Principle: An ad must be a salesman, not an entertainer
Everyone knows the Duracell Bunny.
Wait no. The Energizer Bunn… which is it?
If you don’t know without looking it up, you’re part of the 40% of Energizer customers who couldn’t remember either.
During the initial years of running those ads, sales of Energizer batteries declined.
Good concept, people loved it, it was sticky, and it sold a lot of Duracell batteries.
The irony within the advertising community is that many of the ads with the highest praise for the most creativity are terrible sellers.
They’re cute, funny, and engaging, but they forget their own purpose of existence.
To sell a product, don’t be cute, be clear and exact.
Tactics
We often look at direct-response advertisers as peons of society.
No creativity in their bones, and “I’ve never bought something from a mail ad, have you?”
Don’t fall prey to that line of thinking. Direct-response advertisers are masters. Every letter, every color, every photo is picked to do a highly specific job that only 3.5”x2” allows.
I’m assuming you advertise on Meta. Your approach should be the same: Make 10 ads, take any one that sells a product in $100 of spend, and iterate on it.
Make 5 more of the same concept, this time with a different hook.
After 2 days of running that experiment, choose the highest performer, and make 5 iterations of that one - keep the hook, first visual. Does it beat your original? Iterate.
You should get to the point where you wouldn’t accept $100k to change a single word or image in your ad, because it’s printing money for you.
That’s the direct-response way.
Habits/Experiments
Take your top-performing ad or organic video. Make it again, but change 1 variable 5 different times. Post them all and let them compete on click-through-rate, CAC, cost-per-click or ROAS.
Decide which one is most important, pick a winner after $50-100 in spend, and keep honing from there.
Mike
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Today’s inspiration: Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins