Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I hope you’re all enjoying the last few weeks of summer - it’s difficult to believe that Q4 is just 50 days away, but calendars don’t lie (I cannot speak to the people using calendars, however).
Over the past few weeks, I’ve written extensively about my philosophy vis-a-vis creative – specifically, that creative performance exhibits the fundamental characteristics of a power law game, and, all other things being equal, more creative production = better ad account performance.
This philosophy is grounded in mathematics and logic - two things many marketers have come to loathe when it doesn’t jive with what they’re selling.
For anyone who is Very Online™, you may (or may not) be aware of a cordial-but-low-key-heated debate, started by “psychological” or “neuro” marketers – with the gist being that there are ways (usually: “hire me!”) to guarantee you’re producing creatives that resonate using psychological phenomena and/or behavioral economics.
Let’s state the obvious: this is a false dichotomy. The choice is not - and was never - “make lots of ads” or “make ads that follow better practices, tap into emotion and/or leverage well-known psychological tactics.”
This leads to the most common question I’ve gotten in response to Issue #70: “This sounds great, and I understand the math, but how do you do this? How do you take this concept and turn it into actual creative production?”
The short answer: you do your homework
The long answer: you read the rest of this article.
Effective advertising begins with emotion + understanding. It shows rather than tells, it makes you feel rather than think, it connects rather than divides. The foundation that enables any (and all) of that is homework. The insights + curiosities uncovered through this process are what fuel our ad creative matrix, which is what enables you to accelerate your production of high-quality content.
I focus on five types of homework, in this order: (1) the product, (2) the brand/experience, (3) the team, (4) the audience and (5) the market.
The Product/Service
It is near-impossible to effectively market a product you do not understand. There’s a reason the best restaurants in the world insist that their staff see, smell and taste the entire menu – it’s because that experience is infinitely more impactful than any chef-y description or flowery language or staged photo of the dish. There’s magic in experiencing whatever it is that you’re selling (and make no mistake: marketing is selling).
It’s for that same reason I visit our client sites, buy their products and use their services: I want to see, touch, feel, experience what it is we’re selling. David Ogilvy famously wrote that he often spent weeks (sometimes months) using a product before ever attempting to advertise it. While you need not always go to those lengths, there’s no excuse for neglecting the process.
As you’re reviewing the product/service, I start with the following questions:
- What does this product/service actually do? What problem does it purport to solve?
- Who do I think this product/service was made for? Who is it NOT made for?
- Does it actually accomplish the goal? How?
- What are the benefits of this product? What features enable these benefits?
- How is it differentiated from everything else in the market?
- If I didn’t know about this product, what would I do to solve it?
- If this entire class of products didn’t exist, what’s the alternative to solve the problem?
- How do I feel about this product/service?
- What’s the experience of using this product, from beginning to end?
- Does the experience of acquiring the product/service align with the experience of using it?
Some of these questions will be easier to answer than others - particularly if you challenge yourself to tune out the context you may already have (from the brand itself, from any pre-existing knowledge you may have of the space, etc.) and focus solely on the product/service itself. I’ve found that many marketers suffer from a curse of knowledge: because we’ve spent so much time around the brand in question, we subconsciously fill in the gaps around the product. We make assumptions based on understanding and context regular users/customers would never have. And this leads us to overlook flaws and to focus our attention on what the brand wants, vs. what the experience is.
I’m not going to lie: this is boring. It’s tedious. It’s frustrating. It’s inefficient. But it’s necessary.
As you use the product/service, take copious notes. Document everything, preferably using video (this has gotten remarkably easier now that AI video editors/note-takers can reliably summarize 90%+ of your notes for you) – as that way you can view specific details, vs. trying to remember them based on words alone.
Secondly: whenever a member of our team references or uses a competitor product/service/platform, I ask them why – what was it that caused you to select a competitor (or, more commonly, why was our client’s offer not compelling enough for you to make a switch)? The answers to these questions are often as valuable as my own observations about the product/service, as they help to neutralize my own inherent biases.
The observations that you make that this stage will become fuel of your ad creative machine – and like any fuel, the greater than quality AND quantity, the farther (and the faster) you’ll go.
The Experience + The Brand
I don’t consider the brand until I’ve experienced the product, for one simple reason: the overwhelming majority of users/customers/clients will have their expectations of a brand set via a story, long before they have an actual experience with the brand. And if that experience doesn’t live up to that expectation, it doesn’t matter how objectively good the experience itself was: the customer/client/user will have a poor subjective brand experience.
I want to see if the product/service lives up to the brand – and the only way to do that is to first assess the product/service, then consider the brand. Why? Because marketers have a nasty habit of selective experience - we know the brand (and many of us intuitively understand aspects of psychology and human behavior), so we focus on elements of the product/eservice that align with our understanding of the brand. We see what we want to see to make the client happy.
But if you do it the other way around - if you ignore the brand completely at first, then only consider it once you’ve taken copious notes of the product/service, the gaps stick out like the Burj Khalifa from the Dubai skyline.
The second data point you’ll uncover are the areas of synergy, where the benefits of the product/service and the position of the brand are in perfect harmony. Find those points of overlap + feature them prominently, particularly in hooks.
