How To Make Literally The Best Ad In The History Of The World transcript

[Music] So much of the place that advertising goes wrong in the ads that you are making for your brand or for your client's brand is actually happening at the level of concepting and understanding what you are actually trying to accomplish with your ad down to an ad's component parts. And I want to break down today for you how we are thinking about what an ad, what a social media ad in particular is attempting to accomplish and help you give a uh come up with a framework for how to organize your efforts operationally in your ad creation process to think about how to do the thing an ad is meant to do.

And so let's just start by framing that up by saying the goal of your ad is if you're running if you're running ads on Facebook or Instagram, right? social media ads and really on some other channels as well. Your ad is a direct response ad. The goal of your ad for basically everybody listening to or watching this is to get somebody to engage with your ad in some way, probably click on it, though not necessarily, probably click on it, and then go and make a purchase.

So, you're going to try and move somebody from probably low levels of awareness about your product's existence, uh, may maybe awareness of your product's existence, but depending on how big you are, but some lowlevel awareness of your product's existence from there all the way to purchase extremely fast. And there is one core thing that has to happen for somebody to do that. Okay? And that is that a person has to uh believe somewhere in their heart.

Okay? And I use the word heart specifically here. This is probably not primarily a rational belief. They have to believe somewhere in their heart that uh the value of the product they are getting is higher than the value of the money that they are exchanging for it. There are all kinds of ways they might get there. Like for example, here's one you maybe are not thinking about. A really really rich person for for an extremely rich person. the incremental value of the money that they're going to spend on that like the marginal value of the money they're going to spend on your product is very low and that's why rich people are great people to advertise to right because they don't need the money that bad and they have more disposable income we use that term disposable income you can throw away okay they have more disposable income and therefore the the value of the money to them relative to its marginal utility towards other things is actually relatively low and so So it's fine for them.

The bar you have to clear for your product is not as high. Okay. So like you know the the audience matters and this is why generally speaking like advertising to wealthier people is a good strategy. Okay. So um so there's that. But even in that situation the person still has to believe something. They're not they're not spending their money even if they have a lot of disposable income. They're not spending their money on every single product.

They have to actually believe something about your product specifically that's going to get them from point A to point B there. Okay. And that value exchange, that value consideration is primarily an issue uh uh uh is primarily something that is accomplished via messaging. That is it is accomplished with words first. Now there's an exception to this which is almost any product whose value is aesthetic. So think apparel, jewelry, something like that.

Like um you know in those cases it's really a highly visual consideration although there are some sort of word considerations as well. And and that's why like advertising tends to work a little bit differently for those kinds of brands in the space than others. Um but but even still some consideration of the idea that you are getting across in your ad is critical. And that's why I say that messaging is always the core driver of advertising success in some way or another.

Like at the most basic level, you have to communicate something about your product to a person who might buy it. And if you're going to communicate that thing about your product, then that person has to be able to un to engage with, understand, receive, and be convinced by that communication. And convinced, again, I use the word loosely. I don't necessarily mean you're going to rationally argue them into it, but something about your presentation of the product has to convince them in their heart that they that that their self-interested desires are going to be fulfilled by your product.

Okay? And so, at the core of every ad and at the core of every ad's value is messaging. And the best evidence of this that I can really see and think of here is that I have just seen over and over and over again some extremely boring ads to most people print for brands. Like I have an ad recently that just like spent insane amounts of money very fast. I recorded an episode about 10xing my ad spend for a client in just a few days.

Like that happened with an ad that was like like deeply boring. So, there there's no edits to it. It's just somebody talking. It's just a message. It's just messaging communicating about a product that meets a customer's very specific need. Okay? And it does that. And the only way it's possible for that ad to work is that the message was powerful in the ad. And that's a really important principle. Okay? Because that means that the first thing you need to solve for your brand is what is the core message I'm getting across.

I'll even say this is true in apparel to some degree. Like there's there are things that your brand is communicating all the time to a to a customer uh that that tell them something about what your product is and the value will provide in their life that are really important. And it's helpful to think about what are those things that that you're communicating. You know, is it about fit? Is it about comfort? Is it purely aesthetic?

