Using Psychology in Your Ad Creative

Webinar Replay

June 14, 2023

Sarah Levinger

Paid Creative Consultant

Forbes-featured consumer behaviour analyst, creative strategist, and performance creative consultant. To date, she has helped hundreds of e-commerce brands increase their paid advertising ROI using psychology-based creative, and has worked with brands such as Fabletics, Obvi, Yitty, Kettle & Fire, and Slumberkins.

What you'll learn

Supercharge your creative performance with this enlightening session on integrating psychology into creative advertising. This webinar, ideal for marketers, advertisers, and brand strategists, explores the depths of consumer psychology and its application in creating effective ad campaigns.

Key Takeaways

Understanding Emotional Motivators in Advertising
Practical Application in Creative Strategy
Enhancing Ad Performance with Psychology

00;00;00;16 - 00;00;17;21

And now I wanted to introduce Sarah. Last time I saw Sarah was, I think, at the Whalies and she, like, absolutely crushed it with her talk. Thank you. And I was like, okay, Like we were decided. We want to do Creative Max. Like we to get Sarah because it was amazing. So yeah, I was give her a little intro.

00;00;17;21 - 00;00;39;08

Sarah's a consumer behavior analyst, performance creative consultant and founder of Performance Creative. And yeah, I'll let her take it from here. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much. This is going to be super fun for me because I've actually off the social media for two weeks just doing like a detox, a little bit of dopamine detox, which has been amazing.

00;00;39;11 - 00;01;00;05

But this is like, okay, I'm ready to get back into this. Really I also have to follow Marella, which is going to be hard because for this woman. So, okay, today we are going to talk a whole bunch about psychology and creative. And so me share my screen here. Okay, This is going to be super fun because I think there's a whole lot that we can talk about.

00;01;00;05 - 00;01;26;00

Psychology gets really, really deep. Let me know if you guys can't see this. Hopefully You can. It's quite interesting when you get down into the nitty gritty of the brain and how it actually sees ads and how it processes the different elements that are actually going on within your creative itself. So today I want to teach you guys a little bit about how to kind of unlock that performance with the emotional triggers your customers already have and use that to your advantage.

00;01;26;00 - 00;01;49;11

So let me jump right into it. I think a lot of people probably assume that this is what Sarah does on a daily, which is just a whole bunch of like mad scientist kind of stuff where I'm taking a ton of psychology, trying to distill it all down into like itty bitty pieces. And it's really complex and it's super complicated because it has to do with the brain.

00;01;49;13 - 00;02;07;28

In reality, this is all we're trying to do when it comes down to using psychology in your ads. The only thing we need to remember is we are taking what we know about the brain, putting it into an ad so that we speak to the subconscious, the parts, the subconscious that are going to like that piece of that ad the most.

00;02;07;28 - 00;02;28;20

So very simplified version. We're not trying to get too complex, especially when we start adding in war. What would you call it? More like complicated psychology of like tactics and hacks. I want to really, really kind of push this for you guys that like it's not hard to add these into your ads and to see better performance from those.

00;02;28;22 - 00;02;42;15

It just takes a little bit of time to learn what we're trying to produce. So before we jump into the ads, I think it's really important if you saw the dailies or if you see me talk anywhere else, I usually cover this part first. But I like to do this because everybody needs more knowledge about the brain, I think.

00;02;42;15 - 00;03;06;28

So when we talk about how the brain actually sees ads, we want to start with kind of foundational how the brain processes anything at all. So 95% of our processing power comes from the subconscious mind. This is the one that's very, very old. It's often called the lizard brain. It's very reactive, sometimes called irrational emotional brain. And this is the one that's just firing on all cylinders.

00;03;06;28 - 00;03;32;16

It is the fastest processing power you have inside your mind. And this is where 95% of our decisions are being made on a daily basis. On the opposite side, the conscious mind is only making about 5%. And this guy is pretty slow. He's very logical, very calculated. He likes to take his time, likes to get all the information in first, and then go into actually processing and making decisions.

