😀 Put a positive spin on a negative product attribute

The ad above is from the German Road Safety Council advocating the use of helmets for road safety.

Negative aspect: Helmets mess up your hair.

What makes this ad interesting: Positioning “helmet hair” as something to be desired, in a slightly humorous way.

Here’s how you might reverse engineer this concept for your clients:

Coffee business

Negative aspect: People often spill coffee on their shirt.

Bonus: We might exaggerate this by showing a coffee stain on an important article of clothing, such as a wedding dress.

What makes this ad interesting: The bride doesn’t seem concerned that her dress has been stained because she loves her coffee so much.

It’s silly and exaggerative but grabs attention and, importantly, communicates the value proposition of the coffee being irresistable.

Pet adoption business

Negative aspect: Dogs create unexpected messes.

What makes this ad interesting: The owner couldn’t be less concerned at how dirty her dog is because she’s overjoyed and loves her dog.

In other words, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Child art supply business

Negative aspect: Paint is often messy, especially when kids are left with it unsupervised.

What makes this ad interesting: Despite the mess, the boy is having the time of his life.

This would likely connect with parents on an emotional level.

🔧 Ad tactic of the week

Optimize campaigns towards your main KPI

Our agency manages social ads for home improvment companies (windows, baths, etc.). We generate leads.

Optimizing towards cost-per-lead (CPL) is an easy trap for media buyers like us to fall into because it doesn’t consider lead quality or the client’s profitability.

It’s possible to generate leads for $50 but what good does that do if they don’t convert into sales and are not profitable?

Here’s what a CPL optimization looks like:

• Killing ads simply because they have a high CPL;

• Vertically scaling low CPL campaigns; and

• Iterating on copy and creatives with low CPL.

What we do instead: Optimize campaigns around cost of marketing (COM), which is spend / revenue.

Our clients provide a target COM and we optimize our ads based on this target COM instead of CPL. CPL becomes nearly irrelevant because we simply spend money on what’s profitable.

In fact, some campaigns, like the one below, have expensive CPLs in the $200s but remain active because they’re profitable:

The second order benefit of this is that we’re able to iterate on creatives and copy that are actually producing sales, which improves the performance and sustainability of future campaign launches.

This is easier with ecommerce because you can use a purchase pixel event and literally optimize Meta ads around the main KPI.

We still use the leads marketing objective in Ads Manager for lead gen. The difference is that we maintain a database (spreadsheet) containing all leads as well as their status (set, demo, sale, revenue) that is updated from the client’s CRM.

We then simply match the sets, demos and sales to specific campaigns, ad sets and ads with UTMs.

This allows us to have some ads remain active for months. Here’s one that was active for 15 months, spent $81k and generated $949k:

🏆 Placement of the week

Hotel key card ads👇

• Travellers often have higher disposable income

• Multiple ad exposures because people use their cards multiple times per day

Tactics that might improve the effectiveness of hotel card ads:

• Giving relevant offers, such as nearby restaurants or tourist activities

• Offer special discounts or welcome offers that are exclusive for hotel guests (i.e. First drink is free)

• Use QR codes to improve trackability

Relevant businesses:

• Restaurants

• Delivery services

• Tourist attractions

• Transportation services

• Tour operators

🗣️ Quote of the week