cultural shifts and like how people communicate, how communities are formed, how they discover new products and so on.

00;05;16;00 - 00;05;44;10

And these forces are meaningful. They last up to several years. So truly understanding how trends are shaping culture and consumer behavior is key to inform your creative strategy. Now let's talk about the language of these platforms. So if we look across media and like I said, reels is the fastest growing platform on media and tech talk and YouTube shorts.

00;05;44;12 - 00;06;14;00

If we think of social networks even just a few years back, let's say three or four years ago, they were completely different from what they are now. Social networks used to be about personal updates, like checking in on your friends that you follow and influencers you like, or this person got married, this person had a baby that's completely evolving now, and it's less like that and more like a content distribution.

00;06;14;00 - 00;06;49;00

You should channel your for you page and your real feed is really about discovering new content that is highly tailored to your interest interests. So creators used to be thought of as user generated content, but now they're thought of as trusted entertainers. And within these platforms there's mainly three content pillars, which is entertainment, education and inspiration. And that's why people open their TikTok or Instagram reels feeds or go on YouTube.

00;06;49;01 - 00;07;17;27

It's to be entertained, to learn something or to be inspired. So making sure that whenever you're developing an ad creative, that it falls within one of these content pillars. So let's move on to audience research. So the number one most important thing to keep in mind as a creative strategist is that you're not selling a product, you are selling the problem that it solves and how it makes people feel.

00;07;17;29 - 00;07;43;14

The goal really is to get inside the mind of your consumer because a great direct response strategy will always focus on the key emotional motivators that drive consumers to buy. You have to understand their pains and their desires. Who are they? Who? What interest groups do they identify with? What do they want? What problems do they want to solve?

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And how does it make them feel? How do they speak? What language do they use in terms of jargon and slang? All of that is really important to understand. And the best way to do this is to mine. For zero party data on customer reviews, surveys Amazon reviews, Reddit threads, your ad comments, your competitors ad comments. Pinterest trends.

00;08;08;06 - 00;08;39;20

Enter the Publix just searching keywords and tick and Instagram. This will definitely help you truly understand what your audience cares about. The end goal is to be able to pinpoint the one emotional motivator that your ad is going to be speaking to. So this list is a combination of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Life force AIDS and the new science of consumer emotions.

00;08;39;20 - 00;09;09;10

We kind of merge them all together into this list that we find applies a lot to creating direct response ads, because at the end of the day, all humans want the same thing. We want protection, freedom, pleasure, relationships, we want convenience. We're curious. We love a good bargain. So making sure that you know exactly which emotional motivator you are appealing to when creating your ads.

00;09;09;13 - 00;09;46;25

So the last type of research is competitor research. So we use foreplay. If you're here, you obviously already know about foreplay. We're heavy foreplay users and we use it mainly for two things. The first is organizing our massive reference library. We have boards for product categories. We have boards for different ad types, for different hook types. We create specific boards for different clients, and these preferences get shared both internally and externally.

00;09;46;27 - 00;10;30;28

And then we also use the discovery tool, which is super powerful, and it's getting better every day. It combines ads from both the Facebook and the Ticktalk ad library. You can search for keywords that allows you to find ads that you wouldn't find otherwise. So it's the best place to do your competitor research. So one thing I want to touch on because I think this is something super, super important when you're doing your competitor research, when you're spying on your competitors ads and looking at what other brands are doing and you're saving all these references and foreplay, when you're looking at an ad, what do you see this is the number one thing I train

00;10;31;01 - 00;10;50;18

every one on my team on whether they are creative strategies, whether they're in production or their video editors. Every one needs to understand this. So there are six things to look out for. The way to do it is every time you watch an ad, you have to watch it the same amount six times. Every time you play it.

00;10;50;21 - 00;11;19;27

Pay attention to one specific thing. The first time you play the ad, focus on the concept understanding what is the main message and the big idea that is capturing the audience's interest, influencing their emotional response. So what's that emotional motivator? It's appealing to? And essentially what's the main message of the ad? The second time you play the video, focus only on the hook, only on those first few seconds.

