Episode 17
From Bad Ads to Great Ones: Insights on Creative Testing in Advertising
Join us as we dive into the evolving landscape of digital advertising with Robert from Brill Media, uncovering the critical role of creative testing in today’s marketing strategies. We explore how the convergence of podcast advertising offers a unique resonance compared to traditional models, while trust in podcasters increasingly overshadows social media influencers. Robert shares insights on the importance of skilled marketers in navigating the complexities of advertising, particularly in a tech-rich environment where AI is reshaping targeting and the deprecation of cookies is challenging data attribution. With a focus on the human touch, we discuss how effective storytelling can captivate audiences and drive engagement. Grab your mugs and prepare for a thought-provoking conversation that blends technology with the art of connection in the digital space.
Takeaways:
- In today's digital advertising landscape, creative content is becoming increasingly important compared to strict data-driven metrics.
- Robert emphasizes the need for businesses to have a solid advertising strategy to avoid poor decision-making.
- Podcast advertising is gaining traction due to its unique ability to build trust with audiences, unlike many social media influencers.
- The rise of AI in advertising will continue to shape targeting and creative strategies, making it essential for marketers.
- Privacy concerns are shifting the way advertisers approach data, making attribution more challenging yet crucial for success.
- Effective A/B testing involves creating numerous variations of ads to find the best-performing creative assets.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Starbucks
- Brill Media
- Meta
- TikTok
- YouTube
- CapCut
- DaVinci Resolve
- Thrive
💬 Want to get involved? Leave us a comment, give us a 'like,' and follow us for more insights. Join our Locals for lively discussions, and if you've got questions, email us at bdeister@digitalcafe.media!
👕 Check out our merch: www.digitalcafe.store
🌟 Review the Podcast if you loved this episode and share it with fellow marketers who could benefit from a treasure trove of podcasting wisdom. Tune in to "Digital Coffee: Marketing Brew" and let's brew up some success together!
Transcript
That's good.
Brett Dicer:And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.
Brett Dicer:And I'm your host, Brett Dicer.
Brett Dicer:And this week we're going to be talking about ads.
Brett Dicer:Everybody's favorite thing to really understand, but also hates them at the same time because we hate bad ads.
Brett Dicer:That's what we usually hate.
Brett Dicer:And majority of ads are unfortunately bad.
Brett Dicer:But this week or this month, I should say I have Robert with me.
Brett Dicer: he has been advertising since: Brett Dicer:He has shifted from just doing your ordinary thing.
Brett Dicer:And she's also helped companies advertise on Many he About 62% of them have failed because they don't know how to advertise effectively, which is what we're going to be talking about.
Brett Dicer:So welcome to the show, Robert.
Robert:Thanks, Brad.
Robert:Appreciate you having me.
Robert:Yeah.
Robert:I spent 20 years in advertising and one thing I know is that a lot of people hate advertising, dislike advertising, but they also like the benefits that come with advertising, such as free access to some of the world's best platforms.
Robert:But we get it.
Robert:We're marketers, we're advertisers, we're interrupters.
Robert:And sometimes that's not the best.
Brett Dicer:And the first question is all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?
Robert:A hundred percent coffee.
Robert:And drinking coffee right now, did you.
Brett Dicer:Have any favorite brews or you just like Starbucks and I don't really care?
Robert:No, I'm a little bit of a snob.
Robert:We went to Hawaii last year for a few weeks and I'm drinking, oh, man, Kauai coffee.
Robert:The brand is called kawaii, which I just.
Robert:Here's the thing about this.
Robert:In at I'm in Los Angeles, so in super in at the supermarket here in Los Angeles, you can get kawaii coffee.
Robert:But it's 10% of the coffee is from Hawaii.
Robert:The rest of it is from around the world, like South America and other places.
Robert:The coffee that I buy is from the E Commerce store.
Robert:Their website is 100% Hawaiian coffee.
Robert:Dramatically different, rich, robust flavor.
Robert:And I recommend it for all my coffee snob friends.
Brett Dicer:Nice.
Brett Dicer:And I gave a brief summary of your expertise.
Brett Dicer:But can you give listeners a little bit more about what you do?
Robert:Yeah.
