How to Make NOT Boring Ads

What's up, Marketers! This is Aazar.

This newsletter is about leveling up your paid growth marketing skills by analyzing the best brands' paid strategy, tactics, positioning, and value props.

This newsletter is divided into:

• Sharing what I've learned

• Sometimes sharing some other performance marketers’ lessons with you (this issue)

• And I analyze & compare the best ads on the internet

I am in Toronto to meet with a client in person. It’s a sunny day outside, and I walked 10km. The streets were so busy that I felt like I was in New York.  

Oh, by the way! If you’re in Toronto, reply to this email. I’d love to meet you!

On a side note, I saw this Zoho ad at Union Square and I had a face-palm moment.

This ad lacks life. There is no value added. This is what we’re also going to talk about: How to make NOT boring ads.

BEST LINKS OF THE WEEK (on popular demand)

My favorite finds

• 21-minute step-by-step training on creating production asset creation

• VSL framework is converting traffic @ 9x ROAS on a $100 AOV product

• Relaunch the ads that you launched during the Meta bug see if they perform

• My favorite podcast episode: David Hermann dropping gems on account structure and tactical insights on how to launch ads

This content comes from The Performers’ Mastermind Shlomo Genchin, who shared his insights as a copywriter and how he writes these fun ads. He has worked with some iconic brands like Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Burger King, Hyundai, Duolingo, and many more. 

For context, Shlomo was an ad copywriter for 10+ years in B2C, but now he primarily focuses on B2B. But I’m sure it will be interesting for any vertical.

His POV?

Most B2B ads look like these:

This example at least has a stock image with product screenshots, but it doesn’t deliver the value (at least on the creative level).

He believes in this advice from Bob Thacker: 

“All advertising is unwanted, so if you’re going to crash the party then 

bring some champagne with you.”

These are some of his recent B2B tech ads:

You get the idea.

He has a total of 33 recipes like these and he shared one of them with us.

For simplicity, we’ll use NordPass. 

This is a hypothetical example. Shlomo didn’t work for Nordpass but recreated how he would approach it. The approach is what we are here to learn.

Here’s the ad he found on ad library for NordPass:

So, what’s wrong with this ad?

Redundancy: The ad is very crowded. Logo used twice, For humans at work — meaningless tagline, and two CTAs (in the creative and ads manager CTA learn more)

Here’s is real reason why we get stuck in a creativity hole that makes most ads meaningless:

Either we are afraid that we won’t sound smart enough.

OR we’re afraid that our readers aren’t smart enough.

But you need to assume that you or your reader IS smart. 

As grandpa Ogilvy said:

 “The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her 

intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid 

adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.”

Thanks to our partners who support this newsletter. No one enjoys ad breaks, not even ad marketers (I know), but we need to support our partners, somehow 🤷.

Tools worth checking out:

Atria: You're only as good an advertiser as your swipe file. Atria helps save good ads and analyze them in-depth. But the best part? Their AI helps me create concepts and scripts within seconds. Check it out for free. Most importantly, they now have built-in ad analytics to make more winning ads.

Creative OS: Don’t waste your designer’s time in copying swipe files. Get all static ad templates to increase your experiments and ad creatives’ velocity. Check it out here.

How to make your ad smart so that your customers feel smart too?

Use reductionism. It’s the art of keeping only what’s essential for the message.

Here’s how you can implement reductions in your ads. There are 8 elements to a static ad:

• Headline

• Sub-headline

• Visual

• Logo

• Tagline

• Body copy

• Captions

• CTA

We start by including everything, then reduce elements one by one. Do we need the website address? Can the headline be shorter or removed? Should we delete the tagline or logo? By simplifying step by step, we achieve a more minimalistic design.

So, after removing logo, tagline, and CTAs. This is how the same ad looks, but the headline is still unclear. 

How to make your ad clear enough

Step #1 – Use this technique: This ad is about …?

In the Nordpass ad, you saw that it is about: how risky it is to manage and share passwords manually.

Once you know what it’s about, you can make it clever.

Step # 2 – The visual 

This is the key ingredient of this recipe. So as you can see below, the image right now is very generic. We have someone holding their head and it's always the same idea.

The key to visual ads are the “keywords” such as: share, manage, risky, manually and passwords. For this ad, the keyword is “risky.” Shlomo uses this keyword on Shutterstock to generate ideas.

He tries to find some interesting visuals to use in the ads.

He loves this image because it is the wrong image (not a typical image for cyber security).

When you associate a password manager, it is connected to security and this is how the image usually comes across:

But Shlomo chose the “wrong” image to share his idea.

His point of view:

Step #3 – The copy

He does extensive research to find the right headlines and subheadlines. While researching, he stumbled on this blog that the word “password” is the 7th most common password. Here are the others:

He then turns this into an ad.

Step #4 – The Validation

The only way to truly validate an ad is to run it. Most of us do this, but these two tests help him to know if he is heading in the right direction (I personally loved it). 

The “Get IT” test

When you try to be clever, there's always a risk of being unclear.  

ChatGPT’S Response:

The “3-Ad Series Test” 

Shlomo: 

If I can turn my idea into a series, it means I have a concept, not just a one-off.

And this is what he came up with.

The second ad:

Step #5 – The captions (the FB ads’ primary text + headline sections)

He still needs to make the ad stronger, so he found some more cues in the NordPass website:

• 44,000+ business clients

• Starts from $1.79

• 24/7 premium support

And here’s the final ad:

Genius?

He made an excellent summary, I took a screenshot from our call:

Shlomo freely shared his ideas and you can find some here too. 

Here are my three takeaways from this entire process of ad creation:

• For ad ideation: This ad is about the framework

• For visuals: Use the keywords in Shutterstock to get inspired

• For ad validation: Use ChatGPT’s response for the “get it” test

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.

Three ways I can help you, whenever you are ready:

• Work with me to get you growth from paid marketing. Book a call here. I’m open to more clients now.

• Level up your paid marketing by joining my community, where we share the latest tactics and get nuanced paid marketing questions answered here (we are now 70+, but there is a waitlist to join).

• Promote yourself to 13,000+ highly qualified paid marketers by sponsoring this newsletter. Advertise here.

And if this was forwarded to you, subscribe below with 1-click: