What's up, Marketers! This is Aazar.

This newsletter is all about giving you ad ideas to find wins and help you scale.

This newsletter includes: My learnings, insights from other performance marketers, and analysis of top internet ads (this issue).

P.S. Do you want more scalable and winning ad creatives? Book a call here. I’m open to more clients now.

P.P.S. This newsletter is long; please check the web version here.

Lastly, my friend Josh Viner is running a workshop on how to activate the buyer's brain with your ads instead of talking at them. Check it out here.

A few months ago, two of our scaling ad accounts started breaking. Like nothing changed but the ROAS was down by 50%. Funnels were fine, offers too and landing pages as well..

At first, it made no sense. The winning ads were still winning. Nothing looked broken. So we added more “diverse” creatives, hoping fresh variations would fix the problem.

They didn’t.

Because they weren’t actually diverse. They were just the same ad wearing a different outfit. New hook, same creator. New angle, same script. And Meta knew it.

The campaigns only turned around when we stopped producing more of the same and started building true creative diversity.

That’s what this edition breaks down: how we turned one winning idea into ten ads that kept reaching new buyers.

Quick heads up: this edition is about video formats, so static ads are a story for another day. Also, I can't be revealing my clients' names(NDAs, you know😅)

Every ad gets its own ID, so it looks new to you. Meta reads deeper.

Think of it like twins in different outfits. Still the same two people. 

Meta treats your ads the same way. A new hook or caption is just a wardrobe change, and it still recognizes the same creative underneath.

You might upload 20 ads and feel like you're testing 20 ideas. Meta might only see 5.

Note: We broke down the testing phase in a past edition, so we are keeping that part short here. Want the full testing playbook? Read it here.

The way out is to make each ad different enough that Meta reads it as a genuinely fresh creative.

I will use two of our own accounts to show this. I’m gonna call them Client 1 and Client 2.

Client 1: Leaned on one winner too hard.

Our big winner was the "stage effect," someone presenting on a stage with real authority. It worked so well we made a pile of it.

Stage effect example: 

ROAS back then

Then it stalled:

ROAS now

Client 2: the visuals changed, the scripts did not.

Here we thought we had diversity covered.

The lesson from both accounts:

Before we dive in, it's important to understand that we're talking about scaling a campaign after finding a winning ad angle in the testing phase.

Now, let me share the framework to go about this:

This was the shift that turned it around. Build different versions of the same message so different people can each find the one that feels made for them.

A founder, a first time buyer, and a skeptic can all want the same product. They rarely respond to the same video.

For every winning concept, build five "perfect match" versions:

One idea. Five very different videos. Each one makes a different person think, "this is for me."

Now, the above ad is one of the longest-running ads of Im8. Now, if you notice their top ads, they have different versions of creatives

They have ads running with:

They also have ads targeting different personas and audience types, with Jay Shetty and Bare Nutrition.

Here’s another ad account

Here’s the creatives they’re scaling with

They have got different ads going on:

Thanks to our partners who support this newsletter.

You've probably preached it to your team: "Test different personas. Different emotions. Different hooks. Don't recycle the same format 20 times."

But here's what I see happen: Teams think they're testing diversity. They launch 15 ads. But they're actually just running 15 variations of the same angle with different headlines.

Atria just shipped a tool that measures it.

Creative Diversity scores how varied your ad mix actually is across 10 dimensions: persona, emotion, visual style, theme, media format, and more.

You get a single score (0-100) so you see where you actually stand. Then a breakdown showing which dimensions are overloaded and which are dormant.

I've been testing this. The insight that usually hits hardest: "I thought I was testing diversity, but I was just testing copy."

It's a quick way to validate if you're actually doing the thing you know you should be doing.

Find your creative diversity score for free.

When we rebuild a winner now, we change the biggest parts first. The higher up this list you go, the more different the ad actually feels.

Find 11 different founder ad formats here

And other formats like:

For Client 1 we stretched one authority angle across settings: shot like a podcast and a documentary. The authority worked, so we placed it everywhere.

Meta reads the opening to decide what your ad is, so change what it sees first:

The moment we made our hooks visual instead of spoken, delivery improved.

Check 17 different visual hook archetypes here

Different faces reach different people:

Notice how Whisper Flow is targeting different groups of people and different cultures with different ads. 

Same product, different reason to care. Go past the surface problem and test the deeper motivation:

This is a very strong ad for identity reasons.

Still matters, and it lands harder when the visual changes with it. 

For Client 2 this was the missing piece. We wrote brand new scripts and structures, and moved from listicle style reads into VSL style storytelling.

Experiment with new stories.

Here's a detailed newsletter I did about 25 hooks you must try.

These feel new but rarely move anything:

Useful sometimes. Not enough to find new audiences.

Before any shoot, ask:

Nail those before you roll, and one winning idea gives you ten real videos instead of ten lookalikes.

May you find more diverse winning unicorn ads with this guide.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

Since this newsletter is free, I do it to follow my curiosity. But I’d love it if you could leave some feedback so I know if I am helping you or not.