00;11;19;27 - 00;11;45;22

It's the scroll stopper. It's by far the most important element of a winning creative analyze every single frame, pay attention to the audio, uses it. VOICEOVER Is it music? Pay attention to the text on screen. What's the opener? Message What are the visuals? Literally go frame by frame. The third time you watch the video, notice the script structure.

00;11;45;24 - 00;12;16;06

What building blocks for use is a problem focused? Is it solution focused? Is it storytelling? Does it show a transformation? How and when is the product introduced? That's super important to notice. The fourth thing to pay attention to is the visuals. Notice what kind of shots were used. How did they use transitions? How are the text flyovers applied to They use native platform fonts, or do they use brand fonts?

00;12;16;09 - 00;12;41;11

Do they use emojis? How does the ad visually show the problem and tell the story? Then the first time you watched the ad, notice the pacing. Pacing is superimposed and then it requires this like sweet spot where the ad must be easy to follow, but also fast enough that it's still engaging and it should also change based on your target audience.

00;12;41;11 - 00;13;08;05

If you're targeting an older demographic, your ad has to be a bit slower. If you're targeting Gen Z, it kind of has to be as fast as possible. So the last thing to focus on is congruency. Congruency literally means agreement or harmony between the ad in the landing page that you're linking to. The great thing about foreplay is that when you save an ad, it also saves the landing page for you.

00;13;08;07 - 00;13;28;28

So the last thing to pay attention to is to click on that ad and see if it's congruent with the landing page. And when you're developing different ad concepts, being mindful that you don't want to steer too far away and if you're testing new ideas, then it's not going to steer too far from where the ad is linking to.

00;13;29;00 - 00;14;02;02

Okay, so you've done all your research. Now is time to start developing ad concepts. The first thing I want to talk about when coming up with ad concepts is the importance of creative diversification. So creative is your targeting nowadays is best practice in all platforms is to consolidate and go broad advantage. Plus campaigns are meant to are incredibly effective, but it really relies heavily on having great creatives.

00;14;02;04 - 00;14;32;28

And the truth is people buy the same things for completely different reasons. If you're selling an umbrella, someone might buy it for the emotional benefits, the other for the material, the other for the great price. So you really need to have a diversity not only of messaging of different ad types as well because of how the Facebook auction works and speaking about Facebook, if an ad is similar, it will reach the same audience.

00;14;33;00 - 00;14;58;04

And this is both good and bad. And I'll talk about this more when we touch on iterations. You need to know when to lean into that and use it to your advantage. So having diversity in your creatives allows you to reach different audiences for sustainable performance over time. And again, specifically speaking to matter. If you want to content for all placements.

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Ten Static ads test animated graphics Just carry sell and catalog short form video sometimes will perform the best, sometimes for some verticals super long, like 30 minute long videos perform the best. So it's really important to test and diversify your creative and your content to make the most out of the auction in all placements. So formulating your hypotheses and developing your concepts, this is kind of the concept map that we use every time we're coming up with ads.

00;15;35;29 - 00;16;02;05

This makes it super clear and helps us identify what is the concept. What product is the ad for, What's the ad type we're going to use, what's the pain point? And that kind of emotional motivator we're speaking to and what are the benefits And you espouse that's going to feature in that specific ad? This makes it super easy for you to then create a storyboard, a script or a brief.

00;16;02;07 - 00;16;33;22

And later on, once have tested and validated the concept, you can go back and map out like this. I'm type speaking to this for pain Point worked well. So let's talk about ad types. So this is our list of proven direct response ad types. These are the video ads. This might not be the entire list a lot of times that exists in the world, but this is the list that we pick from every time we are developing a new creative strategy.

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And again, the goal is always to test as many as possible to find out what resonates with your audience and help sell your product The best. So I'm going to go over a few of my favorites. The first one being problem solution. So problem solution ads are a mazing for direct response. You show the problem agitated, you may be discredits another alternative you talk about how the the product solves that problem.