Robert:Digital advertising, how to use data targeting technology algorithms to find your best customers.
Robert:Worked in the business for 20 years.
Robert:I've grown my agency, Brill Media for the last 10 years.
Robert:And we buy ads on search, social display, connected tv, digital out of home, et cetera.
Robert:So if you need to reach customers, drive more sales, we do that with advertising with predictable, repeatable and scalable business solutions.
Robert:The best you have out there.
Brett Dicer:Got you.
Brett Dicer:And as we all know, the digital landscape has been changing, especially advertising has evolved.
Brett Dicer:So what are the current trends that we're seeing in the digital advertising space?
Robert:Absolutely.
Robert:There's a couple of things I'll talk general.
Robert:Consumers want their privacy.
Robert:They have spoken, governments have spoken about that.
Robert:So it's becoming, the data in advertising is, has lower fidelity.
Robert:So we don't have exact attribution.
Robert:We have close to exact attribution.
Robert:And as a result, it's now harder for advertisers on these channels to make a direct one to one attribution between a lead and an ad or a sale in an ad.
Robert:So as a result, we are moving back to what were the foundations maybe 10 to 20 years ago in advertising, which is creative is king.
Robert:We can still target the right people with media and data, but at the end of the day we will have to use the fundamentals, the strategic fundamentals of advertising to reach consumers.
Robert:And what are those?
Robert:You start, you look at the demand funnel, look at people at the top of the demand funnel.
Robert:They don't know anything about you, but your job is to educate them that you exist and you offer service consideration.
Robert:Sorry, I have a sneeze coming.
Robert:Oh, excuse me.
Robert:Thank you.
Robert:Hopefully you can edit that out.
Robert:We'll see.
Robert:At the consideration phase, you want to give people an opportunity to understand more about your product and why they should buy from you.
Robert:And at the bottom of the funnel, the purchase phase, you need to run ads that get people to buy right now.
Robert:So the result of all this is that we have to rely on the fund the fundamentals of advertising that have existed for decades now.
Robert:So on a more tactical front, when we buy advertising on Meta, we do two things.
Robert:Broad targeting, which is age, gender and location, which is how Meta wants you to use advert their platform.
Robert:You can look up more details around.
Robert:Look up the Performance 5 framework from Meta.
Robert:The second thing we do on Meta is creative testing, understanding the products, services and offers and discounts that your customers resonate with.
Robert:And the way we do that is we have a 13 minute video on our website.
Robert:It's BrillMedia Co creative testing.
Robert:And the core idea is within two days we can cull down from 125 different ad variations down to the top 20 and down to the top one in the course of three weeks.
Robert:So you find your, you start, you do that every three to four weeks.
Robert:You have a, an all star team of ad creative that's very relevant for your business.
Robert:So not only is your business actually becoming more effective on social platforms, you are also learning what your customers want from you.
Robert:So it's a double benefit for the business.
Brett Dicer:And speaking on just privacy in general, the rise in prevalence of ad blockers.
Brett Dicer:I know YouTube's tried to block it and it didn't really, it's not going well for them because ad blockers are now becoming more powerful than they have been.
Brett Dicer:So how do, how do we deal with that?
Brett Dicer:Because nobody likes ads per se, but we don't mind good ads, we just hate the bad ads or we remember the bad ads.
Robert:Look, it's.
Robert:Consumers are paying either with their time or their money.
Robert:If you have money, you pay for the subscription, you have time, you pay with giving your attention to brands in exchange for not having to pay for something.
Robert:Look, I think advertising systems continuously evolve.
Robert:You know the.
Robert:There are a few solutions to ad blockers.
Robert:Number one, go to channels where there isn't ad blocking, which is connected television, digital, out of home, digital audio.
Robert:All of those are still big robust channels.
Robert:But the reality is that advertising on meta advertising, on TikTok or Twitter, or on your local news or sports is still effective.
Robert:And I think as a marketer doing this for the last 20 years, what resounds for us, what's important is attention to your work.
Robert:Whether you're a business owner or a marketing manager or cmo, whatever the case is, it's attention to your work and looking at the data and making strong optimization decisions.
