a huge thanks to story blocks for sponsoring this video what iteration should you make on winning creatives should you even bother iterating on losing creatives this is the exact iteration I made recently that spent $2 million and had a three row o what's up marketers I have a hot take that tends to surprise people when looking at your creative testing you should spend 90% of your tests on net new creatives and only 10% on iterations why I'll let you know when we get to iteration 4 we're going to go through 10 of my favorite iterations
to make on Creative tests starting from beginner level all the way up to Advanced so let's dive in number one is messaging iterations and yes this is the easiest iteration to make which is why we are starting here and I also think it's one of the most common forms of iterations here you're simply going to leave the creative Asis and swap out the most important messaging for something new and this is the exact type of iteration that I made to SP $2 million on a creative test recently and it ended up having a three row
as I actually made that iteration back in July and it is still the top performer in the ad account as of November 2024 now how did I know what type of messaging to switch out right I actually think that this is where a lot of people mess up so what I actually did is I looked at eight of the other top performing creatives and I took the messaging points from those creatives and altered them a little bit so that they could be put on this particular step static some of these messaging points that I was
trying out were testimonials some were a little bit more superlative in nature like this but the messaging point that ended up winning out was actually based on something that was like this sorry that I can't show you the actual creative ndas we can all relay right now A really important note about this type of iteration I would only really spend time doing this iteration if you have a creative that's really winning we saw the original creative performing for several months but we just knew that we could get more juice out of the squeeze which is
why I decided to do a really straightforward messaging iteration test number two edit iterations and we're just going to talk about visuals here now especially if you find a piece of Creator content or video content doing well I would swap out how you're doing the visuals particularly in the hook so I'd make iterations for this using a green screen using a split screen as well as using more of a grid style format these seem to be really popular moving into 2025 now I was thrilled to partner with story blocks on this particular video because if
you can't find the right type of Creator content I actually really like looking through their asset library to find something to fit in with this type of iteration story BLX has a curated Content Library that has everything you need to create highquality video ads for meta in just one place with over a million 4K and HD footage templates music sound effects images and more and they are constantly adding new clips so there's always something new to test with with your ad creative and the best part is anything that you download with story blocks is 100%
royaltyfree and safe to use on your ad creative and you don't have to plan a photo shoot fumble around with AI Solutions or hire a Creator to make that content for you it is literally instantaneous and it works just as well to get started with unlimited stock media downloads at one set price head to story blocks.com darad Deni or click the link in the description now number three is another variation on edit iterations that you can do really easily and this is going to be more for your messaging visual so this is really going to
change how your messaging is going to show up particularly in your video creative so if I find a piece of Creator content or a video piece of content that's doing really well I also really like to test out that exact same asset with a Tik Tok response bubble with a new headline and here's where you can also get creative swapping in different types of messaging to really highlight what the asset is going to be all about you can also test out more native or brand own visuals and another thing I want to mention is also
captions now this is also where I would have creative strategist coming up to me and be like oh we should do an AB test to see if captions or no captions works better for this ad account and it's so interesting I've actually tested this several times recently across many different accounts and really there's not much conclusive evidence either way let me know in the comments if this is a test that you've done recently because I'm a little lost I'm actually starting to not use as many captions inside of my ad creative and it seems to
be performing just as well but I'm kind of curious if you guys are seeing the same thing and number four is format iterations if you find that a piece of creative is doing well and you already did a few variation tests within that initial test and you found that just one specific variation is really doing well it is safe to assume that it is likely going to be a part of the messaging which is why it's working so well my main point here is that if you find that a piece of messaging is doing well
try it out across different form formats and really try changing the look and feel of that drastically so if you find something that's winning on video creative for instance try developing that into a wide range of image assets too something that I've had a big learning on recently and I've talked about with a lot of other creative strategist is how much more the messaging impacts the creative as opposed to the format or the visuals now I've spent over $100 million on meta ads and one of the biggest mistakes that I see Junior creative strategist making
is is that they think that they can only make iterations Based on data or they can only make creative tests based on the prior learnings that they have and like that's a really good Instinct but sometimes I think it puts you in big danger of what I call iteration paralysis this is where all of your creatives end up looking and feeling the same to users which means that it's really hard to scale out of that minimum viable customer that's why I'm really encouraging teams to have 90% n new creative and only 10% iterations because most
of the times when teams are doing iterations they are simply doing the first messaging iteration and they're carrying the same look and feel throughout all their creatives because they think they have that learning that's what's going to do better but it actually just makes everything look and feel the same which puts you in the risk of having creative fatigue a lot easier one of the big ways that you can get out of that is by doing format iterations so keeping the messaging points that you know are doing well and putting them into wildly different visuals
and formats that was a long one number five is Creator iterations this is a pretty easy Concept in theory but if you find that a certain piece of ugc content is doing well simply try it with a new Creator now I've also done this with creative brief so if I find oh this specific brief tends to produce really good creative then I'll just try and give that to as many creators as I can now another way that you can look at this iteration too is by looking at the types of Creator content that performed well
