How eCom ad creatives evolved in 2025 with Lachezar Voynov

Webinar Replay

April 15, 2025

Lachezar Voynov

My name is Lachezar, founder of LJV Media.We help 7-,8- & 9-figure eCommerce brands grow by profitably acquiring new customers at scale.

We install into their funnel the same ad creative system that is being used by 9-figure eComm giants to generate $100M+ in annual sales.Clients include brands such as Hush Blankets, Mauvais, Biktrix, Thought Catalog, AvalonKing, Magic Windows, NutriCanine, and over 50 more fast-growing DTC brands. In the past 12 months, we've generated over $50M in revenue through direct-response ad creatives.

What you'll learn

Learn how Lachezar Voynov uses Foreplay to generate Facebook ad creatives that work in 2025.

Key Takeaways

How Lachezar Voynov uses Foreplay
How to use Foreplay's Spyder to see your competitors best performing app ads
How to get exclusive beta access to Foreplay's upcoming products

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Jack (00:00)
I'm here with Latchazar. We're going to talk about UGC 2.0, how ad creatives have evolved in 2025. So yeah, let's get into it. Take it away, Latch.

Lachezar (00:09)
Perfect. Well, thank you guys all for attending. yeah, as Jack mentioned, we're going to be talking about UGC 2.0 and basically how ad creatives in the e-commerce space and more broadly just in general when it comes to meta advertising because everything that I'm going to be talking about today is going to be something that you can implement across every single industry because it's more or less based on consumer psychology and what people consume on social media rather than a specific industry or specific product. So feel free to scan.

this QR code that you see right here, because this is gonna give you access to the deck, to the website, to the presentation that I'm gonna be sharing with you today, because it contains just like a lot of examples, 42 pages of information that you can all guys use as an internal SOP or give it to your creative team, to media buying team, just like do whatever you wish with it. It's super value packed. So.

The reason why this thing is called UGC 2.0 is because from my personal experience and from what I've seen after spending over $8 million since 1st of January 2025 is that traditional UGC does not perform as good as it used to perform in the past and different ad formats that really break the pattern of

Customers understanding that this is an ad within 0.01 seconds are the types of content that currently do well So I wouldn't necessarily say that UGC is completely dead UGC still has a place in the whole ecosystem The thing is that brands who only rely on UGC are falling behind Compared to brands that are leveraging all of the different ad formats that we are going to talking about today So I've been in the ecommerce space for quite some time

2020, 2019, I would even say. And what I've seen is that the market and the industry really goes through different cycles every two to three years. So 2020, 2021 was all about super simple content, not much thought put into it. And this was enough for you to generate a 5X return on ad spend. 2022 to 2024, it was basically all about superscripted UGC ads following a proven framework of hook, problem, agitation, product introduction, et cetera, et cetera.

And since everybody started abusing it, this is when things really started declining in performance because your customer is currently seeing over 6,000 ad impressions every single day. So the only way for you to stand out is to differentiate yourself. And my prediction is that 2025 to 2027 will be all about super authentic, less scripted, but very organic video content that's also different.

to your typical UGC ad. And in order for us to really understand why the ad creative types that I'm going to be presenting later are going to be working, we need to talk about first creative diversity, which is something that you're already seeing on like X on LinkedIn, on YouTube, people use it as a buzzword they tend to talk about all the time. I wouldn't necessarily say that all of them really understand what creative diversity means.

So creative diversity is really built on the premise of creating content for every single subgroup of people that are part of your bigger group called customer avatar. And this might sound a bit technical, I would say, but I'm going to demonstrate it to you with an example from one of my favorite advertisers, which is Loop Earplugs and the fact that they have identified multiple different core.

customer avatars that they can market to. So they have party goers, they have people who work in noisy environments, people with ADHD, people having trouble sleeping. And this is basically the purpose of ad creative production. It's to meet people exactly where they are at and really showing them that you really understand them, that you know what problem they're facing and that you have the solution to this problem. So as you can see here, this is

A perfect representation of how a brand should be approaching advertising on meta specifically is by targeting every single subgroup of people with relevant ad creatives. So here you see keep ringing ears out of the party. So if you have ever been to a party, you would know about ringing ears the next day because of the loud music. Then you have people who are working in the office that cannot concentrate because it's too noisy, it's too loud. People are talking, people are...

walking, etc. Then you have people who have trouble sleeping. So that's the solution, the loop here, plug that you see right here, sleep through anything. And then you have people who have more or less ADHD or they just hate the noise when they commute. So this is another subgroup of the bigger group of people that they can advertise to. So this is really creative diversity meeting people exactly where they are at.

