Jack (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of 4Play Fireside. I'm here with Ben and Triss from Webtopia. We'll be talking about how to make creative that makes you stand out, right? How to stand out with ad creative concepts.
Ben (00:13)
Okay, nice to meet you. How you doing? Do you want to share yours with me? Hey guys, lovely to meet you all. Ben is my name as Jack was saying. We're both from Ireland and we work in Webtopia. Trish was the CEO and I'm the head of growth here in Webtopia. What we're going to do is we're going to start with a little bit of a slideshow and there'll probably be some questions throughout. Feel free to write them in the chat or Jack if you want to stop us, absolutely do that as well.
Yeah, let's get cracking. Sure. Jack, do you us to go straight into it or how do you want to do this? you to wait for people to join? How's that looking?
Jack (00:51)
For sure, let's jump right in. I can see how many people are in the call right now. Guys, feel free to send in the chat where you're from. I know everyone likes to do that or what brand or agency you work with. Would love to check out some URLs and buy some of your stuff. Sandra is from the Philippines. We can see her.
Ben (01:06)
Super.
Okay, and hello everyone in the future. I know this has been recorded. nice to meet you. I'm Triss. I'm the CEO of Webtopia. And, you know, we wanted to talk to you guys a little bit more about how we blend AI with our creative geniuses in Webtopia. But also how we use a bit of foreplay in there in the background as well. Great name for a tool. Very difficult to explain to your mother what that is. Okay, so who we are. Yeah, look, we're
Jack (01:11)
Nice to meet you, sir.
Hahaha.
Ben (01:38)
We're a bunch of marketers all across the world. We're in six continents. We're not in 70. You can't hire media buyers as penguins. But what we do is we work with DTC brands, fashion, jewelry, beauty. And we help them both not from a growth standpoint, but also helping them grow their creative. We do that through social platforms. But also then we look at Search and Amazon and things like that. And more recently, we look at it a more.
at email as well. it's a really diverse team, some really diverse opinions, which is a lot of fun. As it says at bottom there, we marry the art of creative storytelling with the science of digital media buying. I was always told in school, art and science are two different things. I don't believe that anymore.
Some of the brands that we work with, kind of more global brands, but then kind of some more niche brands in there as well. But we've got kind of a cross section between luxury and beauty and fashion, health and wellness as well. Those who work in health and wellness now will know more, a little bit about the health and wellness problems that they're having with Meta specifically. And so we've got a fair share of experience with that as well.
why you should be listening to us today I suppose is because we've got a very very broad and diverse understanding of kind of what makes creative tick what actually works and also I suppose from from you know the the science side of what we can project going forward will work as well so we've got a lot of experience and all that so we'll crack straight into it.
In terms of the macro trends, trends shaping the industry at the moment, we're seeing a bunch of different kind of trends that we can kind of talk to here. I suppose the first talking there specifically about the AI tools implement assisting design, not just necessarily when it comes to actually sticking stuff into chat, GVT. I think we've all done it. I we all made a little Lego character for ourselves and a 2D version of ourselves. I think in addition to that,
is also assisting in understanding human behavior, understanding things that perhaps would have taken days and weeks before it sped things up significantly quickly. mean, look, the sky is also blue. There's some very obvious trends there. We also see a massive shift towards storytelling. With a lot of the AI junk that's been thrown out there, you've got the yetis and everyone else that has been thrown out from an AI standpoint, we want to make sure that we're shifting what we're talking about in our ads to
more storytelling and what's fascinating about that is you're still in the feed, you're still between somebody's wedding photos and someone else's holiday photos, so you're going to have that storytelling and it's really starting to come to the fore now as well. mean, look, personalized content creation as well has become massive for us. We've seen a huge ⁓ shift towards that because obviously when we're telling creators...
telling stories, can't just be generic stories, it has to be very much tailored to the people that are seeing them and actually receiving that information, know, the right person, the right place, the right time. Years ago it used to be relevance, relevance, relevance, it's still that case, you have to be relevant to the person. to that end I think it's important that personalized creative really comes ⁓ and shines through. Authenticity is again just a build on that, I suppose to say, you know, we need to be as authentic as possible
you know, again, you can be on the beach. But one of my clients said to us the other day, customers think AI is the devil. It's going to take our jobs, it's going to take everything away. So I think the biggest trend that we're seeing this month and this year even is actually a shift towards authenticity. know, the Japanese have a term wabi-sabi, which is something similar to what we're trying to achieve with this as well.
So we take an approach to this beyond the creative that is actually quite, ⁓ I would say unique, but it's something that's something we've really worked hard on to kind of differentiate ourselves rather than just do what everyone else is doing. And, know, kind of show that, know, ads aren't just art. They're actually designed to sell things to people and actually build things up. And I suppose what we want to show here is, you know, how we can compound learning through purposeful testing. So we'll talk a little bit about that in a bit.
further down, and we want to build clear feedback loops in ⁓ the creators that we have. And how we do that is we feed that into LLMs. You see here on the right-hand side how we're actually feeding our content ⁓ into a Google BigQuery or into an area and actually start to develop content ideas an awful lot faster. As you can see, that goes through there into Google Notebook, then goes into the LLM, prompt for a customized report, which Ben will talk about shortly, and then we'll
bring in the report to show things on a more ongoing basis. We then feed that into like some VO3 and mid-journey and things like that to test a bit more quickly. And then obviously, we're pushing creative boundaries as well, which is really, really exciting. This is a messy version of what we're talking about, but we're moving so fast. mean, if you want to start making it pretty, I think it can get a little bit out of hand. So I guess, yeah, just talking through that, mean, to kind of for you guys to
understand. I want to kind of show you some examples of this. This is where we say we don't just use it for AI design. We also use it to assist in strategy. we some of these examples here you can see and I'll let you kind of decide which ones are AI versus not. And before we say the second one for the top right is not me. The one of the things I would say to you is that look, some of these were designed purely through AI, plugged into the AI tool. But then actually the some of them were designed the idea
and
the consumer behavior behind it was actually created through AI as well. So it's just to kind of show you can use it in different stages. You don't just have to plug it into chat GBT and away you go. So yeah, I want to talk just briefly then about what the agenda is going to be today. And so it's just a flavor earlier on what we're talking about. So we have five different sections. We've got this creative strategy. We've talked about how to combat fatigue. And then we've got performance versus brand. So those in the agency world.
know this more than in person but you know the odd time when you go to run a creative and the CEO goes don't like it it's like yeah but it's your best performing that kind of fight so we'll talk a little bit to that and then obviously you know talk about our creative process and then creative creative strategy being a team game.
