The Surprising Creative Strategy That Powers Meta Ads To Scale transcript

there is one thing I'm thinking about more than anything else for ad creative right now that I believe is the key to making effective ads at scale I'm going to explain it to you right now the foundational principle that you need to have your head around for making great ads that are effective at selling your product is this every human action like without exception every Human Action starts from a place of self-interest that self-interest is the driving motivator behind every single action that a human makes and that is going to sound to some of you like a really pessimistic view of the world um but I don't think it is in fact I think it's neither good nor bad I think that saying that every human action is self-interested is like saying gravity exists it's a reality and a force in the world that uh is there and it is not really good or bad it just is the case and if you think for a second as a counter to this about um somebody who is sort of an extreme compassionate uh selfless kind of person then uh you know take take like uh maybe your mother is somebody you think of like this somebody who sort of poured themselves out for caring for others or if you want to go sort of on the world stage you think of Nelson Mandela or something like that right uh some sort of famous figure of this what I would say for even that person is that their behavior is self-interested in the a sense not that it is selfish right there is a distinction here between selfishness and self-interest but that they are they are choosing the behaviors that they are choosing based on desires that they have for what it means for them to live a good or meaningful or uh beautiful life in some way or another and so the the point is the self-interest is that they have values that they then live out and those values uh may be for the good of other people and yet it is interested in living out their own values and those values Express themselves in desires okay so this gets a little philosophical pretty fast for an advertising podcast but I think it's crucially important to thinking through how ads work and how ads are effective if it's the case that people are self-interested then take that next step and say where does that self-interest live and I just got at it with words like values and Desires in in the human experience your self-interest expresses itself in your inner being in the form of your desires and your desires are present with you all the time and we can leave aside how your desires are formed are they formed by social factors by purely biological genetic factors are they formed by your brain and rational mind is it purely emotional doesn't really matter and for that for this probably matters a lot actually in life but but for the sake of this conversation about advertising it does not matter so much uh the self-interest that somebody has expresses itself in the form of desires which is the tangible experience of your self-interest and that's happening all the time everywhere you look people are they have certain desires about how to live their lives and really about what is going to bring them some level of Joy or meaning or purpose or whatever contentment in life and they then Express those their actions become the outworking of those desires and so their desires are the seat in their uh being of their decision making and that is the reason this is so crucial to understanding uh for the sake of advertising because if your desires are the thing that produce your decisions then it is your desires that an Advertiser has to speak to in order to sell you products okay now we should take a moment right here and note that the moment that you start talking this way about human beings and breaking apart human psychology and thinking about you know what motivates humans to be the way they are it can sound really mercenary really really fast like trying to pick apart The Human Condition just to sell them more stuff and I'll just say here uh one of the ways that you behave ethically in your business in in a way that is good is you actually deliver on the promises that you promise okay so if you're creating great products and doing things that matter to you and that you think actually make um people's lives better in some way by solving their problems or adding some amount of Joy or whatever it is right that that your that your product does for somebody then your job is to communicate those promises about what your product does as as well as possible to the people who uh who to whom it is most relevant at as much scale as possible and then to deliver on that promise and if you can do that really effectively you can grow a large and profitable business and that I think is a good thing on a lot of levels so um so if you think back to this then your your job is to take those promises and align them with those desires okay uh so there's a reason why I am I am thinking through being this podcast episode in these highly sort of philosophical terms and it's because I've been spending a ton of my time recently with internally and with my team and with my clients thinking through this question of like what makes effective ads and how can we make better ads more often and where I have landed as like the core place that I am putting my chips in and and really am putting my chips in like this is where my team is spending its time with our clients if it doesn't go well they're going to be frustrated and if it goes well they're going to make money and we'll make money and uh and everybody will win right the core place I have been I have been uh thinking about and working with my team on is this is basically this issue which is how can we make ads that speak in highly specific and tangible ways to people's desires and if we can do that at scale if we can do that then I think we will make a lot of ads that sell products and when I analyze past performing High performing ads there are some things that I've talked about plenty of times that are really important factors here right um you know I've had Barry hot on and we've talked about ugly ads and how being native to the feed can be really valuable for your ads I've had Jess Bachman on and we've talked about you know the idea of sort of measuring engagement carefully and thinking about a cycle of turning around creative and and Jess is really creative guy and and is thinking about those things those way I talk about the long firm explainer the importance of uh having lots of information uh that a customer needs to pull out their wallet and buy to go from having no knowledge of your product to being willing to make a purchase in a very short amount of time they need some information they need some questions answered they need to understand things really really well Clarity is really important I talk a lot about Clarity and all that but but actually somewhere underneath all of that what I really believe is that the messaging is the thing that is actually the most important and that the messaging that is the most important uh that that the most effective messaging is the ability to speak into people's desires what they're really looking for the problems they're really trying to solve and what they feel what they strongly feel internally about themselves about the world and about your products and how those things come together okay and so let's let's think a little a bit more