And you can go even deeper if you are in a very saturated industry, because if you are in a saturated industry, most people have heard all of the claims, they have heard all the promises, and they basically have heard pretty much everything. So the only way for you to stand out is to show that you really understand your person or your avatar. So if you want to break down the party goer, that could be split into multiple different groups for gender, for music style. So somebody who's listening to electronic music.

would not necessarily recognize him or herself if you are showing somebody who's into rock, for example. So you can further differentiate people per music style, location, you have open air party visitors, you have big event parties like Tomorrowland, you have club events as well. And then of course you have the different age ranges. And then of course you have income brackets. And this is also something pretty important because those people, all of them,

right here will be attracted by different content styles. A hypothesis here would be that the broke party goers will resonate well more with street style interviews because they just find them hilarious. Whereas the rich party goer would potentially be interested in some more educational type of content about the benefits of earplugs, about how noise is really impacting your health. And they might be interested in podcast style ad or a long form VSL. So just to sum everything up.

Your ad and each and every one of your ads finds its own audience. So if you're making the same type of ad creative over and over and over and over again, you're just telling Meta to find the exact same person that you told Meta to find the last time. So the Meta's algorithm job is to serve the most relevant video or image to each specific person every single time. So in order for you to reach a more diversified set of people and really

attract this topofono audience that everybody is dreaming of and overcome creative fatigue, you need to give Meta a diversified portfolio of creatives to pick from. And if we have to go deeper on types of creative diversity, you have persona diversity, which could be your primary audience, adjacent audiences, different segments of your primary audience.

and the various stages of awareness. Then you have the angle diversity, which is also like super, super, super important because you want to test different angles for each customer avatar because you never know what people are going to resonate with. So you have problem solution, you have educational, social, entertaining. The wider you go, the better the results are going to be. So angle and the diversity is actually crucial at any given point in time. There might be like

10 to 20 different angles that you can use to approach the sale of a same product to the same audience. And you just need to explore all of them. And then of course you have the format diversity, which is going to be the bread and butter of what we're going to be talking about today. But before we do it, I just want to stop sharing for a few seconds and then ask if you guys have any questions.

All right. So do you use Advantage Plus or manual sales campaigns? So this is something that we have been experimenting with for quite some time in the past two months. We've been testing ASC, CBO and ABO. To be honest, we still see the best results when it comes to testing specifically with ABO because it just gives us more control over the budgets. A lot of people are seeing success with CBO. We have tested it.

We were just not that successful where you dedicate a minimum amount of spend for each ad set so that you can make sure that every single ad is getting spent. But you leave the algorithm to decide on which ad set to spend the rest that's left on top of the minimum, the total minimum. What brands you run or have? Ecom, pretty diversified, like accessories, beauty, Food and beverage.

Everything that you can think of when it comes to Ecom, that's basically what we use. What do you look at to determine an ad is, if an ad is working besides sales? Obviously spend, like this is going to be the biggest, the biggest factor because if an ad is getting spent, this means that the algorithm is prioritizing this ad. And this means in turn that this ad is attracting the attention of people. So if it's attracting attention, then it's obviously generating awareness, which is what you need in the first place.

So that's kind of the first thing. then secondary metrics are hook rate and click through rate in order to determine what's really the performance of the ad. But then if you have, for example, good click through rate and good hook rate, but no sales, then you have to look into the funnel. Do you work with skincare? Yes, we do. Okay. I think that we can leave the rest of the questions for later. If that's okay with all of you.

Yeah, okay.

Cool, I'm gonna answer more questions in a few minutes. Jack, any questions from your side? All clear?

Jack (10:52)
No, looks good. Yeah, let's come back to these questions. There's quite a lot pouring in here. What's the sweet spot? Yeah, we'll come back to this. Keep the questions flowing, and we'll build up a queue of different questions at the end.