Is it about is there any functional element to the clothing item at all? Is there anything that a customer is concerned about when they wear this clothes? Like, you know, I've talked before about working with uh Nazarin Jafari, makes by Nazaren, um on on her brand, which sells a lot of jumpsuits. There's all kinds of customer consideration around how annoying a jumpsuit is to take off and put on, like if you're using the bathroom or something like that, like so um so there's all of the, you know, zippers versus buttons, stuff like that.

So, there are some things like that that can actually come into customer consideration even if the core driver is the val is the aesthetic of the product. And in fact, another way you can communicate about the aesthetic of the product is by who you use as a model. you can be thinking carefully about, oh, I'm going to use a 25-y old woman or a 55-year-old man or a 40-y old woman or whatever based off of what you're trying to sell and those all can matter because they communicate something.

They communicate an idea about the product which is that it fits into your life in a particular way for a particular kind of person etc. So even for a product that is more aesthetic there are these considerations to have. Okay. So at the ground level the message is the most important thing. But here's the thing, a message can be endlessly repackaged uh all the time into different ways of producing that message. And so so it is possible to create pretty boring ads that produce a lot of value.

But the best ads that possibly can get made combine exceptional messaging with a whole bunch of other elements of the ads in general. Okay, so this is the theoretical framework I want to keep working through and I want you to think about what are those other elements. If you think about that message first as the core thing and that core task of producing more value than you extract from the customer, okay, in the customer's eyes, then I want you to think about what else does that an analogy here might help which is which is like if you think about a sort of a meal that you have providing just just in terms of its nutrient provision like the core of the nutrient provision of a meal is going to be sort of the main parts of the meal like the meat and potatoes and vegetables or whatever it is.

Okay, th those are the items on your plate that provide you the macronutrients that you need, the nutrient value that you have, that you need, the sustenance that you need in your meal. Okay? And so eating those things is is the way you get the value from the meal at least at that level. Okay? But uh it sure makes it easier to get those to get that value to get that nutrition value from the meal if there's good salt if you know if it's salted or if there's great seasoning or if there's great sauce with it.

Now the salt the seasoning and the sauce they provide relatively little of the actual nutrients. Okay? Uh very very little of it. However, they make it so that you they make the food palatable so the nutrients can be provided to you for the food and they make the experience enjoyable of eating the food. Okay? And there's something going on here where if you think about like the message is the meat, okay? In this case, the message is the is the core nutrient package for accomplishing this.

Okay? The message provides the core value. But man, an ad with a lot of salt and seasoning and sauce really really helps. Okay? And that's because it makes it a it makes it much more palatable to many more people. All right, Richard Jane, CEO of Vermont. Everybody's making the joke all the time that they don't know what Vermont actually is and does. So, what do you tell people when that comes up? What does Vermont do?

Yeah, my simplest answer is that it is very weird that we have accepted the fact that every brand should have only one website when you would think that that's like a crazy thing if you were to say like, hey, you're only allowed to have one store and one type of store in the real world. And so given that that's true, like it kind of makes sense that with technology you should be able to have a different a totally different website and website experience based on where you're coming from.

And we used to do that by like building a landing page and hoping that that was good enough to give a different experience. But the reality is after you land, you still pull on the same PDP, you still pull in the same cart object, you still pull in the same offer objects. And so we just abandoned that idea and said, "Hey, like we're just going to make it possible for you to build a unique website." And and that's it.

Like, you know, it's like it's like not it's actually not super complicated. At least at least to me. At least to me, it's not super complicated. You know, it's like it's like when I go to the Gap store in Union Square in SF, it's kind of different from when I go to Gap in the airport is different when I go to Gap in the mall. And like the fact that that's true >> is like reasonable. And so I'm like kind of hoping that the fact that that's true online is kind of reasonable.

And so I want to break down for you three other elements of the ad. ad and I want you to think carefully about them that will help deliver to you the uh the nutrients okay the value provision of the ad itself. All right so the first of those is the hook. This is the most obvious one of those. The hook is this really critical part of making a great ad. The way many ads go wrong is that they simply never capture somebody's attention even though if they could capture the attention they would actually deliver a great message.