about desires and what uh and the way that desires differ among people okay let's think about two different kinds of people for a second okay um the first kind of person let's let's take a um let's take a uh well actually yeah well let's let's say two different kind of people okay two people one of them is um they both do CrossFit okay they're both really into fitness uh and uh except one of them is a 25-year old male and the other one is a 65-year old male they both do CrossFit the same number number of days per week um they both are really committed to it they've been doing it for a while they care about it they like it they want to be good at it all those things so on the surface despite their differing ages these two men um appear to be very similar in their engagement with Crossfit all right but but now imagine for a second that those two um that you think a little bit more deeply about each person and what's motivating them okay the 25-year-old let's say feels awesome he is getting jacked he's doing CrossFit four days a week days a week whatever it is he's entering a competition he's um pring his his weightlifting all the time he's hitting new and new highs he's getting faster and faster um and he feels great about it his body looks good all those things are are all happening for him he's aligning his um nutrition and his sleep and all that to maximize his performance the way he sees it um he he can all the time get better and better and better and that is his big concern maybe he's entering a competition at some point and he wants to place in the top three in his age group or whatever okay that becomes the way that he's thinking about these things and so uh so there's there's crossfitter number one okay we'll also say he's single by the way we'll say he's single and looking to date okay crossfitter number two 65y old male he is um not a 25-year-old right he's 65 he's still going after it but he can see his 70s not very far away and whereas the 25-year-old is really interested in maximizing his performance the 65-year-old is more is less interested in pring lifts he hasn't he hasn't hit his old PRS in a long time it's not that he's he's never going to lift the same amount of weight that he used to lift ever again and he doesn't care it's not really his point his goal is to make sure that he can stay as healthy as possible as long as possible because he can see uh just around the corner to his 70s and he sees friends of his who are starting to have more and more health problems and and he does not want to experience he wants to play with his grandkids he's been married he is not single he's been married for 40 years or whatever and and is not trying to you know impress some woman the same same kind of way and so for him when he goes into a CrossFit competition or um you know his workout schedule what he's concerned about is uh his lower back staying healthy right he doesn't want to hurt it or his knee that's getting bocky and that he wears a knee sleeve for something like that so they do CrossFit the same amount of days per week but their relationship to the experience is really really different now imagine that you're selling both of those two customers a uh a recovery supplement some supplement that is um aimed at recovery okay helping them better how are you going to speak to those two customers who is going to influence those two customers how are you going to think about structuring your message because the truth is the supplement may be valuable for both of them but their desires in relation to their experiences into the specifics of their lives their desires in relation to those things is extremely different and what they are looking to get out of those things is really different if you tell one of them that they are more likely to have faster Muscle Recovery and therefore achieve goals faster and you can do that in a compelling way and forget for a second the actual execution of the ad okay just think about the messaging for a second uh if you could tell one of them the 25-year-old uh that he is going to perform better that is in a compelling way in the ad that is much more likely to appeal to him than the 65-year-old for whom is all going to be about reducing soreness and um and extending you know the longevity of his uh of of how good he feels ET you see what I'm saying one of them is actually experiencing some level of probably anxiety about about the potential decline related to his body the other one is experiencing anxiety related to how good he can make his body work for him so it's actually sort of anxiety around the opposite sorts of things and if your product can deliver on a promise for Recovery it delivers on it maybe in similar ways but maybe in different ways now look you can probably reach both of those customers by talking about the features and benefits of your supplement to some degree you can talk about the nutrient profile you could talk about what science says about um the nutrient makeup and and how that helps recovery you can talk about um why your ingredients are pure and trustworthy and and anything related to that that you want and you maybe can speak to both customers that way in fact I'm pretty sure you can right like the Facebook algorithm is really good machine Learning Works uh that will sell to some but I am convinced that you can probably sell a lot more product if you can speak more directly to the desires and experience expences of those two different people and crucially to get to those different people you have to think and message differently and more deeply uh than uh than just sort of a broad swath approach to your advertising if you are still tracking your meta ads your purchases on your website with the native Shopify meta ads integration for your pixel install what are you doing it is time to stop doing that and switch to Billy b i l y . a b. a billy is what I use it's a thirdparty uh pixel tool it is 100% serers side tracking and uh and it is awesome it is incredibly fast and easy install and it is the best most accurate tracking for meta ads purchases that I am aware of in your dashboard and the reason I know this is because I've tested it multiple times and then rolled it out with all of my clients uh basically all of my clients who now use Billy to track their ads as well and what do I mean what do I mean by test I mean I've run side by-side campaign with Billy against all kinds of other pixel install Solutions on meta ads Billy has consistently won not only at the level of the campaign Rass running them side by side exact same adsets exact same ads all those things um but in events manager I can see the event match quality of uh purchases and all kinds of other uh website events um with the Billy uh uh pixel uh Billy data set versus all the other solutions that I've seen especially the native shop if I install that means uh you are going to give the best data possible back to meta so that you can track your ads as effectively as possible you're going to get the most accurate data data in your dashboard you're also going to feed the most accurate data back to meta ads and it is only $1 for the first month it is extremely affordable going forward it is the most affordable solution of which I am aware on the market for thirdparty Pixel setups for server side tracking for your meta ads so go check it out right now it's what I use with my clients it's what I recommend everybody uses B ly.

