Leo Burnett, founder of the “Chicago School” of advertising famously said, “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”
Leo is one of the fathers of advertising, a pioneer who arguably invented the advertorial. Ogilvy and Hopkins then perfected it (IMO).
But back in these guys days, your goal was to write an ad that ran for years, sometimes decades. There are some soap products that are still running very similar ad copy that ran before TV’s were a household item.
This is the way advertising has worked for the last 100+ years.
It’s only been the last 5 - 10 years that ad networks like Facebook and Youtube have started changing this. The birth of machine learning has given rise to insatiable creative-eating monsters. Refuse to feed them their fresh daily dose of new creative and their algorithm henchmen bonk you over the head with reduced CTRs and higher CPAs.
How The Need For Creative Libraries Came To Be
When our founder, Justin Brooke, was running his agency creating a Google PPC ad all you had to write was a 35 character headline and a 90 character description. Then came expanded text ads and they lasted awhile. Today they want you to write as many as 15 headlines and 3 descriptions.
Will this monster’s belly ever be full?
Then along comes video advertising.
Now not only do we have to write scripts, we have to record footage, edit the footage, upload a much larger file, and hope we nailed it the first try. Creating video ad creative, even at just 90 seconds each costs 3x as much as writing a simple headline and description.
Do you think TikTok’ers want to see the same ad every time they open their app?
Do you think YouTubers want to see the same ad every time a new video loads on their screen?
Do you think FB or IG users want to keep seeing the same ad in their feed every day?
Back when we all watched TV and it had unskippable commercials we hated seeing the same commercial again and again? Well online, that’s x100 now because people aren’t just seeing ads when they sit down at the end of the day to watch a TV show. They are seeing them all day long, in every app they open, in every feed they scroll, in every video they click open.
This annoyance causes users frustration and even to use the apps less.
If your ads are causing people to reduce their session time aka close the app, then obviously your ads are not going to be favored in the feed.
How Can We Keep Up With The Demand For Fresh Ad Creative Daily?
If you try to solve this problem with traditional copywriters... who are trained by books that are written by offline copywriters... you’re going to be heading in the wrong direction.
In that old world, the goal was to create one great winning ad.
In today's feed-based world, the goal is to create one winning story and lots of ads that tell that story in visually fresh ways.
The old way = Create one ad creative.
The new way = Create a library of ad creative assets.
Gone are the days of spending a couple weeks honing the perfect script or ad.
Today is the dawn of modular copy.
Modular copy is copywriting assets that work together like legos to quickly put together ads, scripts, social posts, reels, stories, and more.
The best digital advertisers today are creating folders in their Google drive or dropbox account that contain folders for headlines, another for descriptions, another for bios, another for stock photos, another for stock videos - are you smelling the ammonia salts yet?
This making sense?
If you want to succeed in digital advertising in 2022 and beyond, you need to start working on your creative library. A digital file repository with a directory of folders that contain little creative blocks that can be pieced together to create whatever kind of creative is needed for whatever platform in whatever file format and size.
It’s a little more upfront energy and time.
Instead of paying a copywriter $300 to write your ad copy, now you might spend $1,500 to create a collection of copy assets that can be deployed all over the web. Like an army of cyber salesmen setting up little kiosks all over the metaverse pitching your mugs, pills, ebooks, and services.
There will be some agencies that will try to keep you hooked by saying they own your creative library, so instead I suggest you come to them with your own. Let them stick to the number crunching and media buying, but don’t give them control over your ad copy.
Instead keep them armed to the teeth with folders full of copy assets that they can feed the hungry algorithms.
You’ll reduce your onboarding time, reduce your customer acquisition costs, decrease your legal liability, decrease your chances of account shut downs, and you’ll make yourself as mobile as a free agent Football player.
At AdSkills we believe a creative library will soon become as important as your brand story.
The two should go hand in hand, a brand story + creative library.
You come up with your brand story, then you work with your team or freelancers to develop a creative library, and VIOLA you now have a deployable brand story.
That can be converted into...
- TikTok Videos
- YouTube Videos
- Blog Articles
- Twitter Tweets
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- and so much more
If you'd like to learn more about how you can create hundreds of ads quickly, read our blog post called "Make Ad Creation Faster, Easier, & Cheaper With These Tools"
Also if you’d like to learn how to advertise YOUR products to the world for as little as $5/day, then sign up for AdSkills.com, it’s only $20 bucks and you’ll unlock over 30 classes about paid traffic. Use code SAVE20 today to take 20% off, FOR LIFE!
See you next week.
Justin Brooke,
Founder of AdSkills.com
P.S. Recently, I got together with two of my expert friends, Ed Dale a copywriting legend and Tom Breeze one of the worlds leading Youtube ad creators. We spent four hours breaking down the scripts, editing choices, and ad strategies behind 25 of the highest performing YouTube ads. You can watch that series here > Decoded: The Top 25 Youtube Ads Revealed