00;03;32;16 - 00;03;53;19

So just as kind of a visual, this is how the conscious mind sees things. Very calculated, right? Like we want to make sure that we're making a very good decision, very slow working, very hard to make a good decision over time. But it just takes a long time. In contrast, your subconscious mind is doing this all day long.

00;03;53;24 - 00;04;19;18

Every single day. Conscious is processing about 11 million bits of information per second, and that's from a whole of things. So the that I want you to take away that your subconscious mind really is the boss here. This is the one that's doing all of the work to process things and in general it's just a recorder. So for consumers, all this brain is supposed to do is take in information from everything that you're seeing on a daily basis.

00;04;19;18 - 00;04;41;05

All of the experiences you have relationships you've been in, products you've sampled those things, everything, and just keep it in a box, record it for future use, basically. And the reason it's doing this is because it's trying to tell what things are most important to keeping it alive, and then it will send a message to the conscious brain once it sees something it likes and it will tell the brain to stop.

00;04;41;05 - 00;04;59;23

So, for instance, if you see an ad and that ad happens to have pizza in it and it's lunch time, you haven't had anything that morning. Maybe you skip breakfast, whatever it is, the subconscious is keeping track of all of that and understands that you're low on glucose. You're going to need to eat soon. So it will send a message to the conscious brain and tell that brain to stop.

00;04;59;26 - 00;05;25;21

Now, once it does that, you get what you need as a human, which is nourishment, food, pizza. Right. In context of ads, though, this is really fascinating and it gets deep down into kind of how the brain works on an emotional level because what the brain is actually doing when it sees ads, for instance, an ad about coffee, it will take that and compare it to all the other instances of coffee it's ever come in contact with.

00;05;25;24 - 00;05;51;06

And it will do that with a millisecond. I mean, this guy screams fast, right? It's doing that for every single ad it sees. And it's taking this in context of what you want to obtain as a human, as a whole. So every goal that you have in your life that you want to try and and go forward with or trying to get to or trying to climb the ladder, it's doing this every single time.

00;05;51;06 - 00;06;28;11

It's making decisions based upon Is this coffee emotionally relevant to what I'm trying to do as a human? The interesting part about this is the brain really is an emotional being, and the experience you have is a human really does come into play with how you make decisions and how you purchase things in general. So every experience you have, even if it doesn't seem like, would connect to some of the ads or some of the, you know, the promotions that you're seeing, all of your experience as a human is coming into play when you start trying to make decisions on ads.

00;06;28;11 - 00;06;54;02

So even the ones that are integral to what you're trying to do now, who you are as a person or who you think you're going to be, comes down to the subconscious mind and the emotional needs of that mind itself. So keep that in mind as we go along that every single customer is making an emotional decision based upon what the subconscious deems as necessary, that we're going to go on to do different things, that I'm the very first one.

00;06;54;02 - 00;07;18;09

We're going to talk about psychology and creative, and this one going to go deep into some of my favorite what what's term as a heuristic. This basically means it's a cheat code for the brain. Heuristics are just shortcuts that every single human on the planet has inside their mind to help make decisions faster. And then we're going to go into a little bit of creative strategy, not we're not going to go super deep into that because it's obviously a whole nother topic.

00;07;18;12 - 00;07;36;02

But in general, I want to talk about psychology hacks today because I want to get you guys something that you can use this week to boost your ads and to get better performance out of them. So these are the top five that I use all the time. You'll notice that there's something on this list, and that's social proof authority, proof, urgency.

00;07;36;04 - 00;07;59;05

Those are fantastic. And yes, they are heuristics. The brain does use those to try and make decisions quicker, but I tend lean a little bit away from things that are overused, especially in performance advertising, because you get to a point where so many people are using the same exact tactics that you start to dole the performance of them across industry.

00;07;59;05 - 00;08;23;28

So I tend to look elsewhere and this is kind of important because I think a lot of people think that there's just a few of these kind of hacks that we can use. Psychology hacks like urgency, yet social proof. There's hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of different risks that you can use to help boost your app. So these are the top five ones that I use all the time, and I'm going to teach you how to use them so you can make better ads and see better performance.