A get better track for your meta ads today this idea has uh become clear to me through a couple of conversations I've had on this podcast recently I I want to play both of them back for you uh not actually play them back but I want to rehearse them uh retell you the stories of these so that you make sure that you hear them the same way that I did because they've been so helpful to me the first was um Riley Strickland coming on here former CEO of Loom cube and I've used this in a few different places and and you might have heard me say this now but it's a really helpful example of this Loom cube sells home lighting equipment well well not just home lighting equipment but LED lighting equipment exploded during covid of course when people were building out their home offices um and so all these LED lights right and that became this the major bulk of their business was these home offices but Riley was saying on my podcast if you miss that episode he said every time they would go try and do you know cro type work on their website where they would just try to you know change the menu change the pdps anything that was sort of broad based cro it just didn't work very well they they didn't see much lift if any maybe a couple points of you know know percentage points here and there but but not serious lift right but he said when they realized at some point and this the example he gave at some point they realized they had a line item of customer or or or a group of customers not a line item but a group of customers who were coming to their product who were tattoo artists and the tattoo artists also liked their LED lighting solutions and uh and the tattoo artists found that they were really really good for tattoo parlors now that's a very different setting for the product than a home office and what Riley realized was oh we need to generate creative and funnels for that is that is an attempt to reach the uh the tattoo artist uniquely from the home office person because while it's the exact same product that appeals to people in different ways and so they started building their messaging around both of those now look both of those customers home office and tattoo artists could see the features and benefits of the product on a PDP but what Riley says is that's where they saw when they start doing that and doing it with other subgroups of customers that's where they saw 30 and 40% conversion rate increases all the way through the funnel at the ad level and then you know this is part of what I love about formont why I've taken them as a sponsor because the ease of doing that all the way through landing page PDP you know custom pdps for different groups um you know custom carts all those kinds of things so um so that's the way to start think about well you think about that and that's because what each of those customers feels the home office Builder and the tattoo Builder what is happening at the level of desires for each of those customers despite being the exact same product is really different and they are using the product probably um experiencing benefits of the product in different ways and I want you to hold that thought in your mind for a second the benefits of the product are subjectively experienced differently than for those two customers even though the objective benefits of the product are exactly the same right uh the construction of the product the materials of the product the how much light it gives off right like the brightness of the whatever all those things are exactly the same for both customers objectively but subjectively they experience those benefits differently because of the different ways they're using them in their lives and the different problems they're trying to solve okay so um so think about those two things okay the second second story like this that I've heard recently that has been helpful to me was with Jack Rubin recently on my podcast Jack CEO of p and fig he's been on my podcast three times every one of those episodes is great you should go listen to them because he is so helpful and so insightful okay what Jack says is at some point they realize that there are two different kinds of customers among others who are who are engaging with their um cleaning products okay so uh cleaning products in the UK clean products for like cleaning your house okay and uh and cleaning your counters whatever uh what what Jack says is one kind of customer is a spot cleaner okay where at the end of the day maybe they just see a spot on the counter and they spray that one spot they clean it up and then they put their cleaning products away they're not they're not rubbing down they're not cleaning up the whole the whole counter all at once they're just cleaning a spot okay customer number two is cleaning large portions of their house all at once maybe even as a routine to end their day okay now again exact same product being sold to two different customers but those customers are engaging with the product and engaging with the brand in pretty different ways actually they're using it probably they're probably using more or less of it in different timelines um they're again they at the level of their desires they're they are wanting something else and Jack and I didn't get into exactly how they communicated differently to these two customers but what he says is they started making creative at for Facebook ads and and really for all their advertising that was aimed differently at the way the product was useful to different ones of them and that was that pushed their ad spend forward really far um and that is another really helpful example because now you've got different people behaving in different ways with once again the exact same product and and those ways even seem kind of closer together right than the tattoo artist and the home office Builder and yet probably in the psychology of each of those customers they are trying to do something different maybe maybe and I'm just guessing right but uh Jack and I didn't get quite into this but maybe the spot cleaner really just cares about Effectiveness and ease and those things because for them it's not about cleaning the whole house and making it Sparkle or whatever it's just like they just have a simple problem they want to