Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting down comfortably, you’ve got a glass of water or tea and you’re ready to get into today’s newsletter.
I heard you... the last few newsletters were long, but you know what? They had to be to get everything out and give full context. Today, however, will be more of a tactical email around how to approach volume-based creative testing. Most ad accounts I come across have 1-5 creatives that drive majority of the entire ad account’s spend, and that’s usually a sign that there is a lack of creative testing.
We already know that only a fraction of what is tested is going to perform and drive scalable results, so to counter that, we need to increase our surface area of luck by testing more, quicker, and iterating just as fast. For today’s email, I want to walk through how I would go about building out a practice for faster creative testing.
Vendor of the Week
impact.com — The industry-leading affiliate platform recently released a report on how CMOs plan to deliver increased growth with fewer resources.
You’ve very likely heard of impact.com, and if you haven’t, then you’ve definitely clicked an affiliate link powered by them. Their platform powers affiliates for brands like LEVI’S, Walmart, and more.
In this report, they asked CMOs across the US and UK how they plan to deliver strong year-over-year performance with fewer resources, and, of course, affiliate marketing is a part of that. Download this report, and you’ll learn:
- Expert tips to build a holistic marketing program
- Ways to eliminate common roadblocks
- Tips on advocating for more budget with senior leaders
- How to leverage a unified platform to see optimal results
The report is free to download and has some great nuggets inside.
Limited Supply
The first half of last week’s 8-page newsletter became the basis for the past week’s Limited Supply episode, talking all about upper funnel marketing and awareness tactics. Tactics that drive brand building but also real performance marketing results.
Listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!
Building an Internal CreativeOS
Truth is, creative can get over complicated internally at a brand. It’s usually when a brand is really small (under $15M/year) or really big (over $150M/year) that creative is such a struggle to get from start to finish quickly. The mid-size/challenger/scaling brands ($25M to $250M/year) tend to move very quickly around creative decisions and be willing to test and learn quickly, allowing them to grow fast.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that content has evolved SO much over the last 5 years — the formats, the lengths, the structure, what catches attention, what creates emotion, etc. You cannot simply approach ads the same way we did 10 years ago because the environment it’s displayed within is wildly different now. Consumers also no longer choose what appears on their feed; to anyone scrolling on their iPhones, every piece of content, ad or not, is basically served like an ad — they’re not following all the pages serving them content, therefore it may or may not catch someones attention. The Following feed → For You feed shift has elevated the quality of ads, forced brands to really build their brand equity, and be more disciplined about their creative testing.
Similarly to how the Following feed has now changed to the For You feed by default, on the ads side, the shift is that platforms are now running campaigns that leverage their own algorithms to find you new customers, versus you needing to setup manual targeting. For the sake of this email, think of these as their AI-driven campaign setups.
On Meta, it’s called ASC (Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns). On Google, it’s Performance Max. On TikTok, it’s Smart+ campaigns. In all of these instances, your ad creative and the contextual clues within it that the platforms pickup, become the targeting for the creative. Creative fully is the new targeting. There are rumors that Meta is going to take away targeting altogether.
The more website events you can fire on your website, which means you have people coming to your website, buying from your store, or even buying through in-platform marketplaces like TikTok Shop, the more the ad platforms will know/learn about your customer, and target these AI-driven campaigns better. Zero party data (attributes to first-party data records) and first-party data learnings are incredibly important signals to the ad platforms. In order to do this, you must develop a good practice around high-volume creative output, testing, analysis and iteration. Don’t let 2 ad creatives drive the majority of your prospecting spend.
Within your ad accounts, setup a creative testing program with your media buyers to decide on a cadence (weekly or bi-weekly) of loading in fresh creative. Test it across your testing audience (broad, lookalikes, interests). Take the winning ad post ID’s and put them into your scaling campaigns. Whatever isn’t working, cut it and go back to the drawing board. For everything that is working, make a variety of creative iterations to find another winning creative.
If you have a video that takes off, test that same hook with different scenes following. If you have a static ad that worked well, try that same format with different copy. Or, keep the same copy and test it on other designs.
My recommendation is that media buyers get comfortable in platforms like Figma, where they can take a static ad design, plug the winning copy into ChatGPT, come up with 25 other options for headlines, put it into the Figma file, export all 25 versions and get them uploaded into ads manager within 20 minutes. Click this ChatGPT conversation to see how I did it as an example (yes, I have ChatGPT call me “Sir Nik”).
Call me an old-fashioned growth marketer, but taking templates inside Figma and making iterations can be done by you, the media buyer (doesn’t have to be a designer), offshore talent or AI.
This is actually one of the most significant use cases to have an offshore creative team from a firm like Oceans Talent. Having someone overseas but working your hours allows for rapid iteration of what works, tagging/analyzing of what doesn’t work, reporting, and understanding the competitive landscape. It always surprises me when more brands don’t have a team overseas helping them with “back-office-like” tasks, of which I consider rapid creative iteration to be one of them.
That’s all for this week!
I hope today’s email was a fun read, helped you understand or learn something, and gave you an idea of how to improve your own internal workflow.
It’s Sunday night, so I hope you get those full 9 hours of sleep this upcoming week. Make sure you take care of your brain, your body, your soul, all of it... stay hydrated, get good sleep, go for a workout, and eat well.
There is a lot of news happening around tariffs and international import/export costs. My goal is to have a deep-dive on it for you next Sunday.
Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Sunday!