Lachezar (11:05)
Perfect. So the first ad style that I want to start with, and this is the top performing ad style for every single ad account that we manage, no exceptions. There is not a single ad account that we have tested this for, where it hasn't worked or it hasn't become the top spender. This is founder story content. And this really perfectly ties into breaking the pattern because I mentioned that every single

person on the planet is exposed to 6,000 or more ads or impressions every single day. If we're talking specifically about meta and Instagram and TikTok, it's all UGC. Like it's UGC, UGC, UGC, UGC. So whenever your customer sees another UGC, they instantly recognize the fact that this is an ad and they're used to be sold and they're used to like skip those ads. So one thing, the best thing in my opinion is for you to have the founder

talk about something. And I'm going to show you some examples in a minute. But Founder Story ads are currently the top performing at Creative style across each account, each industry. It doesn't really matter. And I'm going to start with the top performing one, which is actually this one of the founder calling a happy customer and letting the customer do the talking. So I actually have a guide on how exactly you can

recreate this art right here in different steps, but I'm going to play it for you. And then you are potentially going to see why this thing is working so well.

Okay. So this was the biggest, the top performing ad creative founder story as created that we have, we have tested and we have really experimented with this across multiple different brands. for every single account that we, that we take on board, this is one of the first ad styles that we started experimenting with. And even if you look at true classic, which if you're in the DTC space, you know, true classic, they have scaled from zero to 200 million a year, I believe in four years.

And this is a founder story ad.

from True Classic. So it's a bit longer. I'm not going to play it until the end, but if True Classic is experimenting with Founder Story content, then this is something that you might as well want to experiment with. This is the Founder, one of the Founders, I guess. And it incorporates a lot of humor. I'm not sure if they have actually ran this and how much money, if any, if they spend on it, but the fact that they have done it...

means that like they've seen it work or they've heard it works. So this is one of the easiest things that you can do. And if we go back to the, example right here, like why does it work? First of all, it's because it's actually Suzanne that's doing the selling. Like Suzanne is telling people what her problem is, hot sleeper, like this is our target customer and she wanted to get more for

Her child her children and herself and these sheets these sheets have changed our life. So we're not doing the selling We're letting the customer do the talking and do the selling to people and this is like The best form of social proof just letting a real customer do the talking and this is a real customer like we've tried faking it It never worked. So it's pretty easy to create But some of you might want to abuse it. Just don't do it. It's not going to work. You need a genuine customer

to do it. And it feels organic. There's a real reason to call that customer, somebody who spent $1,000 on their last order, and then just let the customer do the talking. And of course, I'm going to go back to the QR code that I shared in the beginning. If you have missed it, and if you want to scan this and have a look at the detailed breakdown of how we shot and we created this ad creative. So it's...

Yeah, it performed extremely well. You're going to see the numbers inside of this deck. So I would highly encourage you to test this out.

Okay, so we are going to move ahead with the next top performing ad style for us, which is behind.

Jack (16:13)
Just a heads up here,

Lajazah by the way, we've got a few comments that when the videos are playing, they can't hear you speaking into the mic. So just a heads up that the audio coming through from the screen share is pretty loud.

Lachezar (16:25)
No comment. Yeah, cool.

Cool, so behind the scenes content. This is actually something that started trending 2024 with brands like Javi Coffee, Oats Overnight. And this is really a great low cost way to produce ad creatives that people resonate with because it's behind the scenes. It's it's different. So this is one of the top ones that I have seen.

and then you have a single.

So why does this work? It's because it's organic. Like this is representing something that you're going to see on your organic newsfeed. And of course, if you want to add to perform well in 2025, you have to break the pattern. You have to make sure that people will not recognize instantly that you're trying to sell something to them. Just show them something interesting, something that they would really care about or something that they are going to be entertained with. So this is the basic premise of most of those ads. And then you have some more ideas.

for behind the scenes content, like just walking around the production facility, packing orders, line tasting, which is also another great concept by Javi Coffee. And of course, employee generated content. This is a subset of behind the scenes where you have somebody who's acting as if they are an employee for your company kind of show what's happening behind the scenes.

So once again, this doesn't look like an ad. And they are this brand, High Smile. All of their content is similar type of content. So yeah, feel free to experiment with it. I highly recommend it.

Next one is the Street Interview. This is one of the most popular content formats organically. Here I have some production requirements for you and my recommendation is if you have somebody on your team, just ask him or her to do it for you because it's a pain to work with content creators because...

They're not very responsive. You don't know when they're going to be shooting, et cetera, et cetera. So if you can take control over the whole production, that's going to be amazing. If not, then you can still find content creators that are quite good at producing street interview styles. So the biggest thing when it comes to street interviews is to make sure that your question or the hook is always a need that your brand is solving. Like the question needs to focus on the problem you're solving.

just like the ad from Hue that you're gonna see right here.