Robert:And the way you do that effectively is by having a smart team of experts either in house or with your agency that is doing that work for you.
Robert:None of this is set it and forget it work.
Robert:And that's the big, that's where a lot of people trip up.
Brett Dicer:And will the new technologies like blockchain and all that stuff that comes with it with Web3, will that help with identifying targeting consumers better without too much data or helping the privacy issue?
Robert:Yeah, there have been several startups in the blockchain and crypto space.
Robert:So for example, there's one that I think is no longer around, that was set up to incentivize to basically pay people for their data on a per ad basis.
Robert:That's a really, that's a really cool concept and I hope someone actually delivers that right.
Robert:Like every user has a, every web person, every human on the web, whether it's mobile or desktop, whatever, or your television.
Robert:At this point you have a wallet, you have an identifier, and every time you see an ad, you are Paid in a token and that token can be cashed out for dollars.
Robert:Let's say that's one way that crypto could work.
Robert:Now the challenge is getting that to scale and getting participation is dramatically complicated.
Robert:So is it possible?
Robert:Yes, I haven't seen it succeed.
Robert:And then other things like identifying users with crypto, there are plenty of startups doing that as well.
Brett Dicer:And then moving on to like AI, because AI has been talked about through every part of digital marketing, hasn't touched anything.
Brett Dicer:We start to see more AI uses for ads when maybe creating storyboard for it, to grading the script or even like figuring out the data better than the marketer.
Robert:I look at AI like I look at steel or electricity, you know, a hundred years ago, right?
Robert:There are companies that were categorized as electric company, I think in like steel companies.
Robert:But the reality is we all use electricity to power everything we do.
Robert:So I look at AI, there's going to be two companies, there's going to be the companies who are built around the innovation of AI and creating solutions for that.
Robert:And there's certainly technologies out there today that make that happen.
Robert:But I think also far less newsmaking are the everyday uses of AI for professionals making ad copy better.
Robert:Like giving me ideas on benefits and transformative value.
Robert:Scanning websites to understand what the website is about so we can distill the core ideas down to copy points.
Robert:Using AI to like for example, upload data sets and making analysis of that data sets.
Robert:You're never going to replace the people, but the people will become more robust in their abilities because they spend less time doing math on Excel and more time relying on the AI to do the legwork.
Robert:And for you to query that AI, I think that that's less newsworthy, less dramatic, but also very valuable.
Brett Dicer:And could AI help with the AB testing?
Brett Dicer:Let's say you put it up to the AI ad platform and they figure out how to show the right ad for them.
Brett Dicer:Because I also do feel like ads play differently to different people.
Brett Dicer:And if you have multiple ads or if the budget for multiple ads, it may be beneficial eventually maybe if AI gets smart enough to then go, okay, this person may like this one or highly more likely like this one over this one.
Robert:Facebook's been doing that for about a decade.
Robert:I mean that that's the power of what we're doing on Meta is exactly what you described.
Robert:Except I don't control it.
Robert:All I can do is train it just a little bit.
Robert:Our general thesis on Meta is train Meta's machine learning algorithm to find your best customers.
Robert:Using broad targeting and creative testing.
Robert:But beyond that, the actual setting of the algorithm or the learning and all that is for the people with PhDs who are getting paid a lot of money.
Robert:And they could be like rocket scientists or like algorithm experts.
Robert:And they chose that.
Robert:Like that type of stuff is really interesting, but it's completely black box to us.
Robert:Like we just buy ads on Meta.
Brett Dicer:Gotcha.
Brett Dicer:And then ads can be different accordingly.
Brett Dicer:So like pr, mostly the ads are about awareness and for marketing specifically, it's about more towards sales than awareness.
Brett Dicer:How do you decide what data is right for you if you're trying to figure all that out?
Brett Dicer:Because I think for PR pros, it's hard to justify the relevance of PR when it's just all awareness.
Brett Dicer:And awareness isn't really the best metric most of the time.
Brett Dicer:Because if people are aware of you doesn't mean they're actually going to buy from you.
Robert:It's an orchestra, right?
Robert:This goes back to the fundamentals of marketing.
Robert:It's, you have different instruments that serve different purposes that need to be justified on a marketing plan, that need to work in concert with each other.
