The Ultimate Ad Mix Bible

While everybody is busy talking about videos and this hook vs. that hook - static ads are still crushing it!

… and it also makes sense, right?

Why wouldn’t statics work?

They deliver the message and the value props in 0.2 seconds rather than 30…

They capture attention, if designed well…

They “sell the click” and get the user curious to learn more on the landing page, where we can then “sell the product”...

And from the brand side - statics are a much superior ad type compared to UGC and other types of video content if you look at efficiency and cost savings.

With statics - you can test a messaging angle with much less effort and turnaround time, which in turn allows you to move faster and test more (i.e higher likelihood of finding a successful angle)

… and the best part: You don’t have to deal with creators or pay thousands of $ to creators for videos.

Here are the most important things you should consider when it comes to statics:

1) Make it attention-grabbing by using colors that stand out from the crowd. The colors you use in your ads makes such as big difference as to whether you capture someones attention or not. Here’s a good example:

2) Have a big headline that conveys what your product does for the customer, in a easily understandable language. Spend most of your time on the message you’re trying to convey here. Below is a good example from Obvi.

3) Try a lot of sh!t. Nobody really knows what will work and what won’t - but thankfully statics are quite easy to create and test compared to other ad formats

4) The static ad should sell the click - not necessarily the product. It should spike curiosity about how something can solve a pain point of theirs and then lead them to the website where the selling can happen. Don’t try to include every selling argument on the image.

Whitelisting from 3rd party pages

The simplest way to describe the concept of whitelisting is by giving an example;

Imagine you are in the market for buying new cookware.

As you're scrolling through your Facebook feed, you see one ad from HexClad saying: "Our frying is the best for X,Y, and Z reason - buy today."

… and then, you see another ad from bestcookwaretoday . com (just a made-up name.

Point is: a media publisher writing about cookware). This ad says something along the lines of "We've tested the top-5 different cookware brands. See what the test-winner is".

So basically a comparison article as you traditionally know it from affiliate marketing. Could also be other types of messaging.

… and then you scroll even further, and you see an ad coming from Gordan Ramsey's page himself, where he's saying:

"If you want to cook as good as me, you have to use equipment that's as good as mine."

Which ad do you think will be the most persuasive: The one where HexClad is screaming about how great they are or the one where other people are screaming about how great they are?

Whitelisting is basically diversifying your ad mix so that you have ads coming from each of these pages - with different messaging (either completely different or slightly different)

Meaning inside of your ad account - you build out a given amount of advertorial (publisher) ads, a given amount of creator whitelisting ads, and a given amount of brand ads.

This allows you to:

- Diversify your ad mix and messaging

- Resonating and educating with a wider range of customers (for example; the ones who want to read a full-on comparison before considering buying first)

- Engineer and integrate publisher endorsements and social proof into your ads

"Okay, okay, okay - but WHY? "

The reason why this works super well is simple: It's human psychology.

People buy from people and people look for trusted publishers to inform their purchasing decision. Besides that, they also buy from people whom they trust.

To achieve the first part, you can run whitelisted ads from a creator's page or even from your founders' page.

This makes the ads more personal and human - than the standard brand ads. If you can even combine that with influencers or celebrities that are a little bit known - then you get a great cocktail of: "I like you, you are a human, and I know that I can trust you - so I am willing to listen to what you have to say."

Likewise, you can achieve the second part by running ads that are

A) written like an actual publisher such as Forbes would write

and

B) leading to articles/editorials that are selling the customer through long-form content.

For this to be successful, you also need to think a lot about the way you write the ads and landing pages.

Ideally, it should be highly congruent throughout the entire journey and sound like an actual publisher.

The Nitty-Gritty Stuff: How you actually do this in practice

This section will be divided into three distinct sections - because we'll go into A) How to set up an advertorial page and website, B) how to get whitelist creators and C) how to whitelist a founder's page.

Let's get it.

A-Z Guide into building an advertorial page, creating FB/IG Pages, and writing advertorial ads

Step 1) Buy a publisher-sounding domain (For example Collagen Today) and build a WordPress/WIX Blog website on that

Step 2) Get the page filled up with content about the topic to increase trust

Step 3) Craft the copy for your advertorial article with as much attention to detail as you would with a normal landing page - but make sure to write it from the perspective of a publisher

Step 4) Create a Facebook/Instagram page called, for example, Collagen Today, and add it to your add account. Also, fill up the FB/IG page with content about the topic, again for increased trust

Step 5) Craft your ads and, once again: Make sure you're writing from the perspective of a publisher. This is a skill that takes some time to learn, but it's definitely learnable. What publishers are great at is writing captivating headlines that hook people in and get them to the article. That's what you need to do here too.