So Ben, talk a bit about iterations on how it can help you grow. Yes, so we do have a lot to get through here. So just from being Irish, the gift of the gab is, you know, one thing that is part and parcel of our nature. So we'll try and skip through these as fast as possible while still adding as much value as possible as well. So the idea of this slide here basically is urgency is key. You know, like we're.
The world is moving faster and faster every single year. I don't know about you guys, but like when I think about it, and I think, you know, January was seven months ago and like, where has the world gone? You know, everybody's just moving so much faster. And that's the same with creative. You have to be super fast in terms of your ideas, the ideation process, the strategy process and getting them out there as much as possible. And that's where we kind of lean into AI to make sure that we're getting as many new ads out there as possible. We'll go into another minute, it doesn't always necessarily
mean quantity is better than quality. There is a fine line there but you know the speed that you can turn them around is massively important.
Jack (09:19)
100
% I couldn't agree more you guys see that comparison of Will Smith eating spaghetti like I don't know six eight months ago Will Smith eating spaghetti as AI today. Have you guys seen that?
Ben (09:28)
Yes. ⁓
Yeah, it's crazy. mean, the one a couple of months ago made me not worry about kind of my job or the future. Now it's turning very dystopian. ⁓ It's like, damn, I can't actually I thought it was genuine him, you know, iterating on that himself. It was actually real. It's like, great. ⁓
Jack (09:47)
Right, what's that
new one as well from Google? It's not VO3, it's the other one. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Might be, where they're in real time walking through a street and there's like reflections on this car. looks incredible.
Ben (09:54)
Is it opal?
Oh, yeah. Again, just because we don't know about it doesn't mean it's not a thing. It's happened so frequently. mean, even like, you know, getting moving forward into won't go into it now. I mean, even the glasses, you know, looking at those kind of ideas like how you're going to have a camera in your face just showing you that stuff is going to be insane. Yeah, look, let's let's let's chunk on. I mean, look, they're talking about the these are some of the designs that we have there. We'll share this with you after I think someone was asking already to to share this with them after. So we'll go through that.
Sorry, I skipped on past that one. And so one of the things that I mentioned in the opening was just, you know, this pure glut and pure, I suppose, volume of creative. It doesn't always mean that volume is equal to value. So one of the things we're saying here, you know, when we're saying some clients have come to us and said, we can get 100 creatives for 50 quid. And I'm like, great. Like that. What's the point? Like, yes, you're going to test it out, but you're to burn a lot of cash as well. Some people are looking to like some team and stuff like that.
seeing like 22,000 ads live. It's like, OK, yeah, but there's more to it than just actually creating a bunch of ads. So one of the things we talk about in WebTopia is we talk about testing with intent. So we want to focus on specific hypothesis that we want to try and bring out. So when we talk about hypothesis, like, OK, this person is going to buy because of that. This person has this sort of feeling. Are they going to miss out on that? So there's certain things that we want to test with and not just kind of test for the sake of
testing.
We're not going to just change the the button from red to blue. I mean, that's good for CRO ads. That's not going to change. That's not going to move the needle. That's something we don't want to do. you know, in terms of that, we want to obviously bring out better learnings, better learnings, obviously then feed the platform aligned kind of numbers as well. So as we want to make sure that we're measuring in the right direction and then we're to create efficiencies from that as well. So if we have top performance, understand what works best. And by doing that, because we've
tested with the hypothesis, we're actually creating iterations based on that hypothesis. This in turn then reduces waste, creates a sustainable workflow and then builds brand consistency, which we all love when it comes to iterations. So the thing I'm trying to say is this has to follow a path. It can't just be a know, mashing a load of creatives out and hopefully the best. So that's one thing I wanted to say there.
Sweet. So just to touch on the amount and how it works on the creative side, some of the brands that we talk to, they go in there and they put a hundred new ads in there and there's not necessarily a rhyme or rhythm towards it.
This slide is very much touching on like everything you do should be leading to the next step. You should be taking little nuggets of information, metrics, whatever it is, insights from the creative that you're pushing out in order to make it better. So you're step by step getting better and better. There's no such thing as perfect. But you should be always moving towards the end goal with all the insights you're getting from the money that you're spending on the ads that you're pushing out there. So it's important to compound those insights that you are having. And this is just a very simple
version of a testing matrix. on the left hand side we've got the first two ads that you test against each other. You've got a playing background versus a man standing in the background. Then you find a winner from this and you go man in the background versus an AI person in the background. AI wins and then you go further then and you change the colour of the box, the text.
And so as I said, it's a logical step through your testing to understand what's working better in order for you to create better, better as and get more bang for your buck. Yeah, I think just just specifically on this, we've got we talk about in kind of more brand in terms we talk about explore, evolve, execute. And I mean, I think Sarah asked a question there. How do you keep the balance between keeping volume and quality? Right. What we want to make sure that we're doing is I'll talk a little bit about this further down the slide deck.
one of the things that we make sure we're doing is we're exploring a little bit. We're going to find the ones that work and evolve on those a little bit more and then on those we're going to execute even more. it's kind of I mean, look, people argue fun funnels are dead. But when it comes to creative strategy, it's still there because you want to make sure that you're exploring a little bit, exploring a little bit more and a little bit more. So you're still getting the ⁓ volume out there, but you're keeping the quality because you're iterating on what's working. But while keeping that continuous net new
content coming in because it is important to make sure that you're not just iterating on iterating on iterating because actually what you find is you iterate to nothing and there's some brands that we've worked with that have just literally just gone down and down and down the contours and said hey guys we can't iterate anymore we can't we don't know what to do so we take a step back look at it like me and a couple of other guys on the team have degrees in psychology that's what we've done and that's what we've studied and I guess from from that what we've learned
is that human behaviour is not the same for everyone and you know if you've found that little pool you're going to keep going down into it so we go and find some some net new people there to go and find and then talk to as well.