So you instantly know who this is about. It's for busy people that work in the office that spend a lot of money on food. And the hook might also be a funny reaction from one of the people that you interview. And the second thing that you need to make sure is that people genuinely want to listen to the answer. So make them watch longer. The longer they watch, the more engaged they are going to be, which means that the more attention will convert into actual dollars.

The most beautiful thing about this is that this ad style uses instant real customer testimonials, which is basically the highest level of social proof any brand can get because it's instant and it's unscripted.

Cool. I'm going to quickly walk you through the rest, is podcast style. So if you think about podcasts, like you're selling or not, you're not selling, but you have to understand why people do watch and listen to podcasts is because they want to educate themselves. Right? So this is when you need a very subtle product introduction and very subtle CTA, like you should test it out for yourself. You should get one yourself, et cetera, et cetera. Don't.

make it all about your product because obviously, once again, people are going to recognize that this is an ad and they are going to stop watching. when it comes to podcasts, like they're doing very well when it comes to soft metrics, like very high hook rate, very high hold rate, very high average playtime, which most of the times converts into actual dollars for your company. I do have some examples right here. And of course, there are some things that you want to test out introducing your product early.

introducing it later after educating people for some problem. Like you really need to understand what's the balance for your business specifically and then keep replicating it for the future. Then you have reaction videos. This is super entertaining and this is also something that's working extremely well right now where you have a content creator react to something with a green screen effect. So something that we're doing right now is for most of the accounts that we work with, have

and they have had in the past, winning ads that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. If you're in the same position, just have a content creator do a reaction video of your top performing ad historically, because this, like the idea here is that this ad has generated a lot of impressions and people might instantly recognize that they have seen it. And then if you, if your creator acts like somebody who has bought based on this ad,

and then gives a genuine testimonial of the product. Like people are going to recognize it and then you have some chance of getting those people to watch the testimonial because they might have been considering the purchase, but they dropped off at some point in the funnel. And you can do the same thing with reacting to negative comments, such as sending objections or addressing a negative comment that you got on social media. This is actually great. And we are currently combining this, a reaction of a negative comment with founder story ad.

So a founder is reacting to a negative comment. It's super funny and it's also performing extremely well. So highly recommend it. The last thing I think, the last ad creative style that is going to be crushing in 2025 and currently is, is basically a VSL ad. I have added some examples from like really, really big companies that have been selling with VSL ads.

on TV and then I have broken down some VSL ad structures that you can basically use to kind of fill in the blanks and then have this as the barebone structure of your ad creative. And I want to talk about one specifically that I know for a fact has generated a lot of money, which is basically the $34 million VSL. So this is a VSL that has generated $34 million.

And you might have seen it, you might have not seen it. If you have been in the advertising space for quite some time, you probably know who Sabri Sobi is. I'm going to play a small part of the ad. And since the majority of you, would assume are in the e-commerce space, you might instantly recognize yourselves looking at this ad.

So obviously I've provided you with a QR code in order for you to access this whole ad, but this structure here is unlike anything else. And I can assume why this thing has generated $34 million. It's because it has so much relatability that people can just not skip away because this guy is perfectly describing the situation of an e-commerce business owner.

who has been burned in the past by agencies who promise the world and then deliver nothing. And that's how the hook starts. So you start with a hook, you introduce the problem, you add some credibility, you introduce the unique mechanism, which is super important, basically why this time this is going to be different. The revelation, this is where you tell people why they are currently failing, the product that they're using is currently failing, where you just attack the alternatives. And only then you present the solution. So I think the solution is...

is presented within like two to two and a half minutes after the video has started. So don't be afraid to experiment with this. Then you break the fourth wall because this guy says keep going through this funnel. And like this is something that we love. Whereas in some cases we might even test a hook saying, hey, this is an ad, but this and this and this. So we tell people that this is an ad that we're advertising to them, which most of the times they appreciate because you're just breaking through the fourth wall. Like it's unexpected.

It's breaking the pattern. Once again, a no brainer offer and then the call to action. And here I have added some more VSL structures with examples that you can basically steal and start implementing for your business. Tomorrow, last one, I promise this is the ugly ads. This is something that's been working for quite some time now because it's just super organic, super native to social media. And it doesn't require fancy bureau. It doesn't require any editing, no captions.

just a genuine and authentic rant about the product, service or experience with some more examples, two minutes long, 50 seconds long, 40, 48 seconds long, a lot of examples. So this is basically what UGC 2.0 looks like. It's much less about highly scripted ads and a lot more about authentic conversations that really show people that you understand what they're going through and the problem that they face. So I really hope that this made

sense to you. I am happy to answer questions.

