Creative diversity
The biggest mistake most accounts have today.
Head to Ads Library now, find your brand, zoom out, and blur your eyes.
On quick glance, does everything hold together in a coherent style? Does it feel and look similar? Is there consistency in how you’re approaching creatives?
If the answer is yes, then you are leaving huge amounts of growth on the table.
Unlike a few years ago, most brands now understand that the way to win paid social isn’t through clever media buying. It’s through creative. We spend 85% of the time experimenting on creative and 15% of the time experimenting with media buying. You go from 0 to 1, and then 1 to n through creative.
I’ve audited over 50 accounts over the last 12 months and the biggest issue I’ve seen across all of those is creative diversity.
Today, I want to explore what we mean by creative diversity and why it’s so important.
If you have 1,000 purchases a month, you need to be testing 20 new creatives monthly
Last year at the Meta Performance Summit, we learnt that Fabletics create 50,000 ads in 2022. When I saw that stat, I wanted to reverse engineer the numbers to work out what that looked like at a performance marketing level.
In 2022, Fabletics did:
$500m of revenue
$200m from new customers
AOV of $87
Producing 2.3m new orders in 2022
or about 191.6k new customers per month
Assuming:
First order profitability
a 50% gross margin
that means up to $43.7 of allowable CAC.
Let’s assume a target $35 CAC
$6.7m monthly marketing spend for those 191.6k orders
0.02 creatives for every new customer
How much should I be creating?
If we follow those above ratios, multiple your weekly action rate by 0.02 to get your weekly creative volume.
The X factor in all of this is your action cost.
How to work out how much you should be spending on your creative experimentation then? As a basic guide go grab this calculator to enter your own figures.
With the volume question out of the way, we move on to the all important question of: what is creative diversity?
Those creatives need to be different from each other
If you’re testing 20 creatives each month, they all need to look distinctly different.
That means swapping a hyperlink from blue to red does not cut it.
Nor does adding in a free shipping badge.
The ‘zoom out and blur your eyes’ test should reveal a highly varied wall, not one uniform feel.
Let’s use Fabletics again.
These are 35 of the currently live creatives from Fabletics. These all look different from each other. These are all the first frames you see in these ads so it’s a good indication of what a user will glimpse as they browse Instagram.
Things that make these different:
Wildly different colours – if you had to choose one dominant colour per image, then there’s a lot of variety here.
Loads of text styles – there’s more than 35 text styles in play across these. From font face, size, weighting, colour, kerning. Often there’s 3 or 4 in one image. Yes, their two brand fonts (Trade Gothic + GTPessura) exist a lot. But they come in loads of different weights and stylings. Plus they introduce the native Instagram fonts from Stories, Reels, and lots of other mimic lo-fi fonts.
High and low production quality – you’ve got studio shot photography in here in beautiful arrangements. But you also have screenshots of their website, creator content, offers displayed in well designed and quite ‘lo-fi’ ways. There is variety across static and video in production quality. The ‘lo-fi’ end is what we think of as ‘native’ at Ballpoint.
Framing of models/creators – we’ve got close ups on faces, chests, leggings, legs, and then we’ve got wide angle shots showing a living room (both pro + creator), a garden, a street, a gym, etc etc
Big contrast range – there's a big contrast range from the aggressive black / neon green through to the subtle lime green and beige
Lead messaging hook – from product descriptors, offers, jobs to be done, there’s a range of things led with.
Why creative diversity works
Media buying today is simpler than it ever has been.
Most of the time, Meta works best by giving it the largest possible audience to play with. That might mean setting it to 18+ and excluding your customers list, but nothing else.
It rewards simplification and consolidation.
And therefore, how do you target? With creative: creative is the way you do your targeting today1.
Think about as a user: we see and interact with thousands of ads and messages every day. Most of these we ignore and forget immediately.
But let’s say your household insurance is coming to an end next month, and you seen an ad that says “We can beat your contents insurance premium”, then you might pause for a second and consider it.
355 days a year you don’t even register that notice, today, you see it.
The ad is suddenly relevant.
Each visual cue signals something different to different people. Certain people won’t ever respond to creator content because they think it feels cheap or perhaps are cynical towards authenticity. Others will only respond to creator content because they’re cynical towards advertising.
Some people consider themselves hyper-rational and so the product itself is the most important for them. They want feature lists. Most would rather understand how they solve their jobs to be done, and so recognise that messaging instead.
Some love offers and that’s going to be the fastest way to break through the noise. Others see discounts as cheap and swipe right past.
Some want bold bright colours and flash, others like subtlety and style. Some like to see people who look like themselves, and others want to see people they aspire to be.
Some want beauty, some want realism.
And that can all change throughout the day every day.
It can change based on how someone’s feeling at 7.30 on a Tuesday vs 16.00 on a Sunday. It can change based on every ad in their feed this morning, or what’s happening in the news.
Creative diversity means you can appeal to a broader group of people. And as you want to break through whatever ceiling you’re in, the chances are you aren’t being diverse enough.
Each of those 35 different formats Fabletics have running has the potential to appeal to a different audience segment.
Go test new formats now
Consider these two formats format below.
Left has left a distinct style – a cutout of the product with very high contrast (against black) and leading with the offer.
Right: creator content. You’ve got a whole frame filled with a shot of the creator + what we assume to be their bedroom.
The left is perfectly shot product photography.
The right is lo-fi, native, and considers some trend design elements using the mouse pointer.
You can change the text on the left one to lead with the secondary “BOOTY-BOOSTING LEGGINGS’ messaging instead of ‘80% OFF Leggings’ but the immediate visual cue doesn’t change. Nor would it change with a different colour of leggings. Or a different product. It’s still the same ad.
Each of these appeals to two different groups of people, and both are necessary and needed in your ad account.
If you’ve hit a ceiling in your paid social account, then go and put creative together that looks completely different from anything you’ve run before. And if you’re looking for support in running your performance marketing creative, then book a call with me.