Jack (15:17)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. ⁓ think that the volume value balance or the volume quality balance is that you can't, one can't be at the sacrifice of the other, or you can't prioritize volume and sacrifice quality or prioritize quality and sacrifice volume. You know, you have one ad all year, right? It better be a good ad if it takes you all year to make, right? ⁓ Another one I think is kind of relevant to this conversation is, you know, you can't hit home runs unless you take big swings, right?
Ben (15:28)
Yeah.
Jack (15:46)
And if you're always iterating, you should iterate, right? You've to iterate on your winners because that's an ad that's proven to work. But if you're always just iterating, then you're not taking a big swing, are you?
Ben (15:53)
That's it.
Yeah.
And there's tools out there that will allow you to understand what part of the ad will work. If it's the hook rate, if it's the hold, if it's the click through, if it's the landing page. There's a lot of stuff there, mean, even in foreplay that you can kind of use to understand not just necessarily what is your, you know, what is your winners, but what part of it is your winner. And that's important as well. You mentioned there, it you all year to make one ad. You know, I would argue that it's going to be, you know, you're about a hundred percent chance of flopping versus the iteration, the continuous volume.
Someone's asking, I suppose, how much is too much. It's individual because you've got to depend on how much your CPA is, how much you're looking to spend. Don't want to get into the technical side of it, but what I'll say is that in terms of how much is too much, how much can you afford to spend on these to test them before actually going? So I think that's important to consider as well. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jack (16:48)
We've got a couple more questions if you guys have got the time. What are we going to save
in?
Ben (16:52)
I was just going say going in what you were saying there, Jack, in terms of taking a year to make an ad. We worked with this brand before.
who used to sell keto products. And they, I remember having a conversation with the brand owner and he was like, I want to go out and spend, you know, 25, $30,000 on a photo shoot. It's going to take four or five weeks to create these beautiful images and stuff like that. And in the meantime, we sent out some products and we got some UGC back and things like that. And it turned out when we got the images back from the photo studio and when we got the images back from the UGC, we ran them side by side.
the
ones from the photo shoot studio, you know, spent a couple of thousand dollars and know, already science where it was a flop and we needed to focus on what was winning the one from the iPhone that was taken just by a bloke standing in his kitchen. I think we spent two and a half million dollars on it. And what I'm kind of getting at here is like, you can ideate the perfect ad, but until you get them out there and testing the metrics will tell you what's working rather than you thinking, you know, it will work. And then you can iterate off that.
Yeah, for sure. ⁓ So just looking here some of the questions here. I'll just go off a little bit because there's a few. ⁓ yes, the replay.
How can you use AI to be authentic faster? being authentic. Jack, are you putting them up on the screen? Oh, fantastic. Does being authentic have to be slow? No, it doesn't. It's a very good question. How do you be authentic faster? It's almost an oxymoron. It's like, hurry up and be creative. One of the things, I suppose, from our side, we want to kind of say is, the ideation of being authentic can be quicker. You can speed that up quite fast, like quite a lot. I would say to you that the main thing that you want
Jack (18:18)
Amen.
Ben (18:42)
to focus on is the ideas and how you can speed up the idea generation through AI. I think from actually being authentic, can do that in multiple different ways. We found founder videos to work super, super well. And what you can do there as well is get a shot list pretty quickly for that as well. If you have a founder, they're busy. They're busy doing a bunch of different things. So if you have that founder, you want to shoot with them, get the shot.
this pretty quickly, find out five or six different hooks you want to get them to put at the start of the video, and then you can iterate on that pretty quickly. So again, there's authenticity there. We use someone like 11 Labs that for their AI, it can actually model out voice if you have that running over some B-roll as well. So there is some of the authenticity there as well. It's kind of a little bit faker. It's kind of pushing the needle a bit away from 100%. But I definitely think that that's something that you can definitely iterate on from not just being authentic.
and
us just talking to you, you can iterate on that as well. Just in terms of the how do you iterate on a top performing video ad without killing what's working? Great question. Again, this is very simple, very simple kind of actually what's on screen here as well. If it's a top performing video, I mean, these these ones here are static images, but the same process applies, right? Find the top performing video. Have a look at some. TikTok has a really good tool that allows you to see where people are dropping off.
clicking. One of the things you should be looking at there is understanding, OK, what's the hook rate versus the on the different videos? Take that same video and start it with a multitude of different hooks. Then what you can do, that's where we're talking about in terms of evolve. And then in terms of execute, maybe you want to try and change maybe the call to action at the very end or even throughout. So you're actually starting to test various different parts of it ⁓ and try and figure out what part of the ad is actually
rather than just making ⁓ an ad and sending it out and seeing how it goes. This goes back to the purposeful testing that we talked about in a couple of slides ago.
Cool, let's power on because we've got a bunch of other things that we want to talk about and then we can come back and answer some more questions for sure. Okay, sweet. So, you know, how to recognise creative fatigue. There's clear steps when looking at your ad account or looking at the creative, pushing out to understand what to be looking at when you're looking for creative fatigue. Now...
I will caveat this with like you don't put an ad into an account, spend a couple of dollars on it, a couple of pounds, whatever it is. And then, know, a week later is fatigued. Like it's not quite that fast moving, but well, obviously that'll depend how much money you're pushing behind it. You're pushing millions and millions of dollars and maybe, but you know, for a lot of the brands, maybe a week, a week is definitely too short. So looking at things like rising CPCs and CPMs, they're a clear signal that it's starting to lose effectiveness.
the platform is looking at it and going, okay, right, people aren't engaging with this anymore. They're not coming to the site, they're not buying those sort of things. So we're gonna charge more to give it to service add to people. So this is a clear sign that either.
you know, your audience is fatiguing and your creative is fatiguing and if you look at your audience size, it's 30, 40, 50 million. The chances that their audience is fatiguing is very little. So it's probably the creative side of things. So then you look at like you measure the focus on the click through rate as well. So you're looking at, you know, CPC, the gauge if you're hitting the right audience with the right messages. So are people, you know, is it being delivered to people for a good price? But are they clicking on it? And then you can kind of follow that path through the consumer journey to ensure that you just people just clicking.
on it because it's a good ad or is it actually the right people to come and buy the product from you. Then, sorry, how do we codify the logic? So what we've done here in WebTopia is we've taken a lot of the slides that we've just talked about and we've of put a logic behind it so that we can implement it into AI, into a tool that we're building at the moment.