Jack (27:29)
That was awesome, man. That's great. All right, so we've got a few questions here from four. I think you already answered this one, but this one from Lauren, what if you can't access the founder? What would be a solution?

Lachezar (27:44)
That's a great question. That's a great question. We faced this situation before where the founder didn't want to be on camera. So what we did is we had somebody from their team act, no, sorry, not from their team. We hired a content creator who acted as if they got paid to promote this product. Like it's once again breaking the fourth wall and telling people, I just got paid to promote this product. So,

like, please buy it, something like this, like something really stupid that would show people that this is potentially somebody who's really hired by the company and it's behind the scenes content. So yeah, you can, you might not access the founder, but another thing that you can do is you can just ask for the founder to give you some bureau footage, for example, that you can leverage inside of your ad creatives or just photos. Take photos with the founder and tell the story.

of the founder without actually having him or her be present in the ad, like explain what they went through from a third person perspective, just talking about that one person.

Jack (28:52)
I like that. It could be green screen with photos in the background. It could be B roll of the founder with somebody voiceover. Yeah, I like that. We've got another one here. What's the sweet spot for number of creatives running at one time to test against each other from Mar?

Lachezar (28:55)
Exactly.

Well, that would really depend on the amount of money that you spend on ads because you can imagine that brands that are spending a million dollars a month are testing a lot more creatives than brands that are spending $10,000 a month. So I would suggest you dedicate, let's say 10, 15 % of your total budget to just testing. And based on this, calculate what's your target CPA and spend no more than two to three actual targets.

And then based on this, can calculate and your testing budget, you can calculate how many ads you can test at once. But yeah, like just be testing at all times. I would definitely recommend you test more than five ads every single week because first of all, that's the only way to scale. Like finding a winning ad is the only way to scale up on Meta. And then second of all, even if you already have a winning ad, it's going to die at some point, it's going to die. So you need your next winner to be ready by the time your current winner dies.

Jack (30:10)
Awesome. So I've got another one from Lauren here. How do you determine the personas and what content resonates with them?

Lachezar (30:18)
Well, very deep research, like super deep research. It's a never-ending process for us. Going on Reddit, scripting like all of Reddit, and there is a tool called GigaBrain, which is an AI tool that gives you a summary of the whole thread so that you know whether or not you want to check the thread. And it also gives you the subreddits that are relevant to what you're looking for. So GigaBrain, TikTok, like TikTok and IGerios. This is...

Like if you're not using it, like you're making a big mistake because when you go on TikTok and you arrange a topic by the amount of views per video, that's what you really know that people are consuming. And then if you can turn this into an ad for you, like your chances of going viral and creating an ad that people really love watching, which is basically the whole purpose of advertising on Meta, this is where you like, you can completely. Transform your business within like 14 days.

Jack (31:17)
Nice, nice. I might be biased, but I think that foreplay is also a great place to find inspiration for different ads.

Lachezar (31:25)
So, foreplay is actually a tool that since I started using it, we have like, I can't stop using it. Everything that we do is based on stuff that we see on social media. And if I have to show you, like we internally have so many boards that we've built into foreplay that it's just making things so much easier for us to create because

Here on the left, we have boards for all of our clients. We have boards for different graphic ad types. This is where we store the different graphic ads, like before and afters, both claims, comparison, headline call-outs. yeah, we don't start from scratch ever because we just have so much stuff right here. We have broken down our creatives into the different stages of awareness. So we have for unaware, solution-aware, product-aware, problem-aware, most-aware.

Then you have the video ad types like behind the scenes, founder story, listicle, smashups, problem solution. This is where such tool shines. It's because you never actually start from scratch because you always see ads that are impressive to you. And if you just save them, like you can use them the next time when you start producing ad creatives. So you're going to make your life much easier.

Foreplay also has the option to save ads directly from TikTok organic, which has been a game changer to us because we tend to do it all the time. like my whole team, this is a requirement for the team to be collecting like at least three ads or three videos from TikTok organic that could be turned into an ad concept per week. So imagine having like 10 members, 10 team members, like these are 30 ads.

Jack (33:13)
Mm-hmm.

Lachezar (33:19)
Every single week that you can use an inspiration as an inspiration for your next ad. And most of our winning ads, like I'm not lying here, have come through us saving something that we have seen organically on TikTok and then reproducing it as an ad for our clients.

