Here's how to get a gushing spring of creative testing ideas

Brands spend big money running ads on Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok. They all say out loud that creative testing is of prime importance. Yet it’s strange to me that many teams I’ve spoken to don’t have a structured way of testing.

• I’ve asked creative masterminds that have the rapt attention of DTC founders.

• I’ve asked agencies that charge 5-figure monthly retainers.

• I’ve seen it with clients that have 10+ designers on staff.

When I ask if they use a framework or a matrix to get to their amazing results, the answer is flatly no.

It’s true - ads are a blend of art and science. The art is the part that we feel emotionally and sensorily when we:

• aspire to be the lean muscular model wearing the latest functional clothing

• get hyped-up by quotes from famous people tooting the life-changing aspects of some new beauty cream

• have our eyebrows lifted by a novel product doing something that we never imagined was possible

What about the science? Sure we measure the KPIs and results in platform reporting. Things like thumb-stop rate, CTR, conversion rate. But are the test cells set up in a way that allows us to confidently say “yes, for our brand..a video with the product demo works best, especially when paired with a testimonial”. Are the components of the ad cleanly defined and different enough to give us insights?

An ad starts with a good idea - but if you’re not using a framework to leverage that idea to get 4-5 different variations of an ad there’s low-hanging fruit that you can still pick.

Something paid search advertisers use in ad copy testing is an ad matrix. Matrices are used to permutate components together to generate a bunch of finished ads. Admittedly, sometimes the permutations result in weird AI-like results where the headlines don’t really pair well with the descriptions - that’s where the marketer has to apply a human touch to permutate things that fit with each other.

Let’s take a look at how we might apply this to facebook ads. I’ll list out a few dimensions that we can use as components in an ad.

• What do we say in the message? What do we highlight?

  • Positioning - this determines how we talk about the features and what we contrast them against.

  • What problems are we solving? What benefits are we creating?

  • Social Proof. How are we showing that others trust us?

  • Questions. Are we providing value to the viewer by answering a question that they might have?

  • Are we leveraging an existing brand’s awareness and contrasting our superiority?

  • Do we have anything truly unique? Are we highlighting it?

  • How are we framing the value proposition?

• How do we show or say it?

  • Are we leveraging UGC to borrow real user authenticity?

  • Are we showing the product being used in lifestyle imagery?

  • Or are we doing a product demo that focuses on how the features work?

  • Is there a way to show the benefits in a before and after comparison?

  • Stylistically, what type of medium gets the message across the best? Simple text? Photography? Illustration?

  • Are there stylistic choices we need to make for the channel? For instance native text overlay in TikTok?

  • Does the product do better with a specific emotional tone? For instance do we need to be empathetic for a therapy product and exciting for a live events product?

• What kind of media format do we use to convey that message?

  • video

  • image

  • animated

Let’s run through an example of how we might pick a couple of dimensions to generate a matrix of ad variations.

We’ll pretend we’re Supergoop and we’re trying to market their skincare/sunscreen product.

We can position their Glowscreen SPF40 2 ways.

• 1 sells it primarily as skincare that doubles as sunscreen.

• 1 sells it as sunscreen that doesn’t feel greasy.

• The resulting benefits lean on features that are needed to win over buyers for each use-case. We have optionality here on what benefits we want to highlight.

  • Under the benefits section, Options A and B are different.

  • As we move further right through the matrix, we also have optionality for how we want to provide social proof (A, B), as well as how we want to convey our message (A, B, C).

We end up with 12 different permutations for each positioning that we could create.

• Skincare

  • Benefit:A > Social Proof:A > How to Say it:A

  • Benefit:B > Social Proof:A > How to Say it:A

  • Benefit:A > Social Proof:B > How to Say it:A

  • You can even get crazy with the ordering and move Social Proof up first so that the order is

    • Social Proof:A > Benefit:A > How to Say it:A

• and so on and so forth for the moisturizer positioning

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying “yeah yeah in an ideal ad we have all of these dimensions covered”. That’s true. I’d say you’re doing a great job already if you’re doing that. But sometimes maybe the 15 second ad feels way too short to stuff all of these messages in. Or we’re curious as to what opening message will retain viewership past the 3-second mark the most. In those scenarios, it’s helpful to have clarity of thought on which components to move to where in an ad, or to include altogether.

This matrix is also important to layout before you even go for a shoot day. Getting each of these components represented robustly in the shot list for your video production team ensures that you have more lego pieces to play with later when you’re chopping things together for testing.

Let’s finish our thought experiment and queue up 3 ads for Supergoop:

• Moisturizer that doubles as sunscreen. Includes hyaluronic acid + B5. 1m bottles sold per year. Messaged by a happy customer in the UGC format.

• Moisturizer that doubles as sunscreen. Includes hyaluronic acid + B5. 1m bottles sold per year. Produced in-house with lifestyle imagery demoing the product.

• Sunscreen that feels like nothing. Unseen, no white cast, SPF40. Testimonials about the feeling. Messaged by a happy customer in the UGC format.

We run them in facebook or tiktok and see how they perform. Added bonus if we use the ad set a/b split test functionality for cleaner results.

• we notice that the moisturizer positioning retains viewer interest

• we notice that the UGC version has a higher purchase rate

Our learnings are:

• moisturizer positioning is more effective than sunscreen

• UGC format is more effective than high production lifestyle format

As the brand owner, this pays off because this specific placement of components and their ordering allows you to pit specific variables (ie. A, B) within each component against each other and enables you to say something like - we know that lifestyle UGC works best to sell and it seems like our current audience is more interested in the hyaluronic acid + B5 than the wearability with makeup.

This is especially important early on when you don’t really have any data just yet on what works. The more robust your matrix is, the larger the net you cast for finding out what works.

When you identify that winning characteristic - you can double, triple down on it to mine that well over and over again. Generally a high performing ad nails the opening hook, the benefit, the demo, and the social proof. It’s why UGC ads perform so well - they often organically flow through this formula.

It’s also highly possible that the sunscreen ad starts to reach a unique segment of the population that was not interested in the moisturizer value prop - unlocking more scale and volume that the moisturizer ads could not.

Initially, this may seem like a heavier load for a design team - but it’s possible that a more structured and defined framework and an intent to shoot things for usability in evergreen campaigns can result in shot lists that are consistent (reducing need to reinvent the wheel each time). Shoots are expensive to arrange and the more you can batch into a shoot the more you have to work with. If we include the right mix of shots in that batch, we come out with more optionality.

It can feel like there’s only one way to sell or message your product. It’s important to have a beginner’s mind and fresh eyes to unlock other ways the product can be valuable for a user. This framework helps facilitate that.