00;08;23;28 - 00;08;51;02

Anchoring effect is the first one. We'll talk about framing and how to use it linguistically with your actual copy. Loss aversion is one of the best ones I've ever seen. This one I use constantly because it works super well, especially for any sort of product that has kind of a negative connotation around it. Priming is huge. This one's going to be super fun too, because there's a lot you can do with priming to help people kind of push forward and get ready to make a purchase later down the road and then herd mentality being the last one.

00;08;51;02 - 00;09;21;23

So let's jump into it. Anchoring effect. The easiest way to describe this, they did a study on anchoring effect. This particular psychology heuristic basically means that we're taking a piece of information and we're presenting it as the foundational piece so that anything we compare it to seems like a good deal. They often do this with price and for this particular study, they found that when you presented a lower price to a consumer, the consumers expected the product.

00;09;21;26 - 00;09;53;24

The next product they saw you have a low price. So they had an anchor in their head that was just lower than normal. Once they got presented another product that was in the same category, they just expected it to be a lower price, then goes the opposite way. They presented these consumers with a higher priced product in the same and then showed them the product they wanted them to purchase and consumers were ready and willing to actually spend more money because they had a higher price that was anchoring that other price that they were expecting.

00;09;53;26 - 00;10;20;13

The easiest way to describe this really does a great job of this. They're fantastic with theirs, especially because their product is relatively cheap. It's like a ten $5 product, right? It's not super expensive, but they sell a lot of them. And the reason for this is because they're very good at anchoring. So in this lab we see a price anchor here, $10 of the anchor, $5 is the actual benefited price right now for Billy.

00;10;20;15 - 00;10;38;15

If I was going to come in and consult with them, I would probably tell them you're probably price anchoring too low because you give them a $10 price. Anchor I mean, $5 looks like a good deal. You could probably price 15 and bump your price up to seven. You could price anchor at 12 and bump this price up to like nine, whatever it is.

00;10;38;17 - 00;10;57;28

You can do some very interesting things with price pricing. Psychology is fascinating. I mean, there's so much you can do with numbers. It's not funny, but for Billy, they do this a lot in their ads and it works so incredibly for them. Old school advertising did this a ton. And the interesting part about this is they didn't actually do it with a price.

00;10;58;01 - 00;11;26;17

De Beers decided to do the anchor specific time frames. So for this ad, they chose this frame of like, how can you make two months salary last forever? This two month salary is an anchor. Now they've given their customers a specific price. I mean, is not what they did with this. That was a freaky crazy. They've given their customers a specific period of savings that they were supposed to save for this particular ring.

00;11;26;22 - 00;11;44;19

So now, I mean, they ran these ads for months before they decided to actually fill out the prices for these particular diamond rings. But since they gave them an anchor of two months salary for the actual customer base that they were going after, two months salary at the time was somewhere between like 1200 to like 5000 bucks. The more they're like, you know, it's a 2000.

00;11;44;25 - 00;12;05;21

That's a lot of money. At the time when they were running these ads, which was I think 1980s was this one. So in general, you don't have to just stick with price anchors. You can also stick with anchors that have to do with basically any sort of numerical number. So for guys, it was two months early and that one works too, of well, I couldn't find the original KFC ad for this, but it was really good.

00;12;05;21 - 00;12;25;18

So this one came up with a study that KFC did, I think it was in the Asian market, and this was fascinating stuff. So they ran an ad that just said a deal so that you can only buy four. So the price anchor for them was this four, right? So they actually put a cap not necessarily on like this brilliant stuff.

00;12;25;18 - 00;12;45;09

They're doing it. They're actually combining two high risk sticks. So they were combining anchoring and they were combining urgency. Right. So oftentimes when we use urgency, it comes out as limited time deal or it's going to go away soon or we sold out in a week. Anchoring and urgency actually work a lot better. When you tell people that they can't have a lot of it.