Jack (33:37)
Yeah, that totally makes sense. feel like ad creatives chase organic, right? Because what works organically is kind of proof of concept, right, in terms of that content style. We've got a great question here. Hi from Andrea. What do you think about AI content creators? Thanks.

Lachezar (33:56)
That's a great question. We have experimented with this a lot. Honestly, I don't really have a good opinion on AI content creators and they are only useful if you can mash them up with real customers because yeah, we've tested AI only, like content creators never worked. Like the hook rate on those were like 0.0.

10%, like 3%, it was like terrible, like terrible. And then we showed the same concept with a real content creator and there was a night and day difference. So I don't think that AI is there yet when it comes to content creators specifically. And you also have to understand that if AI gets there, it's to a point where AI content creators are really good, every single e-commerce business and every single agency is going to start abusing them.

Jack (34:32)
Right.

Lachezar (34:56)
which would mean that going back to what I said initially, whenever people go left, you go right. So you go back to this authentic content creator that gives them the vibe, I guess, which AI cannot. So yeah, that's my thought on AI content creators.

Jack (35:13)
I couldn't agree more.

I think there's some parallels there between, you know, UGC and UGC 2.0 or CGC customer created content. It's, this needs to be authentic. And the least authentic UGC you could have is a robot, an AI generated person. When your customers are looking at it and seeing that it's a fake person, are these people going to click through and buy, or are they going to go, I don't trust this brand at all. Wow. There's ads now that are trying to trick me.

I there's some really sophisticated AI out there, but I'm not sure about you, but what I've seen on the market in terms of AI generated video of people talking about products is sloppy, right? And using your burning your marketing budget on videos like that when, you know, even videos from paid creators that come across too much like an ad don't work. It seems like a terrible idea. I think, you know, all of my opinions aside as well, when I take a look at the longest run ads in foreplay, I see the ads that brands have actually kept turned on finding new customers.

None of them are AI generated, unless it's some dorky little software as a service brand that has no positive testimonials about their product and they have like three ads running. If it's a serious brand doing serious revenue, they're not keeping these ads turned on. They might have tried them and turned them off pretty quickly.

Lachezar (36:29)
Exactly, exactly.

Jack (36:32)
Awesome. So we've got a comment here from Andrew. People buy from people. AI is only good for augmenting humans' creativity. Not replacing it. I couldn't agree more, Andrew. Yeah.

Lachezar (36:43)
couldn't agree more as well. And this is actually very relevant for the current state of Ecom and the fact that ChudGPT released their image generation model. So everybody on social media is telling that ChudGPT just destroyed creative agencies, like they're gone, like change the business, et cetera, cetera, which I think it's BS because an AI is only as good as the prompt that you give it. And you cannot give a good prompt.

if you are not good at what you do, because poor creative strategists are going to produce poor content. It doesn't matter if it's AI or not AI. So it's all about the know-how and really understanding the trends and what people engage with and what people consume on a daily basis. And then you can use AI to increase your output, but not to replace yourself because it's just not going to work.

Jack (37:39)
Right, I feel like there's this illusion of a productivity hack with ChatGPT because you no longer need a designer to make static ads, right? But then the most important person in the room is waiting four to five minutes for an image to generate in ChatGPT. They're making ads that they can make without AI, with leverage, with a designer that could very easily throw it together. Sometimes when it's product photography, I'm thinking, you know, this is an unlock. This would take two to three weeks to turn around with a photography team.

So it's pretty cool that we can do that with AI. But some of the stuff I'm seeing is just text. Sometimes it's off center and an image of a product. And you really don't need the most important person in the room waiting around four minutes at a time for each ad to be generated. And then I couldn't agree with you more, like inputs. If the quality of the input's low, then the quality of the output's going to be low as well. So we've got one from Jim here. I'm a one-man marketing team and can only spend a few hours a week on ads.

Lachezar (38:23)
Exactly.

Jack (38:37)
What are the top three things to look at in such a limited amount of time? question.

Lachezar (38:43)
Okay, first of all, just look at your organic feed. I don't think that it's gonna take you that much, like even 30 minutes a day. You can understand what people consume on a daily basis. Save it to foreplay, like just save it, like save it. And then try recreating it, like do your research. Obviously research is the most important part. So if you have a good research process,

You are never going to struggle writing an ad and never going to struggle writing a good ad and producing a good ad. So just spend your time researching, like go through Reddit forums, go through.