The Team
One of the most under-appreciated types of research – and a near-endless supply of good ideas – comes from the brand’s team itself. I can’t count the number of times where a meeting with a project leader, an engineer, or a customer success team has provided incredible insights – from the small details included in a given product, to how a service was structured to avoid other challenges, to why an aspect of the offering is the way it is.
Spend as much time as you can speaking with the product teams – particularly the people who designed the offering (engineers, architects, etc.) and the people who interface directly with the customers (sales people, customer success teams, customer service reps, etc.).
As with everything else, document everything. You’ll be amazed at what you learn – and often, these conversations are what leads to the “ah-hah!” moments – connecting the product + the brand together in new ways.
Things to ask must include:
- Walk us through the process of creating the product/service
- What - in your experience - is different about your product/service vs. competitors
- Which competitors did you review + consider when creating this product/service
- How is this different from everything else in the marketplace?
- What are your favorite features of the product/service?
- What do customers/users/clients like most about the product/service?
- When a user stops using the product/service, what are their reasons for doing so?
Candidly, most agencies (+ most creatives) nail this portion, due simply to the structure of those engagements (as part of any onboarding, you tend to talk to people on the client’s team and ask more than a few questions).
But the individuals, agencies, teams, etc. that reliably make remarkable ads (and drive exceptional performance over long periods of time) go farther. They put what they’ve heard from the client/brand + team to the test:
If the client tells you their product is more durable than anything on the market, they put it (and the competitor products) through the most grueling tests they can imagine.
If a brand says that their food is superior in taste and quality to any of their competitive set, they order all of it (without telling the client - just to make sure you’re getting what Jane Smith will get) and compare.
If the client says that their sales team is exceptional, the smart marketer secret shops and puts those people to the test.
If the client claims that anyone can open an account or do X in Y time (“build your dream photoshoot in less than 10 minutes”), find the least technical person you know, give them a task, a phone and the client’s URL, then start the stopwatch. When they fail, not only have you found a significant gap in the actual experience (which is just going to lead to lower conversion rates), but you’ve likely also uncovered a series of issues that, once fixed, will help all other traffic (not just paid traffic) perform better.
Trust, but verify. Some of my greatest failures in advertising have come from taking what a client said at face value. Don’t make that mistake.
And when you find the aspects of the product/service/offering that actually live up to the brand’s claims (and you will find some), use them everywhere. You may have to position them differently for various audiences (more on that below) or distinguish them from what your competitors offer, but those bona fide nuggets of truth are golden.
The Audience
We live in a golden age for audience research – yet the vast majority of agencies refuse to conduct legitimate audience research (then have the gall to tell the client, “We don’t know why X didn’t work or Y audience isn’t buying!”).
I think every brand should do three types of audience research:
Type 1: Broad Audience Research
I’ve written before (and I have zero affiliation with this company, other than I’m a paying customer) that if I could only have one market research tool, it’d be SparkToro. There’s nothing that matches Sparktoro’s combination of accessibility, depth and breadth. It never fails to be a goldmine of insight.
Taking a step back, SparkToro provides broad audience insight – give it some commonalities (whether it’s a current customer list, or people who talk about X, or followers of Account X, or people who visit the site Y, or users of the Z App), and it’ll identify the other nodes of the online ecosystem those people are most likely to visit, engage with and listen to. That information, in turn, can be used for anything from:
Identifying where to place ads Seeing what other brands those users tend to frequent Determining where that audience is most likely to research/get information Finding groups, publications and platforms that audience is likely to use
All of which is helpful for doing critical things like (a) determining the types of content you should create (do they prefer text-based content or video? Do they like short, social-style posts or longer explainers?), (b) understanding that audience’s natural content language (do they prefer traditional narrative arcs or abbreviated ones? Do they prefer statistics or stories? What types of content do they tend to read - articles, essays, blogs, reddit posts, Tweets) and (c) what other characteristics of this audience might be relevant to your marketing strategy (location, age, education level, career choices, etc.)?
Type 2: Specific Customer Insights
Broad audience research is wonderful to understanding your audience generally, but generalities are only part of the story. The other half - and the half most neglected - is structured customer/client feedback.
Most brands simply don’t do it, or if they do, it’s accidental (i.e. a customer/client/user emails someone and says, “Wow, this is AWESOME!” or “I can’t stand this…”). This creates a pair of serious, and persistent, problems: (1) people who proactively email/text/call brands are rarely, if ever, representative of the brand’s actual customer profile and (2) when those interactions are the only interactions, they tend to lodge themselves into the minds of the brand’s marketing (and executive) teams in a particularly persistent way.
What any agency/brand should endeavor to build is a structured process to communicate with their audience in a way that filters out the noise + gets to the signal. My preferred way is relatively simple: have someone senior (an executive, the owner, someone with a fancy title) email a single customer, at random, with a somewhat-personalized message every single day. If you want to be an overachiever, you can do more – maybe a single customer/client for a single service, or a specific product line, etc.