Now, I'll say this covers a lot of things, but it's not bulletproof. So high CPM, example, high CPM, high CPC, low CTR and no CVR. Your next step there is to refresh your creative, look at hooks and visuals, test new angles and tightening your targets. There's a couple of pages of this. You can see here on the second page as well. I'm not going to read through every single one of them, but basically what it's showing you here is.
when you're looking at your ad and you're saying, okay, right, the CPM is low, the CVR is low, everything is low on it, what do I need to do here? And allows you to pick out at what stage you need to change something, whether it's a new iteration, whether it's a new audience, what is it? And then we've taken that and put it into a tool where we're optimizing a lot of feedback coming back our way for us. Yeah, so one of the things in terms of, good question Daniel, I suppose, why is it so important to codify our logic? So we use a win methodology or an
they're just acronyms for more or less the same thing. So we talk about three things when we're reporting and doing things like this, metric, analysis, and action. And so from that, we initially start with the metric ⁓ as Ben's talking about here, what are the warning signs? So what's the metrics that are actually happening? The analysis then we've actually taken to AI to be able to do the analysis for us.
And that's really important that we analyze it in a correct way. There's hallucinations for sure. But we've definitely found a way of ironing those out. But this tool allows us to codify it to make sure that we can actually do this at scale and do this on an ongoing basis. And so it's not once a week it can get pulled out. It can be run live. So we'll share this with you guys after. But this is how you're doing it, depending if you're optimizing and scaling or if you're ⁓ having
low CVR, for example. And this is just some of the examples of the actions that you're going to be taking. So that's really important there.
One of the actions that we can take is obviously, we talked there a lot about iterations, but how do we approach net new is a massive part to it because, as I said to you earlier on, if you're focusing just on iterations, you're going to iterate to the bottom. Where does that go? And it's important to focus on net new. So we talked there about our flexible creative system that we've got there. A very good question from someone there, said, have you tried
AI video. This is an example of Netnew. Yes, they are performing. It's not possible, and some of our brands anyway, make just straight up here is your brand ⁓ in a video. It takes a little bit of editing, bringing the brand in and things like that after, but they have performed quite well. Part of the process that we're trying to implement at the moment is that cyclical cycle, cyclical process I talked about earlier on where it's like you go from, ⁓ you know,
Fiat
input into creative into strategy all the way around trying to automate that a little bit It's still going to be human guided as opposed to be human Exclusive, you know, not gonna get rid of us just that easily and so it's what I will say on that though quickly is when we're testing and we're testing normally in our bottom of funnel middle of funnel stages just so that when people are seeing them it's not their first time seeing it especially because it's such a new idea this one newish idea these AI videos we want
to get as much honest feedback. We don't want someone to be introduced to the brand through an AI video. We want people that have bought from us or have engaged with us or whatever it is to see it first. That way that we know that's not their first experience. It was not damaging any reputation coming down the line from a new customer. So we let them kind of build up the social proof on it and show us what's working, what's not. Not necessarily going to them being like, is this good, is this bad? But like looking at the metrics attached to those videos.
to see are they actually working and other people, you know, watching 75 % of it or are they clicking through or, you whatever it is, and using that then to feedback and then once we cut it to a good place then we're happy enough to push it to our...
Call audiences then Absolutely. Yeah, so as I mentioned here, I guess the you know looking at this is a different tool I suppose the the same this takes out to me is And you know to a man with a hammer every problems and nails So we're trying to equip ourselves with better better tools here. So we've got the iterations We've got you know net new ads that were creating based on the concepts as well But we've also got content generators And prepare me a UGC content as well that we're trying to do there and we've got
AI
assisted build. So there's multiple ways of approaching the same problem that we're trying to find net new content in there as well. So what we you know, what's the full reset look like? We approach the strategic problem and understand it from a you know, from whatever product you might be selling. If it's a it's a Stanley mug, if it's a mouse, you know, it's one of the what are we actually trying to sell? What is the person trying to buy? And it's not from Jordan Belfort selling me this pen style. It's more so a approach of like, what's the issue that this person is facing?
that this problem solves because, you know, we grew up from a brand like when we worked with brands to start with, we worked with mission driven brands and it's very much focused on actually people who are solving a problem rather than just, you know, commercialism to death. So we focus on the strategic problem and then we use AI ⁓ to help us with our human insight. But we also implement that with some learnings that we get from the brand as well, be it their brand book.
or be it from their, I guess, their post purchase surveys or anything else that we can actually implement in there and get some human insight in from that. as they line that up with the brand proposition. And then what we do is we build for speed and scale. So this is something that we've seen a lot of, I guess, in the last few months. And this is what I was mentioning before someone had a question up there, we refer to it and is we have the insight, we start with the insight of why people buy and then what... ⁓
and let's go into the concepts then as well. So what's the big idea or the message that we actually talk about? So this is the process that we go through to develop a large range of creatives, it images, videos, or whatever it is, you still follow this behind the creative rather than just going and mashing it into VL3 or ChachiBT, like I said. And then so, you we've got the execution. So how are we saying? I suppose we want to make sure we're adapting the format to...
They're different platforms. So it's not just, you ⁓ one vision, one version here for TikTok versus another version for YouTube or another one for TV. I mean, the first was it the first Facebook ads were TV ads, the first TV ads or radio ads. So we want to make sure that you're is really relative to the platform people are seeing on, you know, Snapchat is another one that you know, people view it very, very differently to somebody that might be viewing stuff on TikTok. So you want to be very, careful on just bashing it somewhere and said that kind of works.