So you have a great message but you you can't get anybody to listen to it. Okay? You can't get anybody to watch it. And that's why there is a disproportionate emphasis on hooks. There's another way of framing this though which is the reason that hooks matter which is that actually nobody wants to engage with ads. And that principle is really important because um or at least ads are not the thing that somebody came to the platform to do.

So, what I mean is when somebody starts scrolling Instagram uh or tapping or whatever Instagram reels, okay, when they're doing that in general, the vast majority of the time, they did not go there because they want to get ads. They went to reels to Instagram reels because what they wanted was content that they enjoy consuming. Okay, that's the reason that they went there. And that means an ad fundamentally is an interruption to them.

It actually it's actually maybe even a step past interruption is an annoyance to them. Okay, they are they are if they see something that is an ad and it does not quickly capture their attention in some way, they are going to try to skip it, right? They they they would like to skip the ad. And that's because that's not what they came for. And the point of a hook, okay, is to positively create an intervention in that by saying, don't skip me because I am worthy of your attention.

I am actually uh worth your time and attention. And and so that is the point of a hook in an ad. It's to say is to is to speak to the right person for whom that message will resonate. So one way this goes wrong is if you just like go full clickbait and do something crazy, you will capture lots and lots of attention, but oftentimes it will be poor attention. It's not it's not the right attention, but um but the point of a hook is to positively interject into the into the sort of uh scrolling and um and tapping process as people engage with these materials or engage with these media platforms.

Okay. Uh and to capture attention. David Oggovie, the great advertiser, uh talked a long time ago about uh about the idea that a headline was something that pretty much everybody reads, even if only a small portion of people read the body copy in an ad. And that's because the headline jumps off of the page uh in a newspaper ad which he was talking about at the time among other ad platforms but um or media platforms uh media properties.

But he was talking about how a headline jumps off the page and at least very quickly most people can read it. And that's true with the scrolling and tapping scenario too. If somebody goes is on reels and they tap past their con their organic content that they're consuming and they get to your ad even it's it's a very likely that they're going to at least see the headline if the headline pops out even if they scroll past it really really fast.

And so the job of the hook can be, especially if you're using a headline as a hook, can be to communicate something so engaging and interesting and attention grabbing the the moment somebody sees the ad that it says, "Okay, I'm going to like positively the ad grabs their attention and pulls them in to that." Okay? So so that that notion of a positive intervention I'm going to come back to in a minute. Okay? But it's it's going to it's going to positively grab somebody's attention.

And so when you think about hooks, what I want you to think about is to spend time thinking about how what different ways can I use as an advertiser to go out of my way to grab attention. Now, this is something people talk about all the time, so I'm not going to belabor this point. Um, but this is also why clever visual hooks can work really, really well. I know I've heard people talk about V3 as being like being able to create really visually interesting things to grab attention that just do this.

But just consider that in your ad creation process. How do you make it so that the hook grabs attention as effectively as possible for the right person? Okay, that's a really obvious point. Everybody talks about this. You probably don't need to hear this too much. So, I want to actually move on to the next two that I think are underconsidered in this process. Okay. Uh so, uh so, you know, you need to work on hooks. There's a lot of different ways to do that.

There's a lot of probably great content on the internet about how to make better hooks. Something we're thinking about a lot, etc. and we're trying to build into our actual AI ad coowwriter that we use and all those things to make it better and better all the time. But but start there. Okay. Number two, um so number one, the first the first bit of seasoning and salt, right, is is the hook. The second one I'm going to call nativeness.

Okay, nativeness. This goes this principle goes way beyond social media. Um and and so so if you think about hooks, like what we're normally talking about, right, is is is a positive intervention to grab attention. It's saying like, "Yes, you see this as an ad or you might see this as an ad." Okay? It might automatically, maybe you read, maybe you see the little sponsored note on an ad right away. Okay? But uh but uh nonetheless, I'm going to make a headline that's so compelling that even though you know this is an ad, it's a sponsored piece of content, okay?

That uh that you are willing to engage with it and stay with it for at least a second. Okay? That's what a positive a positive intervention on the hook is trying to do. with nativeness. I want to instead think about a negative intervention on the hook. And what I mean is instead of actively trying to gain attention, nativeness is a way to um essentially slightly deceptively not lose attention. So I talked about that that situation before where somebody is scrolling through their feed or tapping through reels, okay?

