Hey, happy Sunday. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. I’m getting killed with allergies right now in the Northeast. If you have been able to improve your allergies, let me know because I feel like I’m really struggling with them.
Listen, social evolves fast, especially paid social. If you're running the same playbook as a year or two ago, you have pretty much zero shot. You need to evolve and meet consumers where they’re at and meet the platforms where they are going too. You need new creative weekly that is keeping up with trends and market shifts, and you need to adapt your strategies to platform changes.
Here are five things you can do right now to keep up with consumers and Meta:
1. Savings messaging: Unless you’re LVMH or Kering, you’re not above talking about price savings in your products. People are hurting; consumer spending and sentiment are down. People won’t spend unless you give them a reason to justify it to themselves and their partners. We’re finding that even on a kit that’s nearly $100, calling out the savings against MSRP is performing really well. Gift with purchases are also working well. People love a free thing right now; which helps them justify their spending. If you can lean into anything that’s not savings, value, or free, it can really help.
2. Specific Creative As Targeting: The other thing that is working really well is being very specific about the targeting in your creative. A lot of marketers think in terms of problem and solution. For example, "if you struggle with." Try focusing more on the who, like "If you are xx and you struggle with", or "for xx who want to". The goal is then go go as laser specific as possible in each angle and hook to who you want to reach, and scale horizontally.
3. Partnership Ads: Partnership ads are an amazing way to scale creative and reach new audiences. They're very native to social. A lot of direct response UGC can be brand dilutive, and we are often asked to make a trade-off between direct response and brand building activities. Partnership ads and influencer marketing are beneficial to both direct response performance marketing and brand marketing objectives at the same time. They should still look native and be filmed on an iphone and have native captions, but they are just influencers or creators telling organic stories in front of their phone about products they love. You can work with a few large influencers and also many micro and mid tier ones. We're having some of our best performance with these style of ads, and its' clear Meta is really leaning in here too.
4. Attend Make Ads That Convert: The platforms are changing quick, the volumes and styles of creative that you need to make are changing just as quick, and AI is changing it all. You need to keep elarning and exploring stay relevant, which can be hard to cut through the noise. I highly, highly recommend checking out the upcoming Make Ads That Convert.
Motion is putting on one of their legendary virtual events, Make Ads That Convert, and the timing couldn't be better.
I've been talking about AI-first ad production and AI creative strategy a LOT lately and for good reason, it's super important.
The event is free and is packed with sessions about using AI for ideation and market research, static and video ad production, persuasive storytelling, and AI UGC Actors.
Motion absolutely crushes it with their events, and this one is perfect for creative strategists, media buyers, growth teams, and honestly anyone involved in making ads right now. It's basically an online course taught live!
I'm going to have my whole team attend this thing, because we're all feeling the pressure to do more with less, and AI is obviously part of the solution - but only if you know how to use it right. You'll hear from names like Alex Cooper, Jimmy Slagle, Jacob Posel, Dara Denney, Kelly Rocklein, Mirella Crespi, and Barry Hott.
A few of the topics include:
- Using AI for deep customer research (beyond what everyone else is doing).
- Advanced prompting techniques for ads that don't look AI-generated.
- Making sure your AI ads actually sell physical products.
- Using AI actors and voice models for scalable UGC.
- Building the lean, AI-augmented team of 2025.
Did I mention the event is FREE? Sign up here, and forward this to your team. Thanks to Motion for hosting amazing events like this and sponsoring this issue to let you know about it. Hope you sign up! See you there. Sponsored.
I'm off to bed to get some sleep before the week starts if my kids will let me. See you at Make Ads That Convert!
-Cody