00;12;45;11 - 00;13;23;20

So if you haven't tried this tactic in your ads, I highly, highly suggest it because it's one of the best things I've seen in a long time. So for KFC, this right here, this buy for with the actual anchor, that worked really well for them. And the study was nuts. They thought 56% increase in purchases for their $1 tips, the actual product they were selling based upon the fact that they told people, you can only have four of them if you limit the subconscious resources that it's allowed to have, You can see some amazing behavior come out that just based upon the fact that people get upset when you tell them you can't have it.

00;13;23;22 - 00;13;43;01

Let's go into framing effects. This one is like one of my favorite ones because there's so much you can do with this. Copywriters use this a lot. So for this particular study, they found that running ad with a positive sentiment which was more like reach your weight loss goals, had a powerful impact on all of their metrics that they were tracking for this particular consumer base.

00;13;43;08 - 00;14;07;04

And then on the opposite side, they ran the same ad, which was, you know, don't get left in the dust like, you know, or don't gain more weight, those type of things. So that all of their metrics dropped. The consumers were not purchasing. They were very upset, like they just had really low scores performance wise. So how you say things is often more important than what you're trying to say, if that makes sense.

00;14;07;07 - 00;14;26;00

We need to frame things in a way that suits our particular customer set best, right? What? To be very careful about how we say it. I've talked about this one time just because I love what I do. Huel did this. I think this ad came out earlier this spring and I was like, Holy crap, you all, you are amazing.

00;14;26;02 - 00;14;48;10

So they have this ad that just says, Don't change your life, just change lunch. It was so incredibly well framed for this customer because oftentimes when you're trying to lose weight, you feel very hopeless, right? Like I have to overhaul everything, otherwise I'm not going to be able to do this. Customers and, this particular industry have a really hard time understanding what they're supposed to do.

00;14;48;10 - 00;15;09;23

So this is very simple for them. The framing around this was just a fantastic next example. This is one of the best that they have ever found. 1920s had some really good ads. If you're looking to learn psychology based ads, go to the 1920 because they were so literal and interestingly enough, they were trying to use things that didn't make sense at all.

00;15;09;25 - 00;15;33;13

And it worked. I mean, the way you structure your phrases and how you compare it to different things really does have a massive impact on the brain and how it interprets that. AD. So for this particular customer, obviously they're selling Cigarets and they had a claim here that was 20,679. Physicians say Lucky's are less irritating. This is what I found interesting though.

00;15;33;13 - 00;16;03;08

It's toasted your throat protection against irritation, against cough. So they're literally saying like our cigarets don't make you call it just it kind of cracked me up a little bit. This though, the framing on this is is fantastic because they're basically saying that our cigarets are good for you, right? They they didn't change a ton about it. They added a little bit of authority proof in here and combined it with that framing to kind of make an ad that had a powerful, powerful, which is like, you won't cough if you smoke.

00;16;03;08 - 00;16;23;26

Our our cigarets last one here, four words through this. This one was really good because it shows the juxtaposition between the two. So this is a positive way of saying things and this is a negative way of saying things seems obvious. But there's one thing in here I want you guys to notice the most, and that's the fact that people skip the image and I drive you crazy.

00;16;24;03 - 00;16;45;21

We are so concerned about what the copy says that we forget that the image is what the brain processing first. So Pro-tip for everybody, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and as it's going through and doing that, it's taking the copy and the image and comparing them very quickly to try and see if there's cohesion.

00;16;45;23 - 00;17;12;09

Right? It's trying to see if they are working well together, if the image and the text itself doesn't really work well together, if it's just, you know, we sell insurance and it's a picture of a dog, like people going to be like that doesn't make any sense. The brain will instantly just disregard it. It will scroll up. So very, very important when you do framing, don't just frame your your copy will try and frame your images to the copy as well so that everything is kind of cohesive.