And as they do that, um they an ad is an interruption in their engagement with that content. But what if you can make an ad that somebody doesn't even realize is an ad and therefore does not feel at all like an interruption in their content. Okay, that's what nativeness is trying to do. And so the idea here is that you are attempting to create content that is so um native to the platform that uh that that somebody is on that uh it just doesn't feel at all like uh like it's an ad at all.

And so this is where like I've seen some really interesting ads recently where people have made um ads that just look like like Facebook status updates, okay? Which is like if you just go and go on Facebook and like go update your status with like a colored background and you see the way that that works. Like just go recreate that as an ad. My friends at Fire Team made some made some ads like this. It's a really clever ad.

And uh in the status update ad, they just go and they they they um they make an ad that looks like a Facebook status update. And I'm I'm serious. Just go into Facebook and go do this yourself. Okay. uh well it looks just like it is a piece of organic content in the feed. Okay. And for that reason this is where the post-it note ad works right is is like it just it feels you know this is why um UGC has potentially worked like um this is why Facebook has or meta has talked about using creators with sound on um on Instagram reels because that is the kind of content that tends to perform on reels.

It's saying when you do that it feels native to the platform. You're not going and shooting these long videos. you know, it's why vertical and aspect ratio matter and all of these different elements of it all really for the same purpose, which is is not not so much gaining attention as not losing attention. It's just making it so the ad now uh doesn't stand out as an ad. It doesn't it doesn't look like an interruption, doesn't feel like an interruption in the feed.

It feels more like the kind of content people really really want to see. And so uh nativeness to your ads can be a really really important way to season the meat, right? It can be a way to make it so that somebody uh before you ever get to the message itself, you're doing something that makes it so that your ad doesn't stand out as an ad at all. And again, this principle is very old. Um if you go look at David Oglevie, again, I'll I'll quote him here.

He talks a lot about like running long form editorial type style ad content uh in newspapers because if the if the ad looks like a piece of written editorial content then it feels native to the newspaper feels native to the media platform and therefore it fits really really well and therefore it performs uh better because people don't skip it and that's the reason why and the the unskippability of it or or the the the willing the ability to overcome the skip is is this really important part of getting attention.

If you think about this at a math level, um by simply attracting attention from more people, just just doing that, right, you have to now convert less of them for your ad to work. Just by doing that, just just in this just by attracting attention from from from more people, right, you you now have lowered the bar of your conversion rate because you've been able to get more people to engage with the content. And of course, Meta's algorithms and um are so good that that you'll you'll be able to get the attention from the right kind of person as you do that.

This is also, by the way, why whitelisting works. Uh because if something feels more native, if it's not from a brand, it feels less like an ad. If it's not from a brand, um and this is why people talk about whitelisting being such an important um strategy right now because uh running stuff from the ad account creators page seems to work a lot better and feels again less like an ad, feels more native to the feed. This is the foundational thinking that is going into the ads that we are making at AJF Growth and it is happening with our friends at Behind the Scenes Studio who we have used to staff up our creative team at every level.

Behind the Scenes Studio is a creative agency that uh is an extension of your team, works with your team to create high performing ads. It's based in the Philippines and they work really directly with me and extend a lot of the same things that I'm talking about to other clients uh who are not working with AJF Growth. They do that by taking a lot of these principles and delivering them via a Philippines-based team that I love working with.

Uh, I love working with them because they are great and highly talented people with great process that can be an incredible extension of your editing and graphic design and even ad concepting team. And they can do that while providing that service at a really, really reasonable cost, giving you a lot of ads for a very low cost per ad because they're based in the Philippines, uh, where your dollars just go a lot farther for hiring incredibly talented people.

And our people are really, really talented, as are the people at Behind the Scenes Studio. That's because there are extremely talented people. The Philippines is a country of 100 million people. If you're thinking about hiring in the Philippines as like $3 an hour, $5 an hour virtual assistants only, you're doing it wrong. Uh, and there are actually incredible people who are ready to work on your brand and provide their great big brains uh and uh and professional skill sets into your brand.