Robert:So for example, when PR drives awareness, we can take that PR inclusion in a publication and drive ads to that publication on Meta or with other banner ads.
Robert:So now you're taking the top of funnel awareness and you're using that credibility to tell people who are ready to buy, you should buy.
Robert:See, we were just recently in Forbes, so that type of credibility is where things work hand in hand and it's just work within the fundamentals of what we know to be true for the last 80 years of marketing.
Brett Dicer:So what I'm hearing is that when PR gets a hit or eventually gets a hit, the marketers and the creative ads should be like, okay, let's create ads within the website of the news site so we can maybe target them a little bit better.
Brett Dicer:Or at least they'll see our ad.
Brett Dicer:We can, it'll be like, oh, maybe I'll actually buy the 20% coupon or whatever you want to do for an introductory price.
Robert:It's a couple of things, right?
Robert:So a person who understands that your product exists because they read an article in a publication, that's great.
Robert:So number one, you hope they visit your website and now you can do remarketing.
Robert:Number two, you use meta's machine learning algorithm to say, people who are now interested in my product or service, they should get the ad that tells them to purchase.
Robert:That's a little bit of black box stuff there.
Robert:So I don't directly control it, but the training helps tune that system for the benefit of the business.
Robert:But yeah, the PR by itself, it really just depends on the strategy, right?
Robert:Like we talked to a company recently and they earned lots of money, millions of dollars in investment in crowdfunding investment because of PR and relationships like PR serves a purpose.
Robert:The purpose for PR is to ensure that people who have the money understand that you're doing something real and it's big, you're not messing around, right?
Robert:Because it's hard to get into a big publication, it's expensive.
Robert:So by being there, you've ushered in a level of creativity, credibility for your business.
Robert:But impressions alone aren't going to drive sales.
Robert:So our job is to take all of the assets as advertisers, our job is to take all of the assets that exist in the marketplace and assemble them in such a way that we can use advertising tools, data technology, algorithms to deliver a compelling message to a person.
Robert:Right at the moment where they're most, where it will most resonate with them.
Brett Dicer:Is that compelling message differ from different platforms.
Brett Dicer:Because I don't think the message is going to be the same From Facebook to YouTube to TikTok to X slash Twitter.
Brett Dicer:Is it going to be like, are you going to tailor it a little bit?
Robert:Yeah, absolutely.
Robert:The delivery.
Robert:What we do for a lot of campaigns that we see work is the following creative testing on meta.
Robert:Take the learning from your all star ad, propagate those learnings across all the creative.
Robert:Now you do Google Ads, it's just going to be the text component of it.
Robert:You might on YouTube, take the best static image, turn it into a video because you've tested a bunch of things and now you put that one video derived off of your best ad on YouTube which you can also use on Meta by the way too, right?
Robert:Meta is good for video.
Robert:So it's about this fortuitous flywheel effect where advertising, at the very least advertising needs to perform.
Robert:It needs to drive leads or sales.
Robert:But secondly it needs to inform your business.
Robert:So the result of all this is advertising needs to serve you in two or three different ways.
Robert:It needs to deliver ads needs to create demand and it needs to inform your business, it needs to.
Robert:Then the creative needs to inform other channels.
Robert:And so as a result you start having $1 spent.
Robert:It's.
Robert:It's like having $3 being spent, but you only have to spend it once because you get so many learnings out of all these different components.
Brett Dicer:And then another component is basically our attention span.
Brett Dicer:Our attention span has Gotten shorter and shorter through the decades.
Brett Dicer:I think TikTok, it's like half a second most of the time if they will actually watch a video or not.
Brett Dicer:It does that play a role with your ads as well as figuring out what will give them the biggest hit in the shortest amount of time?
Robert:Absolutely.
Robert:The best example for me on that is movie trailers.
Robert:So you may have noticed the trend on movie trailers is they will show you the entire.
Robert:All the major hits, major, like pulses of the movie in one and a half to three seconds.
Robert:They'll show all the action, all the drama, all the things that are going to get you excited in the first three seconds because they know like you have that amount of time to keep people engaged.
Robert:And then you see the opening for the trailer, which is the slow intro, fade in.