solve and So speaking to that person is about making it clear like it's one or two sprays you wipe it down it smells great you're good okay and it's clean products okay it's it's it's not non-toxic but maybe for the for the person who's spraying down their whole house what they're going want to know is how is it going to smell when you when you spray it down on lots of surfaces all at once and um and uh and are we sure it's really non-toxic if we're going to put it on things that people are going to be around all the time you know whatever I don't know um but you would think about those two things differently you would give them different creative and you would give them different approaches to the value of the product and as Jack tells it very similarly the numbers bear this out that as they started speaking more directly to each of those customers and their different experiences the different desires the better okay that the better the performance was and that's what actually increased them when you talk about the idea of an angle in advertising what I what I think an angle really is is the overlap okay think of a vend diagram here the overlap between the customers's unique desires and their their specific particular desires and the specific and particular benefits that your product provides relative to those desires okay so whatever like again vend diagram on this side your your your are all of the benefits your product provides on this side are all of the desires a customer has some of those are not relevant to one another right your product may or may not have anything to do with a customer's desire to get rich or something okay um right your product might have nothing to do with that at all okay but but it might have something to do with their desire to um to you know clean to welcome guests into their home and have it smell nice okay that desire their sense of their sense of of hospitality their sense of hosting and what that means for their relationships and all those things may have something to do with the cleaning product that you sell and at that point point the overlap between those two things whoops the overlap between those two things is is the angle of your ad it's the starting point of the angle of your out it's how your benefit um relates to those specific desires and this is where I'd come back to the notion of a subjective benefit okay the object it's it's very easy and especially maybe the beginning stages of your um the the beginning stages of your advertising it's very easy to talk about benefits of your product as if they are all objective uh you know you just talk you built your product and you you want it to have all these features and benefits that um that matter because you have experience of it and you you want it to matter in some specific way right and you you want it to last a long time or smell great or whatever the case may be but uh the customer may or may not care about all those things and in fact the customer may even approach your product in ways you didn't even think of that don't that don't matter to them at all right so or that don't matter to you at all but that are part of your product experience and they use it even differently than you expected okay okay um whatever those are though you need to understand as well as possible what those customer experiences are and then how you communicate to those to those specific things the more that you're advertising can compellingly and in relevant ways Engage The Right customer relative to their their subjective um experiences and desires uh can engage that customer with uh the relevant benefits to to your product if you can do that that is the path to scale which means you need if you want more scale you actually need to think smaller not bigger you need to think more directly about your customers because here's the other thing about human desire all right um our desires are felt uniquely by us or powerfully by us I should say like if my whatever desires I have in life feel like Andrew's desires they feel like what it means to be me in some way um and and so I have those desires and yet at the same time as much as they feel sort of unique and particular and specific to me and in those ways in my felt experience actually lots of other people have very similar desires and share those and they're relatable to many other people this is why you can have friends right or or because people actually you you end up coalescing around um shared values and desires and experiences and all those kinds of things and so um and and so as much as those desires are uniquely strongly felt as much as they they're I feel strongly they are actually not totally unique to me and therefore part of the path to scale for you is to speak to those very strongly felt personally felt desires wherever you wherever your product is relevant to them with on the assumption that what some customers are raising their hand and telling you about their relationship to your product is is actually an experience that's relatable to a much broader group of customers than just them and so they speak for a larger group than themselves uh this is where you know like reading reviews can be really useful and it's and it's where I've said one of the things that concerns me about like just sort of the aid driven approach to review uh reading that though this that could be a very helpful way to do this is that I actually want to take the time to move a little slower to Think Through what is this customer telling me about their desires and relationship to my product and about how my product is meeting them in their life and providing value to them in their life uniquely because whatever they're saying whatever they're raising their hand and saying about their experience their desire uh then they probably repres a larger group of customers than just themselves uh so uh so now you may at some point think okay if I do that then Andrew isn't that going to create a problem for me because now by limiting who I'm speaking to I am going to hurt my chance to have maximum scale so would be a reasonable objection to this idea some degree well my answer to that question is it looks like it at first and if you get too narrow it's possible you do that right