The Recipe For A GREAT Meta Ads Creative Team transcript

every member of my team has been built into a process in some way now to where we're all pulling on that side of the Rope so I just want to say from the outset really clearly that I did not do that anywhere close to alone uh many hands touched this and many hands were involved with making this really good I have a creative strategist who's also really administrative and detail oriented around the process side of things she is awesome at this she's also done a lot of the the briefing for clients I have a um a media buying manager uh you a digital media manager who um has also been a really big part of that uh again a mix of sort of doing some ad briefing himself with some media buying type things so people it's a small enough team there's three of us in the US and now there are six of us in the Philippines um and there's a small enough team uh total to where people are wearing a number of hats um you've heard me say I'm not trying to grow the agency service very much like in terms of uh adding more clients over time I'm really primarily trying to uh do as great of a job as I possibly can for my clients and that means constantly that team of the three of us in the US plus my team in the Philippines which includes a couple of graphic designers a couple of video editors a um an ad Builder sort of an entry-level media buying job as well with hopefully some growth opportunities there also um and a um and a project manager sort of a lead who's directing traffic on a lot of that stuff all all built in the Philippines as well so that is what the team is outputting I should say um about those app well let me say a little bit more about the team first so you have a better sense of what's going on so um so all three of our people in of our people in the US are involved with the briefing process for different clients but the primarily it is my other two team members who are doing a lot of the briefing with input from me helping shape Direction and process and ideas and formats and those kinds of things um they are both very talented people who are um really engaged with the process and who have done a great job getting better and better all the time and sort of building their work flow into my thinking they are very helpful for me I'm not a great process Builder and so they've been incredibly helpful to me in uh in taking ideas that I have and turning them into actionable things that really help clients in the Philippines side that project manager in particular is really crucial she is a um huge part of making sure that things are getting uh ads are getting feedback early on before they even make it to us that she's um keeping the quality level high she is just so awesome and um and I'm incredibly thankful for her and as I said I've got sort of execute individual contributors along the way um I initially had hired the the media buying manager on my team he was doing the ad building initially sort of his entry point uh about a year and a half ago now uh maybe maybe about a year ago his entry point into digital marketing and so uh so for him that sort of just the the manual work of building ads that was sort of his step into the digital marketing World well over time his role has changed and um and has been reshaped um and and because of that we were able to add a resource in the Philippines to do the sort of uh report building and AD buying that freed up more time back in the US which also produced uh the ability to generate more ads because now I had somebody to build the ads which was a bottleneck before as well as people to brief the ads and that all of those different things all those different elements of this have all in my view um been parts of these little bits over time one bit after at some point maybe I'll do a full breakdown of how we got here but they've all been a really important part of generating a process that has been able to scale my output for my clients and uh and that is the first thing I want to note about all of this that process has required a huge amount of effort over time like we did not get there overnight and I believe there's a lot farther for us to go um so let me tell you a little bit more about the ads themselves so you can better understand um what three what 3500 ads or whatever actually amounts to so like I said about two-thirds of those ads are still images now the way we end up doing still images and I'm gon to link to an episode I did recently um where I talked about the parts of the ad making ad creative process that I believe right now are more expensive versus the parts that are less expensive uh in in this process so um it's certainly not 3500 individually different ideas right um the instead there's a mix of Concepts and then variations on those Concepts and that distinction is really key so uh for at the still Image level we'll we're now at a point where where almost every time we deliver Stills there's between 100 and 200 actual different images that get delivered and sometimes up to like 300 and and that's because what we're doing is comb we're taking an ad angle that we want to work with and we're looking at the available imagery that we have uh and uh in terms of raw assets and then also design capabilities and we're trying to figure F out as best as possible how do we combine up headlines and body copy on images with various um with various approaches to the actual design of the image or the photography or whatever it is right so basically you're taking copy and image and combining them a lot of different ways and one of the crucial ideas for me is that when you're in the midst of a concept let's say you're doing a comparison ad and you want to compare product a with a competitor all right well there's actually a lot of different ways to do that both from a design and copy perspective and what we up doing a lot of is we say don't choose which way you think will work you know do the things that you think will work but when you're in that ad creative process and you're going how do I decide which a which ad copy to use how do I decide which headline to use don't decide just make both okay and that ends up creating or same thing with imagery right if you're making a design decision at the Image level and you're like I don't know which one of these uh I I prefer if I want to compare it in this table with these color or if I want to try and you know use product imagery versus not you know whatever there's all these little decisions that happen in that process what I'm saying to the team in general is instead of deciding just make both because by the time that you have the idea in your head it really isn't very much more work to create another variation and so there are these packages at times of various Ed I guess there are times when it's less than 100 and then there's also format changes you know a 1ex one version versus a 9 by6 but each of these different units creates expanded output and and there are definitely times when variation a drastically in fact I would say almost every time variation A or B or C drastically outperforms variation D or e or F of a certain ad and it is really hard to predict which one of those is going to work so rather than predict we just make both and build our process so that we can get both into the ad account and let meta scale the winner I'm going to talk more about the media buying side of this in a second but if you get the media buying side uh tied in to the ad creative side you have a a really good ability if those two things are are really aligned strategically you have this way of thinking about ad production that goes right into the way of doing ad distribution and the whole thing works together really really well this is why it's really crucial that uh you understand what you're trying to accomplish at the ad uh at the ad distribution side which is which is normally what people call Media buying if you know what you're trying to do there and if you know what the the way you're going to test this creative is there you're you are going to have a much better opportunity uh to think about what kind of ads you create in the creative process so uh so so that all is like aligned in one part of the process now at the video level we have way less variations per individual concept which is why there's a thousand video ads as opposed to 2,000 still image ads and that's because still image duplication is way faster than video duplication right we're making one core concept of a video a lot of these videos by the way are like three plus minutes some of them we're getting to be five plus minutes long so so it's not only a lot of videos but some of these are pretty long videos not all of them but some of them are pretty long videos because we like the explainer format so much and we find that works really well [Music]