00;17;12;11 - 00;17;35;09

That's one here loss version. I love this one. This study was done just recently, actually, and they found that this particular customer base, if the customer happened to be the type of person that really hated losing things, they were more likely to follow the crowd specifically when it came to read reviews, which I thought was like mind blowing.

00;17;35;12 - 00;17;55;25

So for this particular customer, they show them a couple of different products and in that time frame they had already taken a test that basically said like, I don't like to lose that image. And for that particular customer who really hated stuff, who just had this big loss aversion, they were super careful about reading all the reviews and tended to just do whatever the reviews said.

00;17;55;25 - 00;18;16;21

So obviously reviews are very, very important. But if your customer is already in this particular mindset and it's pretty easy to figure this out, if you do any sort of post-purchase survey or any sort of like customer information gathering, you'll figure this out pretty quick that some customers really hate to lose stuff. So Klarna did a good job with this because they took the risk out.

00;18;16;24 - 00;18;33;11

So oftentimes when you have somebody that's in like loss aversion mode, they hate risk, they hate it, hate it, hate it, and they never want to take a risk on things. So if you have a higher priced product or specifically for SAS, it's very important to make sure that your customers feel like they're not going to take a risk on this.

00;18;33;11 - 00;18;52;04

It's very easy. We're not going to just take your money, but you can try it out before you start to commit to this. So furnish now pay later. Obviously they're talking about like just go ahead and furnish your apartment and that you could pay later. If you download our app type of a thing. Shame club just crushes this every time.

00;18;52;06 - 00;19;17;24

Obviously they have a good benefit on here and this was off of their website from a long time ago. But this is what just it was like so awesome how it works literally one sentence if you can make your claim I would say clear and like risk free that that is like sweet spot for you guys. So try really hard to make it as short as you possibly can because that also tells the brain it's short.

00;19;17;24 - 00;19;40;24

So it must be easy. The brain wants no risk. It wants ease when it comes to loss of virgins. So fantastic on their website here. Last was good out from Spotify, trapping them free obviously for 30 days. Any time that you can give people a free sample, they're automatically going to feel a little less nervous. Right? Loss aversion is one of those things where they just feel nervous all the time about the risk level.

00;19;40;24 - 00;20;03;08

So fantastic way to do that. Couple more here. So priming effect, I love this one. I can't get enough of priming because it scared the crap out of me as a human. It's just very terrifying. So priming is an effect that basically says you are being influenced by a whole lot of everything, all on a daily basis throughout your entire environment.

00;20;03;08 - 00;20;21;16

In fact, some things that you read is something that you come into contact with or you interact with. They can have an effect on your entire day. And if you have kids in the house, is chaos or someone pooped on the floor that morning, you know what this is like. It just it affects your entire day even if you don't want it to.

00;20;21;19 - 00;20;41;25

So they did a study a long time ago which has been replicated a few times. This is an interesting one because there's some controversy around this this study, which I kind of like. They took a few consumers as a group because he was and they basically had them walk down a hall where someone was sitting in the middle of the hall and basically tracking how fast they were going down the hallway.

00;20;41;27 - 00;21;04;08

They would go into a room, they would read list of words, and then they would walk back down the hallway. That was the entire study. They split these people into two groups. One group read a specific group of words that had to do with older people. So bingo was one of them. Florida was another one. It never said the word old, but the word list really had to do with older.

00;21;04;10 - 00;21;24;16

And then they tracked how they came down the hallway. And that particular group very, very intensely, like high percentage numbers of this, walked slower down the hallway reading a group of words that had to do with elderly or older people. In contrast, the group that read like younger words like you. So those type of things walked faster down the hallway.

00;21;24;16 - 00;21;57;00

So these words that they're tracking and how they were trying to understand this was they were basically trying to see whether or not the words impacted your physical being after you read this particular group. Not so. And the reason that controversy around that is even though it's been duplicated quite a few times, there's a lot of people that are trying to discredit this particular study, even though it has been replicated just based upon the fact that they're not entirely sure that the word group, I guess was well chosen, which I just think is like the best example of that.