Robert:And then you go through two and a half minutes of the trailer.
Robert:And the reason that and every business should be thinking like that, what is going to, what can I say?
Robert:What's the most interesting part of this story?
Brett Dicer:Right?
Robert:Because at the end of the day we're all storytelling what's the most interesting part of the story that I can share that will hook people in and buy my way into their attention for the next 10 seconds, 30 seconds, two minutes, whatever the case is.
Brett Dicer:So it's almost like PR is infecting a lot of the other spaces because PR, especially their press releases is all about the most important stuff on top and then the filler on the bottom.
Brett Dicer:And it feels like it's going towards that direction again.
Brett Dicer:Which most important, like for your ads, most important stuff on top and then everything goes down ascending.
Robert:Yeah, you gotta have videos that hook the user in and you see a lot of great hooks on TikTok.
Robert:One of the things that I'm working on with.
Robert:So we make TikTok content.
Robert:It's mostly me talking about marketing and advertising challenges and capabilities, et cetera.
Robert:And one of the things I need to get better at.
Robert:Cause remember I'm a numbers guy.
Robert:Like I look at excel documents and PowerPoint.
Robert:I don't.
Robert:I'm not good at Photoshop.
Robert:I'm not great at Photoshop.
Robert:I'm barely, I'm barely hanging on in Photoshop.
Robert:But like Adobe Premiere and all that stuff, I don't know how to use very well.
Robert:So I'm getting better at the art of it all, which is how do I meet people, where they're at?
Robert:How do I talk to people in a way?
Robert:I can talk all day about the seven best practices for Google Ads, but the person on the other end may not realize they need it because they don't realize because I haven't met them where they're at.
Robert:They're just like, my Google Ads aren't working.
Robert:Facebook doesn't work for me.
Robert:Advertising doesn't work for my business.
Robert:It's like I need to start there with the storytelling because that's the hook, that's the engaging part for the user, not how to make your Google Ads perform better.
Robert:Because they just think advertising doesn't even work for them to start.
Robert:That's probably incorrect.
Robert:They're probably just not getting the right people to think about their business.
Brett Dicer:It almost feels like you almost need to do one of those terrible infomercial things where nothing works and it's all black and white.
Brett Dicer:And then you come to the rescue and help them out with your stuff.
Robert:Try to pick up the phone and the cord is wrapped around my neck.
Robert:That's funny.
Brett Dicer:But for you, you could also look at Cap Cut.
Brett Dicer:It actually is developed or was developed by Dance.
Brett Dicer:It's their own video editing, which is.
Robert:I didn't realize that.
Brett Dicer:Yeah, yeah.
Robert:I.
Robert:It seems very complicated to me.
Brett Dicer:It's actually.
Brett Dicer:I've heard it's pretty easy.
Brett Dicer:I use DaVinci Resolve, so I don't touch Adobe products anymore.
Robert:Yeah.
Brett Dicer:But I, I've.
Brett Dicer:It's actually pretty free.
Brett Dicer:DaVinci actually resolve is it.
Brett Dicer:They do have a free version of their own too.
Brett Dicer:So you can figure out different ways with minimal budget.
Brett Dicer:But yeah, try Capcut.
Brett Dicer:If you're trying.
Brett Dicer:If you're having issues with Premiere or having.
Brett Dicer:Because Premiere is good, but you need to know what you're doing to actually really effectively use it legit.
Robert:So in.
Robert: pened in like March, April of: Robert:And there was.
Robert:I was like, okay, I need to get.
Robert:I need to keep things busy.
Robert:We were.
Robert:A lot of our business was staffed with live events.
Robert:So all that just shut down.
Robert:And so I was like, I'll learn Adobe Premiere Pro.
Robert:And holy freaking cow.
Robert:That was a hard.
Robert:I had like such high aspirations for what I was gonna.
Robert:I was just like, I'm just gonna film video and I made video and it would take me like three, four hours to edit like a two and a half minute video.
Robert:Like, I don't, I can't if that's the way.
Robert:And the output looked like it took me two minutes.
Robert:But it is like five year old toddler, like status of editing.
Robert:And I'm like, yeah, I Shouldn't be doing this.