It's to be relevant. This is the thing I was saying before, you know, again, you want to make sure you know where it shows up as well. You want to make sure that you're again having that placement in the right place. And then we start to iterate on it. And as we see down the bottom there, you can start to see the the output that we're getting from it is going to be, you know, circa 100 over 100 placements. You know, that's something that we're we're able to do on a very, very quick basis to actually be able to produce some really good creative.
and some really high quality converting creatives as well. Just a question back to you, Jack, I suppose on your side, based on what we're talking about here and how we're seeing this, is this something that you've seen other agencies talking about? Is this something you've seen other brands say, this is how we create creative? Or what have you seen from that side?
Jack (30:46)
You know, it's a really good point. Yeah. I think on the agency front, making really great content quickly is a focus. I think on the brand front, hear, I just want to find that one ad, right? That changes everything more. Right. And I kind of get it on the agency front as well. I don't hear about it quite so much. It's about building systems that reliably produce, you know, that for as many brands as possible. But, uh, cause that's, that's the agency, um, value prop, right? But
Yeah, for the brand, it's like, I just need to find that one ad, right? That doesn't fatigue, that scales. I can spend a hundred thousand to make 200,000 or a million to make 2 million, right?
Ben (31:24)
Down the
street. We've always said like that, exactly that. Our job is not to test but we can't find the winners without testing. It's important, like in football it's not a winger's job to track back but they're not going to win games unless they defend. Same job. We want to make sure that we're doing it. You don't tell you specifically what to do but this is part of the game. This is what we need to do.
Jack (31:32)
Right.
I can see Ben
shaking his head, you're not in on these analogies.
Ben (31:52)
The analogies are just crazy sometimes. They make me laugh. yeah, I'm to do a shameless plug here, Jack, for foreplay. ⁓
Jack (31:56)
Hahaha
Ben (32:06)
We use briefs quite a lot. This is kind of the merge between human input and AI as well. So, you know, when we're making net new, when we're making iterations, those sort of things, we use AI and foreplay briefs is one of those. It allows us just to be really, really clear with our designers, with our creative strategists and things of that throughout the team, what we need and what we want. And then it just helps us be much more efficient and faster because, you know, the key word here that we've been speaking about all all of it through is speed, fast accuracy, that sort of thing.
and obviously briefs within 4Play is something that we can use. We haven't been paid to say that, it actually is very useful to use as a shameless plug. ⁓
Jack (32:49)
You guys heard the, ⁓ it was, was
another agency owner. told me about this. said that I just spent 10 hours automating something that took 10 minutes. I thought it was pretty interesting. You know, nowadays you do see a lot of marketers and I think it's understandable. We're looking for arbitrage, right? We're looking for that favorable gap between how much time it takes us and then getting something out that's worthwhile that that's meaningful for the business. ⁓ we're looking into tools like NA 10. We're looking into how we can use.
Ben (32:59)
Yeah.
Jack (33:18)
the foreplay API, how we can use all these different products to automate these systems. But eventually you just, you come back to actually, need speed, right? I don't need to all day automating. I need a product that works, right?
Ben (33:30)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is it and the other thing as well is like there's these new There's new Google tools that you can actually create automated flows through spoken language. can say I want to make it and it's exactly that but I mean look we you guys have a tool that has definitely helped us As I talked about net new I mean creating that net new content on an ongoing basis, you know be it You know writing writing scripts like this or even kind of they're simply briefing out our creators it created teams. It's been fantastic
So yeah, shameless plug. Sweet. So, know, we've spoken a lot about NetNew versus sorry, new versus old when to change from iterations to NetNew and kind of striking that balance. You know, coming into 2025, ugly ads was the buzzword. You know, everyone wanted to have the ugliest ad out there.
Jack (34:04)
Thank you guys.
Ben (34:23)
And it kind of stemmed from like people sick of seeing this over-created ad sitting in their feed. know, like people don't go to Meta to be advertised to. People go to Meta to relax and things like that. You know, and they're on their bus home or train home or whatever it is. And we're kind of sitting in between. So being as native as possible or as camouflaged, like fitting in as possible is massively important. And that's why where we see this ugly ad coming from.
See on the right hand side Harry's which is obviously a huge huge brand and the type of ads they're pushing out there are ugly ads but to me they're much more effective than something like on the left hand side like Ritual is which you know has this place as well but like when you're when you're pushing out a huge amount of ads that are ugly ads on the right hand side are definitely key. you seen them much? I'm sure you have Jack. Much to talk about this.
Jack (35:19)
Ugly ad stuff? yeah, for sure. ⁓
Ben (35:21)
Yeah, yeah,
everyone seems to be talking about it at the moment
Sweet, Performance versus brand then. So I suppose the most important thing is when you're looking at your ads, what are your ads doing? you know, there's been multiple, multiple situations where we've spoken to brands. We're like, okay, who is your ICP? Who's your ideal customer profile here? And then they'll say to us, ⁓ said, a lady between 25 and 35 lives in this state, earns this amount of money, drives this kind of car, you know, that sort of situation. Whereas when we dig into data then, it could be a 40 year old male living in a different state.
interest
in different things. So ensuring that the ads that you're creating are actually making sense with the back-end metrics as well. So speaking to the people that are actually buying rather the people that you want to buy. And I suppose the goal of the creative has to be aligned towards that as well. Like there's no point in sticking out female-centric images or creative if you're trying to talk to males and vice versa as well. And also what is your ad trying to do? Is it trying to
Sell is it trying to build an email list is it trying to get brand awareness? What is it trying to do like it's very very important for you to Understand what you're trying to do with the ad in order to get that over if you don't know if you're kind of like we'll just put that out there and hopefully it'll sell this product or hopefully it'll build our email list and then that kind of kind of doesn't work as well as if you kind of sat down thought about the Reasoning behind and that kind of you know flushes out that in the ad
Okay, so looking at this, so this kind of talks about the different stages of the funnel. I presume a lot of people on this phone call know the different stages of the funnel, so I'm not going to sit here and preach top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. But what I will say is...
