Why you need creative diversity
Understanding ads and audiences
We’ve been running workshops recently on creative diversity and why it’s important. Here are a few of the takeaways I’ve had that go some way in explaining its importance.
The relationship between ads and audiences
Imagine we’re running an internal advertising team within a concert venue. There’s ad space throughout the venue and we’re working with the in-house bars to run ads. While we’re part of the same company, we still need to ‘sell’ the ad space even if to our colleagues.
“Beer only £2.50 on the first floor bar”
You initially put up an ad that you run on the back of the stage that says “Beer only £2.50 on the new first floor bar.”
35% of your audience love beer
15% of the audience love a bargain and are ok with beer
Half your audience see the ad on stage, and while it’s too busy for most people, a lot stick around and buy the beer.
The bar sales team reports back to the advertising team that they’ve sold lots of beer and whatever they did before was working.
Now what do you do?
Increase the spend
Person 1 sees the data and says they should scale it.
“Let’s run it throughout the entirity of the show rather than just the start and let’s also put it up on the walls around the stage as well.”
Cost goes up.
But the audience doesn’t change. The same audience who like beer & like cheapness remain static. Plus some % of that audience will remember how busy it was and be put off further.
Not only that the audience has a little bit of what we call ‘ad blindness’ – they’ve read that one, they know what it looks like and are more likely to be blind to it.
You might sell the exact same amount of beer, but you’ve now paid more for it.
Initial run cost you maybe £100 in ad sales, and you took £500 in beer.
Now you’ve spent £200 in ad sales, and still only taken £500 in beer money.
Diversify the creative
So how do you make more money at the bar? Diversify the creative.
Bar sales feeds back that lots of people were seeing the queues and turning away: in our messaging frameworks at Ballpoint we’d label that insight an “anxiety” and create an ad around it.
Ad number 2 now reads:
“Beat the queues: you can get a drink in under 30 seconds at the upstairs bar, during the show”
No ad blindness now, everyone sees the new ad.
Now this ad is interesting because 90% of people wouldn’t miss the show to get a drink, but for the other 10% – they hate queueing. And so that tradeoff is worthwhile.
This ad is one of the ones running side of stage for £50, and this generates £200 in beer money. And it’s all incremental. Lovely stuff.
Bar sales team report back better beer sales but wine is lagging.
“The upstairs bar: smashable natty wine to enjoy with the show”
20% of the audience are non-beer drinking hipsters who love natural wine who were never interested in the original product offering but now have a reason to go visit.
And so on, and so on.
Diverse creative finds you new audiences
Each new ad offered a different message and as a result reached a different part of the audience.
Now consider what Meta is really, really good at: finding customers who are relevant for your desired action.
It’s way better than the concert hall advertising because it doesn’t blanketly advertise to everyone, it just targets relevant people who want your product. It also doesn’t have one fixed price to sell that ad space to but its based on the competitiveness of your specific audience and who else is competing for them.
Take a look at these two ads. Yes the visual style is a bit different and yes the weighting of text is a bit different.
But ultimately, these are the same ad.
They both:
Speak to people who know Spotify Premium (product aware)
Are maybe anxious about price and unwilling to try previously
Enjoy soft focus swirly/gradiented design
Let’s imagine I hit two of those three, then Meta probably won’t show this ad to me.
But does that mean I’m not a potential customer? No.
This is why you need creative diversity.
Different styles, formats, messages, Jobs to be Done
Diversity comes in many different ways.
There’s visual diversity: colour palatte, shooting style, vibe, pacing of editing, captionning, people represented
There’s messaging diversity: who is it talking to, how’s it addressing concerns, how’s it being said
Diversity isn’t about making ugly ads, or doing UGC. Though both of those are very good starting points to prompt diverse ideas.
For our most successful clients, we’ve operated a 90/10 rule of ‘new concepts’ to ‘iterations’ with creative. And again and again I think it’s because of this.
Most of the time an ad isn’t there to try to ‘beat’ an existing one: it’s to create an incremental new customer for you. And the way to do that is with something brand new.
Enjoyed this? I’d love to read your comments and receive a like. Even more so though would love for you to share this with someone else. If you ever want to chat creative, then let me know.