00;17;05;20 - 00;17;38;04

You highlight features and benefits and then you end with a great offer in the call to action. The other one that works really well is before and after. It's quite similar to the problem solution. You're also showing a problem and a solution, but it focuses more on that transformation and it works really well for beauty, skincare, wellness, anything that you can visually show a transformation within the short amount of time in the video.

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Another great ad type that works really well is mash ups. This is great if you have a big library of content that you want to repurpose. If you've done influencer seeding or if you've worked with a lot of content creators taking the best bits of each video and matching it up together really helps boost social proof. It's great for both top of funnel and also retargeting.

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It's just a concept that always wins since this is a really fun one. It works really well honestly for any type of product. So the one on the right is fashion. The one in the middle is the wellness divides, the one on the left is a service. So it's really leaning into creators that are able to either make that dialog of me versus my brain, me versus my stomach, or just creating a skit that has a touch of humor.

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And you can add this like narrative around your product and these tend to perform really well. They also feel super negative to placements like Oreos or to Tik Tok as well. Green screen. I'm sure you've seen this one before. Born from a native featured in Tik Tok where you overlay a talking head and it's also incredible for many different types of products and categories.

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It allows you to features, screen recordings and websites. It's it lends to great education opportunities as well about your product, ingredients, features, whatever it is. The next one is styling reels. So these ads are great. If you sell something like fashion or accessories, things that don't necessarily solve a problem, but it's more about showing how they can be used and give ideas about styling and so on.

00;19;39;29 - 00;20;08;08

So these that's a great format for that. The famous listicle, I'm sure you've seen that before. The four reasons why. The three reasons why the mistakes you make. There's so many different formats of creating a list. It's great if you want to feature specific use fees of your products or site specific objections. It's a great performance for that common sense response.

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You can use either the Tik-tok comments response box or the reels one as well. This is amazing to fight the objections actually using negative comments tends to work really well. Saying things like this is too expensive. Is it worth the price or does this really work? Is really great because people tend to stop and scroll, stop scrolling to see the answer to that negative comment to Tori.

00;20;39;06 - 00;21;07;19

This is a great ad type to use for literally all kinds of products. You're showing how the product functions, how it fits into the person's daily life. I highly recommend trying this one as well. And no graphic ads. So this is our list of ad types. For graphic ads. You might not necessarily know what all of these mean on the list, but I'll show a few examples.

00;21;07;22 - 00;21;41;10

Graphic ads are super important to test, especially on matter. They work just as well, if not better in some accounts than videos. So let's go over a few examples again before and after. Similar idea to a product solution showing visually very clearly what problem the product solves always is a great format to go with comparison. There's so many ways to go about this old me versus new me or us versus the competition.

00;21;41;12 - 00;22;08;27

It's a great format to try and can be applied to many different kinds of products. Price breakdown. I love this one. It's super clever, especially if the product is a bit on the pricier end, breaking it down by the number of servings per day or the number of nights of sleep that you can track or whatever it is, helps convey the value PR feature.

00;22;08;27 - 00;22;39;13

Also, many ways to go about this. If the product or brand has been featured in magazines, newspapers, leveraging that as well helps boost credibility, especially great for retargeting ads and the bold claim. This is always a super simple ad to make, just taking a really nice product photo, putting your bold claim on there tends to work really well as well.

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And then last but not least, also a super easy one to make. Taking a beautiful product photo and highlighting either the three key benefits or ingredients or whatever it is, also tends to work really well. So you've pick your ad type, you've done all your research, you know, emotional motivator you're speaking to. Let's talk about direct response copywriting.

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So understanding that video ad structures for direct response always starts with a really strong hook. There's the body of the ad and the call to action. So the hook is when you present the what's in the way, what the product is and why I should buy it. If your hook does not address the what I know why in the first 3 seconds, if it's not clear why I should stop, stop scrolling and watch this video, why I should care.