but but I think mostly the answer is is no okay and and here's why because um if you think about ad a okay and add a is your broad features and benefits ad you're talking about the again the the sort of ingredients in the product okay there's some group of customers who is going to respond to that just by sort of broadly speaking you know this supplement helps Muscle Recovery because of XY andz ingredients okay um that probably works some group of customers though I should say it probably works specifically for customers who are ingredient focused customers and who have desires around um you know effective ingredients and not being sold garbage and whatever you know so still speaking to their desires but you know what I'm saying right there's a sort of broad approach my guess is that what will happen if you do that is that you will speak to a lot of people and you will not convert that many of them and here by convert I don't mean um I don't mean conversion rate as a matter of just like uh purchases over clicks right sort of the technical definition of conversion rate what I mean is of all the people you're speaking to them to how many will you sell a product to okay so so sort of a conversion rate taken more broadly it's almost like purchases over Impressions or purchases over reach is the way I would think about it okay my guess is the more broadly you speak the more likely it is that your conversion rate may reach a wide range of people it may actually or your your ads May reach a wide range of people but your conversion rate will be very low on that group of people and instead the more specifically you speak to a group of people what will happen is yes you reach less people like let's take our 65-year old and 25-year old example from earlier right the 65-year-old um the the things that appeal to him probably appeal differently to him than a 25y old that's before you talk about a 45y old female who's you know whatever thinking about menopause or something like that right very different set of Desires in in relation to Fitness and and all kinds of things in life okay um so yes the 65-year-old maybe is going to be um speaking to him and and maybe if you put a 70-year-old influencer in your ass okay uh then he's aspirational to the 65y old or 55-year-old um maybe he's aspirational to the 65y old but uh but not aspirational allw to the 25-year old and and just sort of glosses past them so now you've left the 25-year old on the table as my point your advertising has actually excluded the 25y old but my contention is what will happen if you do that at the same time is that you will convert way more of the 65y olds that guy and everybody else he represents because there are plenty of people who are aging and worried about it okay and who are trying to um trying to age well okay uh if you can speak to that person more directly you will convert way more of them than you will the 25-year-old so the goal is not to to pick between sort of speaking to everyone or speaking to someone specifically instead it's to speak to the specific people but then to do that repeatedly with lots of different groups of people what you actually want to do is create two ads here right uh not just two broad ads but one out for the 65-year-old one out for the 25-year old and of course way more ads actually than that but uh two two different angles two different approaches to those different people and what I believe will happen for most businesses and what Jack is telling you what Loom cube Riley Strickland is telling you and and what I've seen when I analyze the past ads that have been most effective for us is that by um by reaching uh those people more specifically but then reaching lots of those different people as much as is relevant to your product you will convert more of those people again conversions taken as purchases of overreach okay you'll convert more of those people and the more you can speak to more of those people more specifically you'll end up reach in scale that way basically by piling a bunch of groups of people on top of each other instead of taking one massive group and trying to speak to all of them that ends up being the path to the most scale which is why many of these brands that are producing a huge volume of scale are producing so many ads the point is not just taking a bunch of random shots that work but the point is that you end up going you focus more and more so you can tell your story more and more and more often um and that requires more and more ad Concepts and more and more ideas and more and more angles um to reach all those people so so to recap the concept here where I'm putting my time and again where I'm putting my chips in uh with AJF growth for for my S um for my clients and for my team is as best as you can understand the desires that the customer has who relates to your product read reviews look at past ads try to analyze them at the level of messaging um look at you know look at whatever you can there's there's even like you know Avatar type surveys can do for this sort of thing try to understand those as deeply as you possibly can labor over it and try as best as you can to get not just to their behaviors but to what's driving their behaviors which is their self-interested desires okay try as best as you can to understand what those desires are and to understand why they would take those desires and turn them into the action of buying your product and then speak to that if you can do that as many times as possible with as much Clarity and specificity as possible you are going to win at scale thanks so much for watching for listening make sure to subscribe wherever you are doing that and reach out to me podcast ajfc or Andrew jerris on X I would love to hear from you if you have a thought or a disagreement please take it public so that we can uh talk about it with other people chiming in weighing in and giving their thoughts I would love to hear what you have to say about this topic if you've seen this work this way in your business or not or if you think I'm just too pessimistic about The Human Condition um I don't think I am but you know argue with me uh you can see everything I'm doing at AJF growth.com I would love to hear from you in any way you can [Music]