Brett Dicer:This is this.
Robert:I've learned what I need to learn and I've learned that I need to pay someone to do this for me.
Brett Dicer:If you want to try out, I would say Cap Cut would probably be the best for TikTok because it's made by the people that made TikTok.
Brett Dicer:Check that out.
Brett Dicer:I think it's pretty, it's more user friendly than Premier is.
Brett Dicer:But I've been using Resolve and I know experts on YouTube and I follow stuff on Discord for Resolve.
Brett Dicer:So I'm pretty good at Resolve.
Brett Dicer:But they're all pretty difficult if you don't know what you're doing because there is a learning curve to all of them.
Brett Dicer:But once you get them, it's pretty easy after that.
Robert:Yeah.
Robert:All right, I'll check out Capcot and.
Brett Dicer:Then moving on to actually advertising.
Brett Dicer:Do you think most businesses common problem is the ROI via the return on investment?
Brett Dicer:What is this really giving me?
Brett Dicer:Because people, the click through rate is like one metric you can look at but it's really like how are you going to move that needle and how are you going to justify this ad when you may or may not have the best analytics for it?
Robert:The common problem is they don't have a strategy and they don't know what they're doing.
Robert:That's the problem.
Robert:I mean that, that's really just all it is.
Robert:So the strategy is your way of protecting yourself against bad decisions.
Robert:It's your moat, it's your armor.
Robert:If you don't have a strategy, you can get attacked at any moment.
Robert:And how do you get attacked?
Robert:Your sell.
Robert:The sellers come out to you and say hey, you should buy this ad on the bus bench.
Robert:Which could be part of the strategy but if it's not part of the strategy, you can easily say no thank you.
Robert:The per the seller from I think it's called Thrive used to be yp.
Robert:I think they can come up to you and be like we're the best at everything and they're gonna, they might have some strategy thinking I've heard some good things about them.
Robert:But the point is you as a business owner need to have a plan for how you're gonna grow your business.
Robert:And part of that plan is marketing and advertising.
Robert:And that plan needs a plan.
Robert:Like you need to know day in and day out how you're going to spend your advertising budget, why you're running on Meta and why you're running on Google and why you're not running on TikTok or Twitter.
Robert:Because if you don't have that plan, you're going to be susceptible.
Robert:You'll read a headline, everyone's running on ads on LinkedIn.
Robert:You should be on LinkedIn.
Robert:Why is it part of your strategy?
Robert:My mother in law said that the guy on the radio said radio ads are the best.
Robert:Okay, maybe, but is it part of your strategy?
Robert:So the big problem companies have is they don't have the fundamentals down, which means they're making, they're routinely making bad decisions.
Robert:That's the first step.
Robert:If you have a strategy, then it's about the execution of it.
Robert:And the execution is who's working on your ads?
Robert:Is it your cousin thrive in YP they talk about Everyone has a guy.
Robert:The guy is your first marketing pro, your cousin, your nephew, your neighbor.
Robert:Everyone has a guy, but the guy doesn't have expertise in this thing.
Robert:It's their hobby.
Robert:Or the guy might be a website guy, but you need ads.
Robert:But you aren't versed enough to understand that the guy who understands websites is not going to be the guy who's going to be editing video on DaVinci Resolve, nor Photoshop and also running your Google search campaigns.
Robert:Those are like five completely separate skill sets.
Robert:So if you have a strategy, you need to choose people who are, who understand how to drive performance, who understand urgency, who understand the ability to provide context for your advertising.
Robert:What's working, what's not working, how do you improve it?
Robert:And they need, and you need to have that strategy.
Robert:There's 1.4 million people on upwork that are categorized as sales and marketing.
Robert:There's a lot of people, anyone can get into advertising.
Robert:All you need is a computer, an Internet and a Facebook account or a Google account.
Robert:But you can't replicate experience.
Robert:You can take courses and certificates, but you can't replicate experience.
Robert:That's why clients stay with us for many years, because a lot of our work is agencies who decide to work with us to do their, to outsource their media buying to us and advertisers too.
Robert:And so as a result, clients stay with us for many years because we do good work.