00;23;36;21 - 00;24;17;06

The hook is not good. Start over and make sure that it covers the what and the why. The body of the ads works to resistance and build trust. This is when you introduce the product. You talk about the problem and solves the features, the benefits, and you end with a great call to action and an offer. And when you are scripting your ads, it's very important to keep in mind the sales copy formulas for direct response, which always call out a problem agitated, discredit, present solution, and then the call to action in the end.

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Or you can build awareness, build curiosity with the interest, create desire or show proof like testimonials, reviews and so on, and then end with a strong call to action. So you've your research, you developed your concepts, you have your briefs and your script ready, and now it's time to move on to production. Now, whether you are shooting ads in-house, whether you are outsourcing to content creators or influencers, or even if you're shooting content to yourself, here are some Pro Tips from Creative Milkshake.

00;24;56;20 - 00;25;18;20

So always script multiple hooks for every single ad minimum of three and be role is your best friend. You can be used at any stage of the video from the hook to the body to the call to action. It allows you to also create as many iterations as possible, which will come in very handy as soon as those ads go live.

00;25;18;20 - 00;25;43;12

And you have to start iterating based on performance. Usually you will create a main storyboards with the script of the ad we developed and will have an extra shot list of just talking heads and B rolls to make sure that we get as much content as possible from every single shoot or collaboration opportunity and always secure image usage rights for commercial use.

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If you're working with actors or content creators or influencers, the last thing that you want to happen is the ad takes off and you're it's a winner, and then you run out of time and you have to pause the ad because you didn't secure the right. Okay, So you set your ads live and they're running, and now it's time to interpret the data and figure out what's working.

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So here are the metrics that we focus on for creative iteration. The first question we want to ask is did the ad do the job to make them stop scrolling? So the two main metrics that answer that question is the thumbnail of retention or the 1 seconds you divided by impression. This is not necessarily the actual image thumbnail that you see in your ads.

00;26;38;18 - 00;27;09;01

Manager It's just that first second kind of that first frame of the video and you want them to be more than 90% because if less than 90% of people are scrolling past even that first frame, then you have to go back to that hook and analyze each single frame of that first segment to make sure that it has a really serious scroll stopping visual that the supers are super clear and engaging.

00;27;09;03 - 00;27;37;12

Sometimes when I'm revising a lot of ads, I see that video editors tend to like, animate the supers to appear. So what happens is like it almost takes two or 3 seconds for the whole message to pop up. And that's something I often catch when reviewing creatives. It's like it's important to animate supers, but always make sure that the hook is super clear from the very beginning.

00;27;37;15 - 00;28;02;26

Then the three second retention, this is your hook. The whole what why message is it conveyed? Is it resonating to make them stop scrolling and watch the first 3 seconds, then the metrics that tell you if the ad is retaining them after the hook. So there's the hold rate, which is watching through the through play 15 second mark, divided by impressions.

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And you want them to be ideally more than 25%. The average watch time of the video. I find that this has a really strong correlation with performance. So at the end of the day, Facebook and Tik-tok, they want people to stay in the app. So if your ad has a very high watch time and it's keeping people inside the app, you're going to get better placements for a better price.

00;28;32;20 - 00;29;11;28

So I find that average watch time has an even higher correlation to performance than thumbnail or hook rate and all of that waterfall rate. So this is when you measure the drop of watching the 25% of the video, that 50% to 75%. And this really helps you understand where users are dropping off. And it really is helpful for iteration if you see a massive drop off in a certain point, going back to that frame of the video and seeing if you can maybe change that shot, let's say it was a long talking head.

00;29;12;00 - 00;29;40;09

You want to switch it out for something more interesting. And then the other metrics don't necessarily correlate so much to specific creative iterations, but just tell you a bigger story. So did it get did it generate interest? Did it make people want to click? So the about link click rate and then did it make them want to buy, which is the click to purchase ratio and your return on ad spend?