Um, and you can get to access to those people through Behind the Scenes Studio. So, if you are looking to um scale up your creative team, particularly on the video editing, graphic design side and to do that specifically for the purpose of creating meta ads that work at scale, you should do that with my friends at Behind the Scenes Studio. You should at least get on a call with them. Explore the service for yourself.

Explore the price for yourself. You can do that at btsstudio.co. btsstudio.co. The link for that is also in the show notes. Um and and so go check that out today. I'm a huge fan of Behind the Scenes Studio. I'm going in deeper with them all the time and I think you should too. Now, you can actually combine those two uh nativeness and hook and this ends up creating a really good ad, right? Or an ad is highly native and also has uh a hook that feels really really unskippable to somebody because it grabs attention.

So, first you don't lose attention um with the nativeness of the ad and then you grab attention with the hook of the ad. Okay, those two things work together really well. Um okay. Uh so hook niveness you you get the point there. Number three storytelling. Okay and this is also a place where I think it's this is I think in some ways the hardest part of this and another important piece of this you might consider this something like pacing uh or something like this.

So if the job of the of the native of the nativeness or the hook of the ad is to gain attention. The job of the storytelling concept is to retain attention is to not lose attention. And there's one little line a long time ago that I heard the co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the co-creators of South Park, talk about that I thought was a really smart way of putting this, which was they they did their writing in a way where they were constantly trying to get you to anticipate the next line.

They they always wanted to leave you looking for the next line. That was purposely the way they wrote. Um, and that is really the core idea here, that at every point, you're always promising somebody more and more and more and delivering on that promise consistently throughout it with with content that you're making. And um and so so now we've moved from just like the hook side of things to the the ability to retain interest in it.

And and there are a million different ways of doing this. What I think uh a lot of people do here uh to accomplish this is is to use framing devices specifically to to help guide this process. Right? So part of the thing that we've done at AJF Growth with our um AI coowriter that we that we use for our ad creation is we've pre-selected framing devices that help somebody through this process. Okay? So, for example, myth versus truth.

Okay. Myth X thing X is the way you solve this problem. I mean, maybe um I I'm not even going to give an example. Okay. Um I I'll use Bamboo Earth, okay? Because I always go back to them. I'm not even really involved with them anymore, but because I've used them as a reference before. Skincare brand. You can do this with any skincare brand. Okay. Myth: Retinol is the number one way to solve exkin problem. Okay. Truth.

Retinol actually hurts your skin over time. And you know, I don't I don't know if that's true or whatever, but that would be a way of doing it. Okay. um myth versus truth. What that myth versus truth framing does is it is it works with it starts with a hook like the myth hook. Okay? So there's there's like something interesting and hooky about that, but then it retains your attention over time by giving you something to look forward to next.

So when you say myth, you lay out the myth. And if you've gathered someone's attention, once you move to the truth instead of the myth uh or once you've gathered somebody's attention on the myth, now you have them anticipating, okay, what is what is the ad going to say next about this? How do you keep somebody engaged? What is the actual truth instead? And then after the truth comes, okay, then you now have a chance to um exposit that truth, right?

To to provide more value relative to the truth that you claim. And if you do a good job putting the truth in a clever and creative and attentiongrabbing and interesting way, then somebody will stay with you for the truth portion of the ad. Okay? And um and that that's the idea. And so framing devices like that can be really helpful. There's a whole bunch of these all over the place. Like and the negative hook is a classic one of these where you think about um you know this is the worst product I've ever used because it made me hate all my other products or because it made me realize how much money I'd wasted.

If you use the retinol example, right? this is the worst skincare product I've ever used because it made me realize how much money I've wasted on retinol products in the past. Okay, that would be a negative hook. Um, that's attention grabbing and then it leaves you anticipating what the next line is. All right. Um, another one would be the list goal, right? Four reasons why uh you don't why this skincare product is better than all the other skincare products.

Okay, number one. And if you can be engaging and interesting with each of those, those framing devices are helpful ways to to keep somebody anticipating what's next. Do I care? Do I still care? am I still interested and retains attention. So that can be a way of solving the storytelling problem. There's of course lots of other ways to do that uh including just by generally being interesting and being a good writer and all that.