for you and really Z in on hm what types of demographics are really working here is it a certain age a certain race a certain Vibe a certain sort of curation that the Creator is going for and really trying to replicate that but I will say don't try to go down this path too long really try to keep your creators as diverse as possible and really encourage them to lean into their own unique style that's where you're going to get the most juice out of the squeeze for this but I do find sometimes hey it
really is just as easy as taking a winning script and trying it with a new Creator my favorite way to do this actually is if you find that a specific script works with someone a lot older or a lot younger go the complete opposite so that you can open up into a net new demographic ooh and number six is green screen over an ad and I know what you're thinking you're like oh my God we already talked about green screen I'm actually saying if you have a winning ad creative simply do a green screen over
that exact ad asset this is something that I saw oats over I do quite a bit and I've tried myself on a number of Brands and it really does work if especially if you had a few of those unicorn smashing ad creatives that everyone seems to have seen having a Creator react to that type of content by using the green screen effect I have seen to be really really fun and effective and what's great is you can use this not only on images but also video creative as well and it also turns a lot of
your winning image creatives into video which is very very cool to test and number seven now we're getting in a lot deeper into messaging strategies and this first messaging strategy that you can think about making iterations on is really a part of the user Journey now I've shown this slide in a few videos recently about how to make more scalable creative essentially what this iteration is is simply identifying which part of the user Journey this messaging or this creative is targeting and trying to go even further up funnel by making it more educational making it
more humorous and citing more more curiosity in the ad creative this is one that I've tested out a few times especially recently and it almost always results in extending the length of how long the creative is performing number eight another great messaging iteration is looking into the human desire that is being elicited in your ad creative and simply trying a new one maybe you're looking at your ad creative and you're like I'm not really sure if I'm leaning into a key human desire here well this would be a good iteration to test then now the
place that I learned about the key human desires was from Sten rice who wrote that there were 16 Key Human desires that motivate people not only into buying but really just motivate them in their everyday lives and I found the ones that tend to really work a lot in advertising are ones like Beauty and romance power as well as family actually one of my big learnings in 2024 was that a lot of AD creative that I saw in the top performers is actually in some way referred to someone's family or family member your family is
inherently incredibly emotional um so what I would suggest is taking a look at your top performing creative and seeing hm how can I actually inject a family angle or even another human desire angle into that ad creative to test this is one that I feel is actually pretty Advanced I've only really talked about it in my course so if you're interested in me doing a video on the 16 human desires let me know I would be so happy to make that video I think it's long overdue number n is actually just for one type of
ad creative which is a Founders ad so this is the type of iterations I would do on Founders ads and some of this is actually based on a recent conversation I had with Barry hot so be sure to go follow him over on Twitter he is also coming out with a course soon which I am very very excited about I am also going to be doing a lesson with you guys in there so be sure to go follow him and to sign up for his course it's truly amazing but the specific founder ad iteration is
a lot of times when I'm working with brands see that they've done a few more lowii Founders ad iterations which is great it's a great place to start but this is actually the number one piece of AD creative that I would suggest you taking more high-fi and if you really want to try doing some more high production value ad creative the founders at is absolutely 100% the one that's most likely to perform there was actually an ad creative that I produced that was more high-fi in nature over 4 years ago and it is still running
today in the ad account and I'll say the reason why I think this ad creative really performs and why many other high production Founders ads I've seen work is because they're not actually writing out as much of a script they are actually asking the founder questions right so when I would conduct these Founders interviews at thesis I would actually have 10 to 20 questions that I would be asking them to really elicit more emotional storytelling and responses from the founder a lot of times if you do something that is more scripted it just you know
kind of comes out blah but that's why if you take the approach of actually asking a Founder questions and getting the type of content that way that's what I've seen work really really well and again Barry hot is someone I've seen talk about this recently and it's absolutely something that I want to underscore and underline um yeah so that's a very very good iteration to make if you find either oh I want to invest in something that's a little bit more high production or oh I you know haven't seen my Founders ads work as well
this might be why and you might want to actually try asking your founder questions as opposed to giving them a script and number 10 I actually want to talk about losing creatives right so a lot of times we'll see oh the specific creative didn't actually work that well is it worth making iterations on I would say 9 out of 10 times do not make iterations on losing creative it's losing for a reason so why would you want to iterate on something that isn't high confidence you'd actually probably want to iterate on something that you have
a lot higher confidence in however ever there are times where I have iterated on losing creatives and it's because I realize that we really made a mistake in the editing or in the messaging so this is actually where I would look back at all of the nine other iterations particularly the messaging ones the user Journey ones the human desire ones and ask yourself is there something that I could have done here way better to elicit that type of emotional response or knowing from the user then I'd say yeah try making an iteration then but otherwise
sometimes creatives are just meant to die but maybe that's the one that people don't agree with me on let me know in the comments and that's it thank you so much for joining me today I can't wait to see you guys next week love you bye