Only in the last week we've had a conversation with two different clients of ours. One client is like, I don't care what you do with the creative. This is a type that I want you to create. Don't go outside it. Another client that came to us who was a very, very luxury brand in the UK and had literally been like, I don't give a what is on that ad. If it's a penguin standing in the middle of the ad, if it converts, it converts. It gets people's site, gets people's site. Now what I will say is there's a happy medium there.
saying
everyone should start advertising penguins. What I am saying is like when people are coming through your top of funnel, you don't necessarily need them to know your brand story or your things that certain people will buy in for that. But the idea here is to try as many different types of as as possible, different angles, different hooks to get people into your funnel. As you get them into your funnel, that's where you start building your brand awareness and things like that. But your top of funnel is where you try to be as very out there as possible.
I saw an ad the other day in the first two seconds was just this ambulance screeching across my screen and it was nothing to do with ambulances but it was like trying to stop me in my place when I was scrolling. So it is important to understand what types of creative sit in different parts of the fund as well.
So lastly, then we talk a little bit about the creative process that we have here in Webtopia. But something that you guys can go and just take away and actually start implementing yourself is very useful. So we talk about the research phase to begin with, but we use a couple of different acronyms in this. So CMs are our campaign managers and former project managers ⁓ of a creative request, obviously determine the capacity that's needed.
So basically make sure that they understand what they actually need on an ongoing basis. And then we prepare the assets and we gather that together in 4Play and in Google Drive. It's really important to make sure that we've got the assets that we're clear on what's actually needed. We then obviously gather client information and make sure that we get the information of what's going to be working. And we do some performance analysis of obviously what's in the platform in meta, but also then what's
what
competitors are doing as well. And then we, know, the Creator Strategist does some research on the competitors. They look at the trends, the industry, all that kind of thing. And that's really where foreplay has come in to help. And I'm not paid to say that, I'm just saying that's something we use. ⁓ And so that's kind of, I want to kind of explain that to you as well. You can see here, we can see that some of the creators analysis that we're doing using the spike files, et cetera, there. ⁓
Here's a little hook you guys can use, take away. So these are 100 hooks that we have created and have found that has worked really, really well for us from from ours. Earlier on, someone was saying, what's the top three? Go in there, have a look. There's some really good ones in there. And there's ones that we use on an ongoing basis that have been.
fantastic for us and Ben mentioned the ambulance screaming across the screen there's multiple there's somebody walking down the road straight and face at you so you know somebody's jumping in somebody jumping off a chair there's various different things like that so there's a bunch of different hooks that can be relevant to your brand as well as just hooks that are trying to catch people's attention in there as well
And we've also got then some creative and ideations as well. So we've got ⁓ our high performing creative as inspiration. So this is again gathered in collaboration with Foreplay and kind of making sure that you guys understand in terms of the creative creatives that we're doing. We've got a creative process here that you guys can also follow. So our stage four is obviously our production. we have the creative brief is approved and all assets are verified. And then the
We hand over the creative brief to the designer using our brief tool in foreplay. And then we obviously get the guys work through all the different design parts. And then we obviously make sure we QA that as well. And as we can see there, we've got the iterations. I don't know many of you are football fans, but this is the iterations of Pirlo, ⁓ which is, I think should be hung in the Louvre. But we can see there the kind of job of the creative strategist, et cetera, on the back
Great. In terms of the creative strategy as a team, I suppose you want to talk bit about that? Yeah, well, I'm just going to pause for a moment because I feel like neither of us have taken a breath yet, Do you have any questions or anything that you want to go through,
Jack (41:52)
We've got a couple, let's go with Daniel. Why is it so important to codify the analysis process approach?
Ben (42:01)
Yeah.
I suppose that's answering that kind of on the slide as well. Massively important. We have our process where it's all in our heads in terms of the process that we're going through when it comes to ⁓ the metric analysis and action, as I mentioned. So this is what happened. This is why it happened. This is so what. If you want to start involving AI, if you want to start involving other people in your thought process and to kind of actually ideate on some of these things as well, it's important to make sure you're codifying so that people can
follow the same process while also using their creative inspiration as well. So, you know, if you're going to bring in chat GPT and you want to start using that or any other AI tool, you want to make sure that it's codified and that it can understand what you're trying to say without you having to prompt it every single time. To your point earlier, Anjay, you could spend 10 hours trying to automate something that took you 10 minutes. ⁓ So it's really important to codify and make it a lot simpler.
Jack (42:59)
Yeah, I really like this one from Sophie as well. What tools do you use to understand which component, which part of the ad is driving the performance is moving the needle?
Ben (43:10)
You're it.
I mean, it's a very good question. mean, I'll take it initially, but if you want to build on it as well, think certainly if you're using, obviously, using in-platform tools, you've got hook rate and hold rate. That's massively important. But then, like I said, you can use something like TikTok that can actually start to see where people are falling off on the actual view rates as well. You can use, obviously, Metas that tells you what percentage people are watching to as well. But then there's anything from other creative platforms
platforms
that you can go in this show, it'll show you ⁓ where people are clicking. I think just generally within the platforms themselves has been very, very beneficial. But also then it's kind of being a bit clever with when you're using your naming conventions as well. So this is hook, not just hook one. It's like, what's the hook? Why is the hook there? You can actually bring that information again. It's about this is the code of eye. Make sure that you can bring that into an AI tool that can understand what the hook is as opposed to it spitting back to you hook one one.
Jack (43:59)
Right.
Ben (44:10)
⁓ what does that mean for hook two one it's like okay well actually it's more so the ambulance hook I keep going back to the one he's saying but it could be like the hook where it's it's a problem problem benefit or problem solution is the hook so you want to make sure that you're ⁓ codifying it in the right direction as well yeah
Jack (44:31)
I really like that attention
paid to the funnel, right? That rate of valuable interactions with the ad. You have to hook them in order for them to do anything else afterwards. And let's say you're hooking them, they're watching, but then they don't click, right? Well, you know what the problem is. You have to make the ad better at driving the click. So whether that's the CTA at the end, whether that's some CTAs throughout the video, right?
Ben (44:50)
Mm-hmm.
Maybe
people are just aren't clear what you're trying to do with the ad. Maybe it's just too far removed what you're trying to do. we also we also going to use foreplay in collaboration with motion as well. So foreplay is very much the start of the ad process briefing, swipe files, spider, that sort of things to understand what competitors are doing, looking at other ads across the internet. then what we do then we use motion and to collate all the data once we are.
testing it. So yeah, that's what we do there.