00;29;40;11 - 00;30;08;25

The click to purchase ratio is an important message to evaluate that congruency we talked about. So maybe your ad has incredible metrics all around. Great scroll stop rates, great city are high average watch time, but then it has a really low click to purchase ratio. So that could mean that your ad is doing a great job of getting people to click and go to the product page.

00;30;08;27 - 00;30;38;27

But then the product page is doing a terrible job of driving the sale. So at least you know what to focus on. It's nonsense, it's fairly creative iteration, but that congruency or improving your landing page. Okay, so recording hands down, the best tool for creative analytics in reporting is motion. But the most important thing in order to make motion work is having your naming conventions, right?

00;30;39;01 - 00;31;10;25

I cannot tell you how many times every week we get creative reports and it's like, I don't know what to do with this because your media buyers didn't like name things properly. Everything is name like ad copy copy two or your UTM is, aren't there? It's really important to have your key elements tracked accordingly so you can create comparative analysis reports to understand how each element is impacting performance.

00;31;10;25 - 00;31;34;26

You want to be able to answer questions like where people are dropping off or statics better than in video. Did one content creator work better than the other? Did this hook work better than this hook? Are shorter videos working better than longer videos? What's the thumbs up ratio versus click to purchase ratio? What's the ad spend versus ROAS?

00;31;34;26 - 00;32;24;23

To gauge fatigue? So all of these things are super important and I personally love their color coding for benchmarks, which allows you to very clearly see in your pivot tables which ads are hitting your metric benchmarks, which is super helpful to understand and also to visualize. So if you take an ad that has a great thumb stopping rate, high average watch time, but then you see another ad that has maybe a much higher CTR, you can start thinking like, what if I take the hook from this ad that has the highest thumbs up and I put it in front of this ad that has a great CTR, it really helps kind of get the wheels

00;32;24;23 - 00;32;56;10

turning in terms of iteration ideas. So let's talk about iterations iterating at scale. So the first thing I want to say is that spend does not equal reach. You can scale your budgets as much as you want, but it mean you're going to reach more people. It just means you're going to saturate the core audience that you're currently hitting with your top performing creatives.

00;32;56;12 - 00;33;31;01

So best perform best practices when it comes to matter is most learnings are on the creative. So instead of pausing your ad, so let's say you find a winner, right? That has the most spend, it has the lowest EPA, but the CPA is rising because you're hitting that creative fatigue. Don't pause. That ad adds new ad variations in that ad sense so you can lean into those learnings and hopefully improve the creative fatigue.

00;33;31;03 - 00;34;06;07

So that's what I mean when I said earlier that like because that's how the algorithm works, if the ads are very similar, they're going to get served to the same audience. That's both good and bad. You can use that to your advantage when creating iterations of that, winner will allow you to squeeze as much profit as you can from that audience that's working, but then also creating iterations that diversify your messaging and your ad type allows you to reach new audiences.

00;34;06;09 - 00;34;41;25

So this should be your strategy for iterations. You want to be creating a continual cycle of ads that resonate with your core audience that you have kind of found as your winning audience. But you also want to make ads that are differentiated and constantly deployed creative that will allow you to unlock new audiences and to maintain a fresh stream of creatives, to continue to get strong response rates.

00;34;41;27 - 00;35;16;13

So you should always be looking at your ad account, thinking about how you can refresh creatives that are resonating with the audience, but also develop new creatives to unlock new audiences and maintain that cycle going, if that makes sense. So some ideas for how to iterate. Once you have found a winning ad, focus on your hooks. You have found a winning ad, it's spending, it's scaling, it's found an audience that is working like your hook is your targeting.

00;35;16;13 - 00;35;50;03

It's the most important part of your ad. So by adding new hooks to the top of that video, we're just replacing the existing hooks to a proven concept. We can help you unlock new audiences or scale horizontally. So a new hook is just a new combination of that. What y message and the scroll stopping visual. So an example of taking an ad that was working and just flat testing different hooks to be able to double down on what was already working.