00;21;57;01 - 00;22;26;04

I absolutely love magic food. Always. Have they primed so incredibly well they choose their words very, very carefully, which is smart. They also prime visually. So this is a bowl that's actually filling up, right? It's not a full bowl that's going to gone. It's an empty bowl that's going to form, which is very different priming, right? Like your brain sees that kind of bowl of cereal very differently as it's going through like fold to empty, empty to full.

00;22;26;06 - 00;22;44;00

So these guys are always just crush it. Like, I can't even tell you how much I love their ads, but this is how we prime with vegetables. And this is also how we prime with words low carb, low calories, zero sugar, natural flavors. None of that says cereal, but it's still priming the customer to understand benefits, benefits, benefits.

00;22;44;02 - 00;23;10;19

Redbull is one that does this very, very well. You never see Red Bull logos on panels like you. You never see Red Bull on like flower pot, like you don't see the Red Bull logo on anything. That's not fast. So Red Bull has chosen their particular visual entity has specifically been chosen so that they always say, we are fast, We are like, We get you in the zone.

00;23;10;19 - 00;23;29;21

Those type of things. So when we're going through and we're actually choosing different visual elements, I want you guys to think about what do we actually represent and what can we visually capitalize on so that people will understand it faster. Because again, the brain is processing these images way faster than the text. So it's important that you choose those wisely.

00;23;29;24 - 00;23;57;09

Coca-Cola did this really well with this ad as well. Open the happy cans. This is something called and I say this word wrong every time and throw another anthropomorphism. my gosh. This is a really hard work for me to say. For some reason. Other anthropomorphism basically means that we really love cute faces. Kawaii is really big about this and we will often see faces and like characters and things that aren't actually real inanimate objects.

00;23;57;12 - 00;24;19;26

So this is a great way to actually primed brain to understand what's actually in this can because Coke is basically saying it's not just soda. This is also going to make you happy, right? I'm trying to be cognitive type. Okay. Last one third mentality. This one I love because I think a lot of people don't think that they follow the herd when.

00;24;19;26 - 00;24;52;03

They actually do. And there's hundreds and hundreds of studies for this one. So I didn't stay for this one just because I was like, there's are so many, but tick tock, tick tock is like the epitome of herd mentality. And I love that because it's just there's something so delicious about this app. So on Tick Tock, there's interesting things that I think a lot of advertisers do that they don't realize that like following these big, big trends that have been done again and again and again and again, that's herd mentality.

00;24;52;08 - 00;25;16;09

So we even do it as marketers. We're following these trends because everyone else is doing it. So this like pecking order with me, very, very herd mentality. The interesting part is, though, it still works psychologically. This one is similar, obviously. So they combined a few of these like mental heuristics. But the fact of the matter is, as people will follow this kind of like as some are trends, they're following each other.

00;25;16;09 - 00;25;39;20

Right. So the consumers are following each other. All tick tock and it goes deeper down into kind of like how people what's weird, how the brain actually wants to experience the world. So as tomorrow is one of the best examples of herd mentality. Just because people really really love sounds of things on tick tock. On top of that, I this one was really interesting of this.

00;25;39;20 - 00;26;01;07

Like satisfying is also another kind of herd mentality basically, because every human on the planet really loves satisfied things in this study. This across the board that we just really love to watch things get filled up, which is just funny. But if you could add like an interesting sound to it, like in it's colorful and it's pretty satisfying things is very much herd mentality.

00;26;01;07 - 00;26;19;07

Lots of people just follow everybody else as they're going through it. And then last one that I really loved on Tick Tock was this green screen. This didn't used to be a thing. When Tick Tock first came out, it just started getting big sometime in the middle of last year and then everybody was doing it for Santa. Markings is herd mentality.

00;26;19;07 - 00;26;40;25

We're just we're kind of following as as things kind of come up and trend. The more people that get on the trend, the more people will follow the herd mentality is is so integral for any sort of, I would say, trending content, especially on tick tock. So and we have few more minutes or so, we're going to go into some ad strategy really quickly for how to use these.