But this again comes down to level of ideas. Okay. Uh and so storytelling devices and frameworks like this can really help you think through how to organize your content so that the message comes across in that really good way. Okay. So if you think about those as three kind of core me core parts of the the seasoning of your ads. Okay. Then um then now you can of course take one further step which is to put them all together, right?

The hypothetical best ad in the universe, okay, is uh is an ad that uh gather ga uh that gains tons of attention via a great hook, okay? It's just becomes unskipable because it g it positively gains so much attention. It is at the same time highly native to the platform. Therefore, it doesn't lose attention. So, not only does it gain attention positively, but it doesn't lose attention negatively because it feels so negative, feels so um good to the platform.

And then number three, it retains your attention all the way through the ad. Number four, all while communicating a message that provides uh that that that uh that convincingly shows that the product uh provides more value than it costs to the customer. Okay, that's Richard Jane, the CEO of Vermont, telling it to you from his own voice what I've experienced as somebody who has been a customer of Vermont with clients of mine and seen real results.

Go check out Vermont yourself by going to ver for vermontcommerce.comf vermontcommerce.com/ af to get started with Vermont today. The link for that is also in the show notes of this episode. Thanks, Bishop. That's the hypothetical best ad in the world. Now I am talking very purposefully in this episode about hypothetical ads and that is because as I have thought about the task at AJF Growth of creating great ads at scale what I have realized is that if you start at how do we make good ads then you're going to be in trouble trying to actually solve the problem because you have to break the ad down into component parts and then figure out how to consistently operationalize each of those over a bunch of time and um And so some of you are watching or listening to this and thinking like that was so obvious and so theoretical, but I just know most people are not actually thinking through these frameworks when they're making ads.

And we're only as good as we are at it right now, right? I think we can get a lot better about this. I've talked before about um how important it has been for me to bring on Patrick Kadoo as my COO and and and partner in the business at AJF growth because the whole goal that we are trying to do right now is to take ideas like this and say okay we think we know what makes good ads but now how do we actually turn that into operational process that we can repeat over time that is the task okay that is the task and and different uh pieces of content on the internet different educational content are going to have different roles in helping you think through that okay I am very much a like idea kind of person uh and trying to think through this at the level of foundational principles.

That's that's the way I think about almost everything. If you've listened to or watched this podcast for a while, you know that's true. Um and so now the task is how do I in my for my clients and at ADF Growth create as repeatable of a process as possible to help us make that hypothetical best ad in the world. Okay. Um and that that's really the goal. But it starts by sort of breaking down the ad into its component parts at the foundation.

And of course, there's lots of other ways to think through um all of the elements of the things that I've said and add to it. So, I want to hear what I missed in this. I want you to comment with uh color around what are the parts of this that I missed or if you have really specific things that you think could be good parts of the seasoning of the ad or the messaging of the ad or whatever, then um then you should you should let me know in the comments here because I want to hear about them so that we can get better and other people watching or engaging with this content can get better as well.

But that's the basic core idea. Okay? Message moves the needle. uh message is what provides the nutrients of of the ad. Okay. But then there's seasoning and salt and sauce and that is things like the hook, the the nativeness and the uh storytelling uh that maintain attention all the way throughout the ad. If you can actually think about your ad creation process and each of those component parts, you can build a process for repeatable ads that win at scale.

Okay, thanks so much for watching or listening to this episode. I would love to hear from you if you liked or disagreed with or anything else had any other reaction to this. Like I said, leave it in the comments. Don't forget to subscribe while you're doing this as well. Uh because I uh I am going to make more content like this and tell you more about how we're doing this over time. I'll bring Patrick on when we build this into processes and tell you how we do it.

If you want to uh receive those processes for your brand and work with us as we continue to develop this kind of thinking and uh delivery of ads for our clients, you can uh go to ajfgrowth.com. Um sign up there. Uh it'll email me. just take just fill out the intake form and and I would love to work with you or see about if it's a good fit for us to work with you and your brand. Uh you can also email me podcastfgrowth.com with any questions, thoughts or ideas um around either this episode or anything else uh about working with me and and our services and those kinds of things.

Um thanks so much to my sponsors who are great. Go check them out. The links for them are in the show notes. Thanks so much for watching and listening. I will see you next time. [Music]