Step 6) Ensure that there's Ad=>Article congruency. This is self-explanatory

Step 7) Add your Facebook pixel to the publisher site and start testing.

How to do the same, but for whitelisting creators

For creators, you don't necessarily need to test out a specific domain/blog for them - although you could definitely test it out. For example, Millys Cooking Blog . Com.

When whitelisting creators, the thing that can sometimes take quite a lot of time and work is communicating to the creator how they should share access to our ad account and then coordinating payment.

This process can be a bit time-consuming to do manually, which is why we love using Insense for this purpose. There, you just know how much it costs to whitelist the creators, and it gets done in no time.

However, if you want to do it yourself or have someone on your team do it - then you need to make sure that the creator has changed their pages to business pages/profiles, and then you can find their profiles by searching under "add new pages" inside of your ad account. After this, they'll get an email where they have to confirm and so on.

Founder whitelisting

This is super simple. You just do what you want the creator to do, but just with your own profile.
 

Bonus: How to use AI to create unlimited creative scripts and briefs

Now, we know that we’ve said that the fake creator / actor generated content is dead… and we really believe that it is.

… but we do appreciate that sometimes, you may not be able to access REAL UGC from actual customers - and hence you’ll need to settle for fake UGC.

When doing so, we recommend that you try to spend as little time as possible on the actual scripting and briefing of creators - because you can use AI to get quite far. (We’ll show you how now)

That being said - you’ll still need to edit the output that you get from the machine to make sure that everything flows well.

2. Rules of using AI

First things first - using AI can be a great way to increase efficiency and thereby volume of output. However, many people still think that AI can help with filling a skill deficiency.

Although I wish that was true, it simply isn’t the case (yet!)

AI can help you amplify your current skills and help you get more done in less time. But if you’re a bad copywriter/creative strategist, AI won’t help you get very far. Therefore, don’t expect AI to do something you can’t do yourself.

On the flip side, what AI will do is help you fill a volume deficiency, meaning that it’ll help you be able to produce more volume, in less time, and with less people.

Another important rule of AI you’ll have to remember is: “If you feed the machine garbage, you’ll get garbage back”

The quality of the output you’ll get from AI is highly dependent on the quality of the input you’re giving it.

3. Feeding the machine

As said, if you give the machine garbage inputs, you’ll get garbage outputs back.

In order to feed the machine great inputs to inform our creative briefs and scripts - we need to educate it on what our customers are saying about our products.

A simple way to do this is to copy and paste a handful of customer reviews from Amazon, Trustpilot, etc.

This way, we’re teaching the machine what our customers love about our product, what change it has made to their life (in their own words), and what they dislike about our competitors products (given that we paste in their negative reviews too)

4. Understanding the modular ad creative framework

If you’ve ever tried to create a script or a creative brief using AI - you know that it can sometimes give you the most basic and vague sh!t ever.

I actually used to hate using it for creative briefs for exactly this reason.

… but then I discovered that I can chop up my creatives into a modular framework and then get it to make a 9/10 outcome on every single module instead of a 5/10 outcome on the entire script.

To show you what I mean - allow me to first briefly introduce the modular creative framework.

As can be seen on the image above - a modular framework is simply a way of dividing a creative into different sections such as hook, problem, bad alternative, results, etc.

This is super crucial to understand if you want to use AI to help you in your creative scripting process.

Another thing we love about Insense is that this modular creative framework is actually built into their platform - so you can easily built out your modular ad creatives without much hassle.

5. A Step By Step Tutorial of How You Can Create Unlimited Scripts Using AI

Step 1: Set the scene

The first thing you'd want to do with any prompt is set the scene for who the AI should be, what its objective is to do, and what tonality it should write in.

Step 2: Feed the machine with reviews

The first thing you want to do is feed the machine with as many reviews as possible. Sometimes - I can use upwards of 10-15 prompts on just feeding it reviews. The more context about your brand, product, and target audience you give to the machine - the better results it will deliver for you.