Thanks to the miracle that is Zapier, you can have those emails feed directly into a Google Sheet, and with a little LLM Integration Magic, you can have the tone, key points, etc. extracted and analyzed on a regular basis.
That’s the easy part. A decent number of brands do this (maybe 10% to 20%). But that’s where those brands stop – they collect the data, maybe do some analysis, and leave it be. Maybe once a year they brush the dust off and trot it out for an executive briefing.
What separates the truly remarkable from the remarkably ordinary is the willingness to take this information and use it to accelerate their ad creative machine. Consumers are an endlessly renewable source of insight, if you’re willing to listen and do the work to parse the signal from the noise. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Stanley Cups, who solicited massive amounts of feedback on their tumblers from loyal customers, and through that feedback, uncovered both the audience + the distribution channel that catapulted them from a good ($75M+) business to a juggernaut ($750M+).
Type 3: The Unknown Customer
If the first bit of audience research helps you understand your broader market, and the second helps you understand a specific subset of your customers, the third bridges the gap: focusing on talking to the people who fall into (1) but not into (2).
For this, you need non-customers from your target audience. The people who should buy/use your product/service, but don’t.
The objective of this research is to understand what these individuals value, how they make purchase decisions, and (crucially) what promises/claims you could make that would encourage them to buy from you.
The Landscape
“We have no competition.”
“Our product is the best on the market, period.”
“We have the best [product/service] in the market.”
“There’s NO ONE who can match our offering or do what we do.”
“We’re the only company in the world doing X.”
In the past two months, I’ve been told each of those things by executives at current or prospective client brands. And while I have no insider knowledge as to whether or not they actually believed it, the simple reality is this: not one of those statements is true.
Every brand has a competitor. There is an alternative to using any product or service (even if that alternative is “do nothing”).
Too many brands - particularly start-ups - make the mistake of thinking that all competition is problematic; that somehow, the existence of other offerings reflects negatively on their business. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The mistake isn’t in acknowledging competition; the mistake is in ignoring competition.
For every client we work with, I want to know as much about the competitive landscape as is humanly possible:
- How do their products/services compare to our client’s? What are the points of difference?
- Where are our client’s products/services superior to each competitor? Are there any competitors that are markedly better than us across the board?
- How does each competitor position themselves from a brand standpoint?
- What types of ads does each competitor run? What offers? When?
- What features/benefits does each competitor focus on?
- Are each of those features/benefits legitimate areas of strength for the competitor, or are they areas of ego + delusion?
- Which platforms does each competitor rely on?
- What type of emotion - if any - does each competitor attempt to evoke?
- What experience does each competitor offer before, during and after the transaction?
- What are the sentiments of each brand’s target audience across social media platforms?
I often find that it’s helpful to plot each competitor on a series of 2x2 or 3x3 matrices, using the following axes:
- Niche vs. Broad
- Emotional vs. Commodity
- Large vs. Small
- Level of Differentiation (low to high)
- Level of Innovation (low to high)
- Financial Positioning (Low Cost to Luxury)
- Adoption (low to high)
- Level of Audience Attachment (high to low)
- Approx. Level of Profitability (high to low)
Not all of these will be eye-opening (in fact, most will be mundane) – but a few of them will yield disproportionately powerful insights.
So, what now?
In each of these types of research, you’re hunting for points of difference, for the nuggets of insight that will lead to big, profitable, differentiated ideas. Or, as Roy Whittier, the former Copy Chief at Young & Rubicam wrote, “the beginning of greatness is to be different, and the beginning of failure is to be the same.”
All of this research is aimed at a single goal: to systematically identify the opportunities to be different, so that you can capitalize on them across your marketing. That’s it. Find the opportunities - whether via a detail, a benefit, an audience, a promise, an emotion, an under-served market segment, whatever - transform them into creative at a remarkable rate, and continue to do even when you hit home runs.
The thing about research + homework is that there aren’t any shortcuts. There’s just the work. From an agency perspective, clients often bristle at the prospect of our spending weeks (or longer) just on research + auditing – as they should. Any good client has a proclivity for action – they want to see results, and now.
But, by the same token, any good partner (agency, freelancer, whatever) has an obligation to ensure that the actions taken are in service of the client’s objectives.
Sun Tzu famously wrote, “If you know yourself and your enemy, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” I’m not a general (unless you count my time playing Command & Conquer), so I can’t validate his claim as it relates to battles – but I can confirm that what separates the effective marketers from the ineffective ones tends to be their level of knowledge, preparation and attention to detail.
Ultimately, the most successful brands (and ad accounts) I’ve worked on all have three things in common:
- They never stop doing their homework
- They lean into a structured process that transforms their homework into creative
- They understand that quality + quantity are complements, not opposites
Before we wrap this issue, if anyone still thinks that quality alone can overcome quantity:
Steph Curry takes 500 shots every single day. Picasso created more than 13,500 paintings. Ogilvy wrote over a million words. Nike published nearly 700 ads last month alone.
Yes, brilliance helps. Sure, a well-researched ad has a higher probability of succeeding than a poorly-conceived one. But there are no guarantees in this game. The surest way to improve your creative performance is to marry quantity and quality, starting with research.
Until next week,
Sam
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