Reddit forums, TikTok, like these are the two biggest unlocks for us. And of course you use JGPT to do your research. That shouldn't take that much time. And then create templates based on something that you have seen work. So for example, you have the template of the VSL ad, the 34 million dollar VSL ad that you can just like fill in the blanks and that's gonna make your life like much, much, much easier.

Jack (39:48)
Awesome. We've got a few more questions here. Keep the questions coming, by the way, guys, if you want your question answered. Drop it in the chat. We've got Laura here that says, so if my ad is spent three times my target CPA and it doesn't have sales, I should turn it off. Should I turn it off, I guess?

Lachezar (40:07)
Correct. Correct. Like if you want to be more aggressive, if you don't have that much money to work with, like don't even wait 3x the CPA, just turn it off at 2x. If it's really poor, like if you see like 0.5 % click-through rate, you can even cut it like at 1x, but you just need to give it enough time to get it to generate impressions, which is usually why we keep the ads 3x the amount of CPA that we target.

Jack (40:38)
Awesome. Yeah, Jim, to give a little bit more context to your question on if you have a limited amount of time, one thing you could do when you're doing your research is spend less time throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and more time taking a look at your competitors' creative tests. So I'm taking a look at true classic here. I can see every ad that they're running, the mix between videos, images, DPAs, what landing pages they're sending people to. But under the creative test tab, this is sort of like seeing the

ad account history, the change history for an ad account, I can see every time they launch a batch of ads, they launch hundreds of ads all the time. But on March 27th, they launched 20 ads, and only one of them is still live. You might decide instead of, know, true classic and all the resources they have, that you're going to create ads based on the inspiration for what they keep turned on. I think this is an unlock, right? You don't want to launch hundreds and hundreds of ads when your competitors are doing it for you to test, right?

So yeah, just come into foreplay, check out a brand, and then check out the creative tests tab and see which ads they're keeping turned on.

Lachezar (41:45)
That's a great plug.

Jack (41:47)
Yeah, for sure. Awesome. All right. Do you have any good examples of an organic post and the optimizations you made to turn it into an ad? That's a great question. It might be a little bit too specific. Does anything come to mind? Latch.

Lachezar (42:04)
yes, actually earlier today I was, creating an ad for like a founder story ad. And basically the first thing that I typed typed in was founder story. And the first piece of content that I saw on tech talk was somebody just talking and taking people behind the scenes of why she started her business. So that's what I usually tend to do. just type in the basic search.

like the most primitive one in the TikTok search, search bar. And then I should just start going through content. And then of course you need to adapt this. So for example, if you're selling a travel accessory and then you see that most people on social media respond to top four travel accessories for your next long haul flight, then first of all, you'll know that this is a hook that you need to test. Second of all, you just, you know that this is a concept.

And then you should add your product as one of the top four recommendations, best recommendations. And then from that point on, you can try putting it at number one, number two, number three, number four, and seeing what's the response of your market. And then of course, at the end, you always need a call to action. It might be a soft call to action, but I tend to love adding a call to action just so that I can get people to go to the website. So just like check us out, check this out at this website. It's going to change your life. Just like something like this.

But that's how we usually adapt organic content to our clients. And in some cases, we just even copy paste everything, like the full script. And then we change some small adaptations to our product. And that's basically what we run as an ad. But you need to be really fast when you do this and produce a lot of volume because it not always works. And it's an educated guess, a good educated guess. But nonetheless, you have to be very mindful.

piece of content that you create.

Jack (44:08)
Awesome. We've got another question here from Laura. If I'm making ads for skincare products but I want to use my face, what should I do?

Lachezar (44:18)
I think I already responded to this. Either pay a content creator to act as if this is your new marketing hire and like make it funny so that people actually laugh when they watch the ad. Or once again, let's say if you're the founder, just potentially use your old photos. And if that's not an option, yeah, well, UGC, I guess is your best bet. Fake podcast, street interview, like...

behind the scenes, like showing people from your team, packing orders. And if you remember the examples that I gave from Oats Overnight and Javi Coffee, like if you don't want to put your face, just show yourself, show yourself packing orders and sending them to customers.

Jack (45:07)
On the topic of Javy Coffee, we'll get to your question, Matthew, in a second. I think there's a really interesting article from House Incrementality on Javy Coffee. They ran some very expensive incrementality tests and basically found that one advantage plus shopping campaign was all that their account needed.