00;35;50;03 - 00;36;21;01

Let me play that again. So using different visuals with green screens, trying at streets interview, this just allows you to pour those into that and set that scaling and extend the lifetime of that creative beats fatigue and allow you to keep scaling so other ways to iterate on your creative. So once you find a winning ad, you can make it longer or you can make it shorter.

00;36;21;04 - 00;36;49;14

Some people respond better to shorter formats, some people respond better to longer videos because they require more information. Depends on what stage of the funnel they're at or what placements your ad is being served in. So for example, placements like reels and stories shorter for content is going to work better. But if you want to create a version of that ad that will probably perform better on feeds, then the longer version might work better.

00;36;49;17 - 00;37;24;23

So that's an easy one to do as well. Then experiment with audio. Like I said before, since Meadow has been growing with real significantly. It's way more similar than Tik Tok, where people are watching reels and stories with the sound on. So just changing the audio has a big difference. Changing the music, adding special effects like ears, stopping sound, something that if they're watching with the sound on, will contribute to making the ad even more engaging.

00;37;25;00 - 00;37;51;04

It's like a sound that stands up changing the voiceovers. This is also another way to change the targeting using a male voice, a masculine voice, using the text to speech. There's so many ways to go about it. Audio is a really fun one to play with, and when thinking about iterations, there's different goals for each of the iteration.

00;37;51;04 - 00;38;22;00

Like I said, for the continuous cycle. Are you trying to improve a specific metric? So this iteration, the goal is to improve the thump stopping rate or to improve the average watch time or the goal of this is to just scale and create more variations of this winning concept. Or the goal of this creative is to take a learning that has worked for this product or this ad account and convert it to others.

00;38;22;00 - 00;39;05;22

So let's say, for example, you're selling skin care and you found that a green screen with a demo works really well trying it for other products that you might be launching as well. Other ideas for iterations is the Hook and Home remix or the hook stacking. So looking at the video drop off and figuring out where people are dropping off and experimenting with changing the sequences of the clips, maybe you see that there's a shot or ad singing in the middle of the video that is working well, moving that to the front or adding a second hook in the body of the video.

00;39;05;25 - 00;39;42;08

And another thing we do often is if you find the winning hooks across different videos, combining them to create one big matchup and or just stacking them in front of the same video tends to work really well. And then also if you have a concert app that is working and a proven script, recreating that with different talent and location and most importantly having a creative testing tracker.

00;39;42;11 - 00;40;13;29

So this is where you create your hypotheses and you document your results. Otherwise it's just a big waste of time and effort. If you are not tracking what messaging hook, what type is working. So this is just a super simple example of one, but just having anything similar to this is key to keep track of your learnings. So that's it.

00;40;14;06 - 00;41;12;09

I think I'm on time. So key takeaways produce direct response creatives based on deep research, regardless of the ad type that you're going for. If you're making UGC videos or if you're making static ads, make sure you understand your audience and the emotional motivator that you're speaking to and leverage Direct response copywriting formulas and methods set up creative analytics and reporting to really understand what ads are working and hypothesize as to why and set up a system that allows you to quickly iterate based on performance data so you can lean into what is working and also diversify your messaging to unlock new audiences and beats creative fatigue and then say thank you.

00;41;12;12 - 00;41;36;06

Should we move to questions? Okay, yeah, we're going to do some questions here. We curated a few in the chat, and so the first one is from Sean. He's talking about mostly the training audio is being copyrighted. And so what is your kind of like thoughts on that? How do you deal with that and how do you kind of approach approach that?

00;41;36;08 - 00;42;02;23

I would say never use them. I know that some brands new and they kind of just like don't care, but I would never deliver an ad to a client that has copyrighted music. What you can do is go to talk actually has like trending audios that is royalty free and that you can use or you can always like recreate that kind of sound.

00;42;02;23 - 00;42;27;17

Like recently we were making ads for a fitness app and one of the audios we wanted to use was like a ticktock, audio and original audio that was kind of like a motivational script and there were like workout videos on top of it. Obviously we couldn't use the copyrighted audio, but we recreated it with a slightly different script and just recording the voiceover.