Brett Dicer:It seems like from what you said, this first step is just understanding your target audience.
Brett Dicer:If you're skewing younger, TikTok actually may be better for you.
Brett Dicer:If you're skew older, LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe even Twitter slash X I think that's a middle of the road, more demographic, but that actually may be better for you.
Brett Dicer:So if you don't understand who's buying from you, your ads could be worthless.
Brett Dicer:Because you don't know who's who you can target.
Brett Dicer:Yeah.
Robert:And you don't know, you know you're delivering the wrong message.
Robert:So typically let's go into the found the fundamentals of the channel mix.
Robert:The fundamentals are meta has the best.
Robert:Sorry, the fundamentals are meta has the best algorithm in the marketplace.
Robert:By the way, don't distinguish between Instagram ads and Facebook ads.
Robert:It's just one source of inventory.
Robert:The algorithm works the same on both and they work together.
Robert:So think of it as one source of inventory.
Robert:That's number one.
Robert:Number two, Twitter is good for entertainment.
Robert:Even some B2B things we run some B2B on TikTok and anything that you might be interested in for people up to I think the age of 50 or 60, it wanes at the top there but relevant but does especially well for e commerce and entertainment.
Robert:Twitter good for tech technology journalism.
Robert:Direct to consumer brands.
Robert:You definitely can take advantage of the craziness that is X or Twitter.
Robert:I see some products that like I wouldn't see anywhere else because they're on Twitter, they're on X.
Robert:YouTube is good for anything video related where you can demonstrate your product or service in a video.
Robert:That's good.
Robert:Google search is good if your product or service can solve an easily searchable problem.
Robert:So I need video editing.
Robert:Okay, you're out for video editing is up there.
Robert:That's a very one to one dynamic between the consumer's challenge and what you offer.
Robert:If your product or service is less, is more complex, is more high consideration, Google could be a little more difficult to work.
Robert:But really at the end of the day you've as a marketer you've got to start more consumer journeys and scoop up that that interest.
Robert:With ads that scoop up that interest on meta would be good for generating new consumer interest and Google Ads are good for scooping up and turning that into a sale.
Robert:That's way I think of it.
Robert:Banners on across sites works really well for remarketing for reach and frequency for lower costs but keeping your brand top of mind.
Robert:So that's how we look at the marketplace.
Brett Dicer:And this kind of goes into like the AB testing.
Brett Dicer:Should you like a B test on say meta and then figure out where else if you need to be on meta.
Brett Dicer:But how should you a B test it because and how should you optimize your ads through a B testing?
Brett Dicer:Because most of marketing is like really testing out.
Brett Dicer:You're like almost like a little scientist going does this work?
Brett Dicer:Does that work?
Brett Dicer:So how should you effectively AB test Your ads to make them effective.
Robert:Yeah, AB test really implies testing two things.
Robert:We test like that creative testing framework that I broke out.
Robert:You're testing 125 different variations at any given time.
Robert:So it's not two, it's 125.
Robert:And the way you do that is you start by creating five ads.
Robert:So five headlines, five images, five primary text.
Robert:You disassemble all those elements, you run a control and variable test on 15 different elements.
Robert:So with those 50 different elements as an aside, you multiply them in all the different possible variations.
Robert:You have 125 different variations, but you only created five ads.
Robert:And then you cull down to the top 18, 20 ad variations, even as low as six or 12.
Robert:And then you turn on optimization to your objective, whether it's lead or sale.
Robert:And then for the next two two and a half weeks, you take those 20 ads variations up to 20 ad variations.
Robert:You let Facebook determine which is the best ad, which drives which combination drives the most sales, the most engagement, whatever the case is.
Robert:And you'll know in a few weeks which is your best ad creative.
Robert:And that's how you have a perpetual cycle of understanding who your customers are and then take those ads and perpetuate, propagate all the learnings across your different channels.
Brett Dicer:Gotcha.
Brett Dicer: And then looking ahead to: Brett Dicer:Is it going to be more reliance on AI?
Brett Dicer:Is it going to be more new, different formats?
Brett Dicer:Is it going to be more podcasting advertising?
Brett Dicer:What are you seeing?