Jack (45:29)
Nice.
Ben (45:30)
Sweet, I'm just mining for the time, I'm trying to think. I think we only have two three other slides left. So we can, we'll go through those and then we'll go through the questions at the end. That's cool with you, Jack. Sweet.
Jack (45:41)
Yeah, for sure.
Ben (45:48)
Okay, so creative strategy is a team sport. And what I mean by that is, know, in some circumstances, maybe you're a brand, maybe you're a small business, you wear multiple hats in an agency like Webtopia here.
we have multiple people doing different things. So it's massively important to have that collaboration across those teams. So obviously a client talks to us, the media buying happens and the creative team. So basically what's happening here is the creative team are talking in collaboration with the media team consistently, understanding what's working, looking at the metrics together, and the creative team are able to action that and then to spit out more creative. So as I said, if you're a small brand, you probably wear all of these hats.
Some people are lucky enough to be able to handle certain aspects of these to other people but it's massively important that they all stay in cahoots with each other and that they're always talking with each other because you know if it falls down somewhere then you start losing the direction you're moving with your ads. And then the last slide, excuse me, is the spider that we use within foreplay. ⁓
Those of you here probably have used it already, but basically it just gives us a great understanding then of what else is out there, what's being run by our competitors, landing pages, hooks, new ads being run, those sort of things. Now, you obviously don't want to go out there and copy people, but it's great to have an understanding of what other people are doing in the market as well. Yeah, I think that's the end, isn't it? Yeah, that's us. Any questions? Yeah, some good questions. think Hunter had a good question there. How do you organize your creators so you know it's been approved? ⁓
I guess, we were very simple. think that all blacks had a best keep it simple, stupid. I think it's important to make sure that we've got you use a very clear naming invention, but then using a Google Sheet with different lines on it was very, very helpful in terms of what's been approved, tested, and then the learnings and feedback from it as well.
And you know, we've got that LinkedIn with Google Drive and it's been, to be honest, it's game changing in terms of, you know, we wouldn't be able to run it per client without it. Because I guess one of the things in there is making sure that you've got your creators in a certain folder, but then also then making sure that that's listed in a certain way in there for your creative strategies to be able to see it. And there was another tool that we're starting to test the recent, the name escapes me, I'll mention it now in second, but they,
They allow you to bring different sections of the video as well. So you can you can organize it similar to how we're doing it, but you don't have to just have the whole video, for example, you could have this is all the hooks. This is all the main parts as well. I don't think it's really charm. I'll get you the name of it now. It's called build your ads dot com or something like that. I think they're they call Freddie out of Germany is pretty, pretty good at organizing that. But yeah, what I would say it's called.
Jack (48:39)
Say it was cool, build your ads.
Ben (48:41)
build your ads. I'll get the exact name. He'll kill me for making a mistake with the name. But yeah, that's definitely a tool that we use. Do want to take a question while I get the name of that one? Yeah. So how you name creatives? Do you have sheets and what's important to include?
Jack (48:45)
Ha
Ben (48:56)
It's important to include absolutely as much information as you can. We have a tool that we build. Basically what happens is we go through the different levels of the funnel. Let me see, can I actually pull it up here and show you guys really quickly? A live demo. A live demo, yeah. There you go. I hope I'm not giving anything away.
But basically what it allows us to do is it allows us to make sure that every single ad is named in the same ways that when we're going looking at it can ensure that we're not missing any of those different angles and different hooks. you put me on the spot here. While you're getting that, it's called buildyourads.com. So that was the one that, so what it allows you to do is get different sections of the video and allow you to organize it in the right way so that when you're going to actually build it, you want to say take a hook from over there.
there
and the main body of a copy of from here is a B-roll for over there. It allows you to build that up pretty quickly, bring that all together in the tool and then export it straight into Meta or TikTok or wherever you're sending it to. That's very, very helpful from a creative standpoint. He's just, he's been launching over the last few months and it's been pretty game changing for us. So yeah, pardon me for forgetting the name. thought that was it, just wanted to make sure.
Jack (50:14)
Nice.
Ben (50:15)
Okay, cool. What other questions do you have? I'm going to start sharing. That's okay. So I can look at this tool. Just the name and convention tool.
Jack (50:19)
see here guys you have three to five of course of course
Talal has asked, have you tried full AI videos and how are they performing?
Ben (50:37)
Yes, this is what we were mentioning earlier on. Yeah, we have tried it and it is they are working for sure. The full AI is a bit of a misnomer in that you can't just go straight up and be like, hey, yeah, it's full AI straight out of VO3 or whatever and straight into the into the into the platform. You got to do a bit of editing. So we had a brand there recently called Zest and they wanted their their actually to be honest, when you look at their product, the logo is actually not as clear as possible. So we're producing
all this content which is really good but they were getting the logo completely wrong so the person might be turning the product up in front of them but the logo was kind of weird in the corner so we had to do a bit of post on that but generally it was pretty good for sure. I found it, I found it. ⁓ The name and convention tool. ⁓
Jack (51:26)
What'd you find?
nice.
Ben (51:31)
Let me just share this really quickly. Okay. We'll share this with everyone after so you can actually be able to just take this from them. The idea here is you've got different campaigns, set and ad names. So when you're putting them in here, obviously the date goes in here, different levels, the funnel goes into it, where it's been placed is at TikTok shops, website and shop, website, the different strategy angles here, you've got multiple here.
Jack (51:36)
you
Ben (51:52)
Format is a video gif, etc. And basically all of these have drop downs. You put your version new iterations Who is it created by that sort of stuff and it spits out a
name here so that we have the, so the name pretty much gives us every bit of information we need to know about the creative that we're running. And then we can use, you know, different tools to pull up our best value prop ads or, you know, image ads or whatever it is. But every single one of our ads will be named like this. Same with our ad sets and our campaigns. Super. Great.
Okay, I hope that was useful. We'll share that with the deck after you'll be able to see that. And then, yeah, obviously download it if you want to use it, you can copy it, whichever, but it saves us a lot of time. We'll see. But sure.