And this is a huge brand and massive. And they decided that their bottom of funnel retargeting campaign wasn't incremental, that they should actually turn it off. I have a lot of opinions about this. think there's a good reason why they would turn off that bottom of funnel campaign. It's just closing the sale and taking data away from those top of funnel campaigns about who to show the next ad to. But my opinions aside, it looks like Javi Coffee.

after some very expensive testing found that they should turn off that bottom of funnel campaign if anyone's interested in a structure there. Okay. So Matthew asked, do you recommend working with e-commerce marketing agencies or hiring internally to make ads like these?

Lachezar (46:05)
Pretty interesting.

So even though I run an e-commerce marketing agency, this is not a black and white response or question, I guess. It would depend on your scale. If you're generating less than 50k a month in revenue, I would actively advise you against hiring an agency and then working with some freelancers or even doing it yourself because yeah, like an agency might not perform within the first month.

of your relationship, is in some cases completely fine depending on the volume that they produce, which is not going to be that good for you because you're obviously paying for the ads, you're paying the retainer of the agency, and then the agency might need some time to learn more about your business and what's working and what's not working. So if you are at a smaller scale, I highly recommend you either do it through a freelancer or just do it yourself.

And then of course, if you are at bigger scale, so for example, spending 300, 400, 500K a month, then it would make sense to do both because an ad creative agency usually has an overview of what's working in other accounts that your in-house team might not necessarily know. But of course your in-house team might be faster or might be producing ads that are more on brand, which at that level of scale you would be looking for. But nonetheless, both options are beneficial because

I'm just saying it myself, we just bring so many new ideas to the table that the in-house team doesn't necessarily know. So it would depend on your scale. If you can afford a marketing agency and you can, let's say, afford three months of not losing it all, then do it. But of course, be careful with the marketing agency that you choose. Maybe it's not going to be the one that's sending you cold emails every two to three days. Maybe you should focus on working with somebody that's really like an expert and an authority in the field.

that you have been following for quite some time and you know that they really have a high likelihood of performing.

Jack (48:14)
Right, right. I think there are some tricky things with hiring internally. Sometimes, you know, you get what you pay for, the talent that you can acquire, let's say 50K a year, 100K a year, 150K a year is understandably going to go up as you spend more. You get a new graduate, you might get new graduate output from them, right? But you benefit from tenure, right? They learn in your business, they learn about your business, and you get to keep them for a while, ideally a long time if you treat them well, right?

Lachezar (48:42)
One

thing that I didn't mention, sorry to cut you off. do you have something? Okay. Um, if you want to build it in house, you either need to hire somebody who's extremely experienced that can build out all of the processes and all of the SOPs, which like, can tell you from my personal experience, a super, super, super good creative strategist is not going to work for anything less than 150K a year, like in salary. So that's what 12K a month. I mean, you can find a really good agency for like half.

Jack (48:45)
No worries, go.

Lachezar (49:12)
have that with the know-how, with the experience. So yeah, if you want to hire in-house, you have to make sure that you know your stuff pretty well so that you can actually control this person. You can actually give them constructive criticism and then you can work alongside them to optimize the whole system because if you just let them run with it, like you wouldn't even know if you made a good hire or not because you just don't know what to base your decisions on.

Jack (49:42)
Right. And you get the benefit of with agencies, one, they figured out a system that's their service, right? They have to figure out a clean and efficient way to deliver that over and over again. And they have reputation, right? It's harder to track reputation on, you know, your individual hires, maybe, you you're asking for references and such, but agencies have online reputations, you can see everything, there's quite a lot that they put into public. So yes, it's definitely a

nuanced decision to make. Mohammed has asked one final question before we wrap up here. How to find brands for any niche in foreplay by categorizing in terms of country. I want to find healthcare brands in the USA. What should I do? I guess that's a question for me. I'll show you quickly right now Mohammed and anyone else that is watching here in foreplay. Open up your account. Go to discovery. The products are up here in the top left. Go to brands.

and then add a filter for the niche. I believe you said health and wellness. So I can select that. And then we can see the top health and wellness brands and advertisers. So I could see there's quite a few here that are in different parts, I guess, sub niches of health and wellness. But you'll see from top to bottom the brands with the most saved ads. I can see Liquid IV up here. I can see quite a lot of brands that are quite recognizable, like hims and hers.

So that would probably be the best way if you're trying to discover within foreplay.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Latch. This was a lot of fun. I learned a lot personally. So yeah, I really appreciate you coming on.

Lachezar (51:19)
It was my pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Jack (51:21)
All right, thanks so much everyone. See you soon.

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How eCom ad creatives evolved in 2025 with Lachezar Voynov

Lachezar Voynov

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