Robert:Yeah, I think just like this time last year was when AI hit the scene with ChatGPT in a big way to like many consumers.
Robert:My understanding is ChatGPT has been around some form for like many years, but to consumers or to the general public, we're still early stages on that, but a lot of people can use it now.
Robert:I think the ability to create chat agents on GPT and to get to monetize monetize it is going to be a huge win for any type of business.
Robert:You're going to see the adoption of more AI across enterprise brands.
Robert:So AI definitely very interesting.
Robert:There's various initiatives to deprecate the cookie, which makes visibility by Google specifically to which makes it even harder to track conversion activity.
Robert:So we're going to pay attention to that.
Robert:But at the end of the day, I'm not.
Robert:I'm focused on the fundamentals.
Robert:A lot of our business is just about the fundamentals.
Robert:Like we're doing things that were like, it's not sexy.
Robert:Like dynamic ads.
Robert:Like, dynamic advertising has been around for a while, but holy freaking cow, it works.
Robert:It works really well to sell like tickets, for example.
Robert:And there's different types of dynamic creative optimization.
Robert:That's something different than what you do on Facebook.
Robert:But the point is we're really focused on using the tried and true methods to grow businesses we're not interested in.
Robert:We're not.
Robert:I remember working at big agencies when I started my career.
Robert:I was working at Universal, McCann and we were really pushed.
Robert:Okay, how do we.
Robert:What are we testing this time?
Robert:Like, we bought the first takeover on MySpace, that type of thing.
Robert:Like, how do we test these new channels?
Robert:I remember we bought like some sort of like ESPN mobile takeover and holy cow, that was the most.
Robert: was for like lords of Dogtown: Brett Dicer:That's what.
Robert:Like we worked like three months to buy that ad.
Robert:It was so incredibly complicated.
Robert:Our campaigns need to perform.
Robert:They need leads and sales.
Robert:Clicks likes engagement, not so much because clicks likes engagement, comments, shares don't pay the bills.
Robert:So we focus on what works and we leave behind what doesn't.
Brett Dicer:Also, it seems like dynamic ad insertions has crept up into podcasting too.
Brett Dicer:There is dynamic types of ad insertions, so it's a tried and true sector of ads, but it hits a different types of industries for content as well.
Robert:Yeah, I think advertising on podcasts is really interesting because you get the resonance of PR and you get the direct scalability of advertising and it's like a nice combination.
Brett Dicer:And it seems like from the data, podcasters are a little bit more.
Brett Dicer:Are more trusted than social media influencers.
Brett Dicer:Right now I feel like it's because the trust factor and influencers have messed it up over the years were where people don't trust them as much.
Brett Dicer:But that's what I've seen from the data.
Brett Dicer:I could be wrong and some podcasters gonna mess it up.
Brett Dicer:Where trust is lost for all podcasting.
Robert:I think at the end of the day, like if you listen to a podcast routinely, you get to know the individual and it feels like you're.
Robert:You know them in a way that you know your friends and it's unique for the channel.
Robert:It's a very unique opportunity.
Robert:Look, 20 years ago, the distribution systems that we can take advantage of for $50 a month cost tens of millions of dollars to implement.
Robert:And we all knew them as NBC, ABC and cbs.
Robert:So the fact that we can even have these conversations is.
Robert:It's a testament to how far technology has come.
Robert:And also a testament to what we humans love the most and that's connection with other humans.
Brett Dicer:And where can people find you online?
Robert:Absolutely.
Robert:Brill Media Co B R I L L Media Co if you want to learn more about creative testing and the capabilities drop down.
Robert:It says creative testing go there.
Robert:The URL is brillmedia Co Creative Testing and if you want to reach out, go to the Contact us fill out the form.
Robert:You'll be prompted to schedule time on my calendar if you want to talk about your strategy.
Brett Dicer:Thank you Robert for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brand Sharing Knowledge on Digital Ads.
Robert:Thanks Brad, appreciate it and thank you for listening.
Brett Dicer:As always, please subscribe to Digital Coffee on all your favorite podcasting apps with a five star review and join us next time as we talk to another great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry.
Brett Dicer:All right guys, stay safe understanding your ads and get to testing and making great ads later.