Jack (52:35)
you
We
got another one here. think this is a great question. What are the first three iterations that you start with 90 % of the time? I'm not sure if that's actually something that comes to mind.
Ben (52:46)
⁓ I think
they put it up there straight away. They put it up when we were talking about Iran, but they actually then got a full hundred of them on. So I'm really happy that we're able to share that with them.
Jack (52:57)
Hehehe.
Ben (52:58)
I think, yeah,
it's going to always depend on the type of niche you're in. Like if you're in a health and beauty or health and wellness or if you're in active wear and things like that, there's different there's different. We have an ad bank that we go into an account with and we say, OK, these are the 1520 ads that we know work really well. We're going to just on day one change logos, you know, get it in the brand.
feel and then get them out there in order to just test them because we know that they've got a huge millions and millions of dollars of spending behind them and then from that then we start making iterations or net new concepts and things like that so and it's not as easy just saying what's the three that I just go in with to every account it does depend on different accounts that sounds like a very political answer but it's
Jack (53:47)
That's a good answer, it's the truth. I've got a question for you
guys. As an agency, do you have any systems for sort of like a central intelligence, right? You have lots of accounts, have lots of strategists, you have lots of people who are learning different things about the brands that they're working with and how to drive the best results. Do you have anywhere that you're collecting all of this together so it can be used across niches, across different brands that are in the same niche maybe?
Ben (54:11)
Yeah, for sure. That was that project that we talked about at Iran where we're bringing the information into it into our own data warehouse and applying a chat GBT.
Google LLM, all these kind of over the top of it. Some of the parts I didn't share in there, but yeah, we have a place that we're synchronizing and bringing it out. That then feeds out media buying information, creative strategy, and actually just general brand strategy as well. So it brings in Shopify data as well on top of it. You know, there's multiple other LLMs that you can use Shopify obviously have their own integration now. You've got the, you know, obviously, Claude, Chanty, Biddy, Gemini, all these kind of the whole
Jack (54:24)
nice.
Ben (54:50)
LLM structure, but I think they're they can be very generic. What we do is we train ⁓ individual GPTs on our onboarding forms as well. So when we do that, we train the GPT and then show them they allow our media buyers to understand more about the brand rather than just the generic information it has online is from that feedback that's happening on a weekly basis to the brand of what's working and what's not. So, yeah, that's.
Yeah, we are is the answer. Work in progress. Yeah, for sure. We call it Project Oasis is what we're calling it. Just so happens that Oasis are touring the UK and Ireland at the moment. It's nothing to do with Nolan named Galaher. Yeah, we're nothing like that, I promise.
Jack (55:18)
Bye.
Nice, isn't it?
We go on here from Hunter. What does your creative team consist of in terms of the different roles?
Ben (55:41)
So we recently restructured our creative team. was actually quite interesting. We had a traditional style creative team where we had somebody at the top and they're kind of feeding the creative strategies and designers. And so what we've done is we've restructured it now and we're to have individual creative strategies per pod. So we structured our company in a pod like format. So we've got multiple different, I suppose, how do put this, like many agencies within an agency. And then what we do is we have a creative strategy to work with a group of clients.
I haven't called them partners, but that's a story for another day. The creative strategist then will have at the disposal UTC designers or video editors to be able to go and create the content and they will actually act as project managers as well as creative strategist to be able to bring that stuff together. So then they work with multiple different brands to get that understanding across the brands. But also then have that multiple, suppose, feedback into what they're actually performing, what they can use to
perform. So they're almost like an artist with multiple tools. And so that's the focus there. They then link in with the campaign manager and the lead strategist to be able to understand what's working for the brand, but also then they can talk in a creative sense of how they can actually implement that from a creative standpoint. So it's very much focused on the creative strategies now rather than it was kind of a top-down approach and it was getting quite bottlenecked. So the traditional model, I wouldn't say it's dead, but it wasn't working for us. So it's probably, you know, lot of support.
Jack (57:10)
You know, it's interesting, this might sound a little bit vicious, but I've always wondered what it would look like at an agency to open source the brand's marketing, right? To say, hey, all of the creative strategists at the agency, all of this talent, you can work on it. And if you get performance, then you get compensated more. You're incentivized to create performance.
Ben (57:26)
Mm.
does.
it work. I've seen it work. Hunger games of sorts. There are several creative strategies that I know have previously left agencies have WhatsApp groups that they just launch a thing in and say, right, make the creative and we'll pay you if we're to use it. They then in turn then get paid based on the idea that it's a percent of spend on ad. We don't do that because we were working on perspective spend on ads on ads generally with growth. We find that a better growth model, but they
Yeah, they get paid based on how much you spend on ads as well, which is really good. We're really different.
Jack (58:05)
That's interesting. Alright guys, let's see. Do we have any more questions here?
Ben (58:07)
Yeah, for sure. Thanks a lot.
Jack (58:14)
I don't think so. think we might be coming to the end. Guys, if you have any last minute questions, now is your time.
Ben (58:20)
We wanted to drop our email down here Jack or is that something you do if there is questions people want to ask
Jack (58:26)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, your email or your LinkedIn. think that's a great shout. Someone asked earlier if they would be getting the slide materials after the program.
Ben (58:37)
We'll send them straight on. You'll have them and you can download them and do whatever you want with them. But yeah, it's definitely something we're going to be sending on in addition to that, namely convention calculator as well.
Jack (58:49)
So guys, don't blow up Ben's inbox asking for the deck. I will send the deck to everyone after this event.
Ben (58:55)
Oh,
sorry, yes. Okay, you can delete that email if you want to. And yeah, we'll get back to it. We'll get it over to you as soon as possible, in the next few minutes.
Jack (58:59)
Hahaha.
Awesome. All right, well thank you so much everyone. This was a great conversation. I learnt a lot personally. Thank you guys.
Ben (59:11)
Thank you very much. Yes, thank
you so much for your time, Jack, and thanks for hosting it, and thanks everyone for turning up. Thanks a million. Talk to you guys soon. Bye-bye.
Jack (59:19)
See you guys.