00;42;27;17 - 00;42;45;26

So you create the same effects but not the audio. If that makes it cool, that makes sense. The next one is from Mateus, who is just asking what formats are working best for you right now. He's saying, you know, UGC might be a little bit saturated. What are you kind of what are your right now in terms of about creatives?

00;42;45;28 - 00;43;22;18

Yeah, I think UGC, as I'm assuming you define it, is definitely saturated, but I think it's not dead and it's still very much a like winning style of creative. You just have to think about how consumer behavior has changed in the app, right? So several years ago when influencers were booming, that was the way that people discovered and bought products and social media was through influencers receiving products from brands and sharing about it.

00;43;22;18 - 00;43;49;03

So then paid media strategy replicates that tactic. And if you're just hiring content creators to mimic influencers and open a product and be like, I'm obsessed with this, this changed my life, like, that's not working anymore, right? Or it's it's slowly dying, but Twitter reels and YouTube is still very much like that's the native language of the platform is user generated content.

00;43;49;04 - 00;44;19;28

So it's just about tailoring your strategy to fit those three content pillars of being entertaining, being educational, being inspirational in focusing on a problem, and creating the ad with direct response best practices. So I answered your question. And then we have Jenny, who's asking, you know, if you have a really good creative concept for a client and maybe they're not feeling it, what do you do in that situation?

00;44;20;00 - 00;44;43;26

That's an interesting one. I feel like we always try to find a middle ground. Like the way to go about it is obviously you want to make the client happy, but you also truly know that like you know what's best. If you have experience in creating ads and if you feel super confident, what I would always do is just be like, Just let us test this concept.

00;44;43;26 - 00;45;08;09

We will do what you want. We'll create exactly what the client wants, but give us like one concept to test just so at least we kind of find a middle ground to keep him happy, but also improve that we know what we're doing. Cool. And then this one's talking about working with creators. So if you, you know, send a brief to create and then maybe they didn't fit the guidelines or they didn't match the guidelines.

00;45;08;09 - 00;45;42;03

How do you communicate that next stage of iterations and making sure that they potentially follow the guidelines a little bit better? And in the next round of I feel like I'm not the best person to answer this question, because I, out of that exact frustration of not having creators follow the brief or not having micro-influencers do exactly what we want, we shoot all of our content in-house.

00;45;42;05 - 00;46;06;12

And I think the best solution to that is maybe not sending a brief, but sending a specific script like literally just follow the script, allow for creativity because you want it to sound authentic. But yeah, just asking them to follow the script because you want to have that flexibility to test multiple hooks and have enough content to iterate with.

00;46;06;14 - 00;46;29;10

It's a tricky one. Cool. Got it. And although this may be the last question we bring up, it's kind of the hot topic of of the year right now. How are you using A.I. right now inside of creative work? Create a milkshake in your workflow. Is there anything you're using specifically? Where does it fit in? So we use it a lot in the pre-production stage.

00;46;29;10 - 00;47;02;08

So with research, with developing, helping develop scripts and in the iteration stage as well. So you can use things like Chargeability or Jasper, A.I. or Copy A.I. to take a winning script and create ten new versions of it. It just allows you to become much more efficient with your time. But the most important thing is knowing which prompts to use, because you likely will get scripts that are super formal or not conversational.

00;47;02;08 - 00;47;27;00

So it really is about engineering prompts that that work for you and your team. But we sure use it a lot and I have yet to use, but I'm very excited to try the new for play Brief Scripting feature. Cool. Awesome. Well, that's all the time we got today. I appreciate you taking the time and killing it, as you always do with your presentations in the chat.

00;47;27;00 - 00;47;46;08

We're in a job like all of the info to contact. Mirella Yeah, she always crushes it and like I said, she's like the power, power power user of foreplay. So I appreciate you taking the time and going to hop into to Sarah Lavender now. Thank you so much, guys. I

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