PS: 10-15 prompts translates into up to 25 normal pages worth of reviews which can take a bit of time gathering if you’re copy & pasting. Using free review scraping tools is also an option for this. However - once you’ve fed it to the machine, you can continue working from that prompt forever


Use the following prompt to do this:
“Role play with me here.

You are a world-class copywriter and creative strategiest who is looking to write a handful of video scripts for paid advertisement on Social Media.

To do this effectively - I'll provide you with a set of reviews that my customers have given to my product and that you must read through and understand before giving me any output.

Simply reply with "YES" if you understand the reviews - and DONT give me any output before I tell you to do so.

The reviews will be pasted in the 3 following prompts. “

Step 3: Structure & Organize

Get the AI to first structure and organize the reviews based on things such as benefits, objections, fears, purchase triggers, and much more (See full list in in transcripts or screenshot)

Use the following prompt to do this:

“Create a comprehensive compilation of the most frequently mentioned aspects that customers appreciate or dislike about this product: https://myobvi.com/products/fruity-cereal-obvi-collagen-grass-fed-bovine-multi-collagen-protein-powder. Include only recurring sentiments from reviews, prioritizing those with the highest repetition. Alongside each point, indicate the frequency of the sentiment using one of the following categories: 'Very common,' 'Moderately common,' or 'Not common.'

Organize the list into seven distinct categories, ensuring that each category contains a minimum of five points. Employ Markdown to format the content elegantly.

The categories are as follows:

Pain Points / Challenges: Identify the primary or frequently encountered pain points or challenges that led customers to purchase this product.

Desired Outcomes: Highlight the most commonly expressed desired outcomes that customers had in mind when acquiring this product.

Purchase Triggers: Examine the events or factors that prompted customers to consider purchasing this product.

Unique Value Propositions: Emphasize the key distinguishing features or advantages that differentiate this product from others, compelling customers to choose it.

Unique Features/Benefits: Present the distinctive feature-benefit combinations that this product offers.

Uncertainty & Perceived Risk: Explore the reasons behind customer doubts or concerns, as well as the fears they harbored before making a purchase.

Objections: Investigate the reservations or reasons why customers initially believed this product would not work for them.

Do this using the reviews pasted in the previous prompts”

Step 4: Follow a framework

This is where the modular ad framework comes in handy. The reason why you’d want to follow a modular framework is because ChatGPT is much better at creating good output when it’s given a single task - i.e to fill out info on one of the modules. But once you start to ask it to fill out all of them at once - it starts to give vague and basic results. This brings us to the next step

Step 5: Create & Iterate on each module of the modular framework

It’s much better (and easier) to create each section/module of the script one at a time. This way - you can ensure high quality and also iterate on any output that may not be at the wished quality standard

Here are some elements of the creative which you can easily iterate on if you don’t think it meets the quality requirements.

- Readability - I.e how well does the script read?

- Verbage / wording - i.e which words are being used?

- Price wording - i.e how is the price presented?

- Tonality - i.e which tone is used in the script?

- Avatar - i.e which customer avatar is it talking to?

Step 6: Compile the script

Once you have each of the sections build out - you can now start to compile it all together. You can either have another tab open beside your ChatGPT and compile all the modules in there - or you can ask ChatGPT to compile it for you.

I actually choose to do the former - because it allows me to create variations faster than if I had to prompt it to take module 1 variation 1 and combine it with variation 2 in module 3 and so on. This I’d rather just do myself.


Step 7:Create variations

Give ChatGPT the final script and ask it to make variations that are shorter / longer - or even have different sections.


Step 8: THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP

The most important step of this entire process is the human review. ChatGPT can get you very far - but you still need to read through the scripts and make sure they actually make sense, flow well, and are just overall good. Don’t be lazy and don’t neglect this


Step 9:Make the creative brief for the creator

Compile it all into a creative brief where you give the creator the intro to your brand, when you expect them to deliver the content, where they should upload it, the script, and a potential list of B-Rolls they can film. ChatGPT can also help you with most of this.

After this - you’re pretty much set and ready to shoot out a ton of creative briefs

If you’ve read this far - then we hope that you got value from this free resource.

Feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues, and family members - and make sure they get some of that value too.

If you have any feedback into what you’d like to see from us in the future - then shoot us a message on LinkedIn, Twitter, or [email protected]

We look forward to hearing from you.