00;26;40;25 - 00;27;03;17

Right. So we just went through a couple of different psychology heuristics and kind of how use them in ads, how other people use them in ads. But I think it's important to kind of touch on a little bit the emotional side of the subconscious brain. And I like to teach you this outside of how the brain works, mostly because I think people see the customer journey kind of like this where there's specific stops that we're making along the way.

00;27;03;20 - 00;27;30;11

They stop a tick tock, they'll stop at our website they'll get on our newsletter and then eventually their buy. This is what people think the jury looks like. It actually looks like oftentimes consumers will have multiple touchpoints in one specific spot, say on Tick Tock or Google or wherever it is, YouTube, multiple multiple times, and then loop back around to it several times as they're making the decision to actually purchase from you.

00;27;30;13 - 00;27;50;05

And the reason they're doing this is because consumers are shifting their buying habits throughout the year and throughout their life. So constantly aging up into your demographic and aging out of your demographic. And it all just depends on where they are in life, who they are as people, where their brain is and what they're currently consuming. And it just depends.

00;27;50;05 - 00;28;09;27

It depends on what age they are. In particular. And it's quite interesting when you start to study generations and how the brain will start to kind of change what you need in life and what you want out of life as you age. And it's our job as marketers to make sure that we're not just hitting like who they are, but also when they are in life.

00;28;09;29 - 00;28;34;12

Because our goal really is to kind of develop ads that that prompt that specific response from the subconscious brain at scale. We want a lot of subconscious brains to understand what we're saying, take it into processing of the big mind the boss, right. And then make a subconscious decision so that the conscious can actually purchase from us how we do this is by leaning into the emotional motivator.

00;28;34;12 - 00;28;57;05

So I talked a little bit about this at the way we're going to couple the different places, but there's nine different emotional motivators we use to purchase the heuristics we just talked about come into play here, but they're actually second level. So the base level of every decision we make is emotional, right? So this is based off of a psychology framework developed by Will, which really good friend of mine works for kind of like big, big brains out there.

00;28;57;05 - 00;29;21;26

But his framework capitalizes on nine different emotions that we have. Sometimes they will combine to actually make the decisions that we're trying to make, especially when it comes to purchases. But once you can hit on one specific emotion, usually I find about three when I'm doing research for four brands. But if you can hit on that one specific emotion, you can actually build your ad so that it reads that way.

00;29;21;28 - 00;29;45;22

All of your ads can talk to you consumers about their need for competence or their need for safety or acceptance or esteem. And it's pretty important to know which one is going to be most important for your customers, because the creative strategy process that we're all talking about, this is usually the one that I see presented our research ideation production, doing the evaluation of the ads, and then going into any sort of iterations.

00;29;45;24 - 00;30;10;01

That's only half of the puzzle. The second half of the puzzle is your ad strategy. And this is where heuristics come into play. This is where emotional needs come into play. The nine different emotions and this is strategy really needs to start with our emotional sentiment, our messaging that we're actually using to draw people in. Image selection is so incredibly important.

00;30;10;07 - 00;30;33;21

What your image says will actually stop the brain faster than what your text says. The layout in the design is super crazy important, and then going into your iteration phase, these two work together. They've always work together. They will never stop working together. And it's incredibly important to know how to do both and do both well because this is how you build psychology based, creative.

00;30;33;24 - 00;30;51;18

So once you find an ad, you'll be able to say, I know which image to pick, I know which copy we need to go after. I know what testimonial we need to look for. I know where to place elements. So psychologically this is easy to process. I know how to reduce cognitive load so that the brain doesn't get tired.

00;30;51;20 - 00;31;12;26

This is how we start to create good ads so that the iterations of these ads also perform at scale. Because at the end of the day, all of these elements are going to work together. Every single piece of your ad is getting processed by the brain in a particular way, by a particular person who has a goal that they need to solve.

00;31;12;29 - 00;31;40;01

And all we're trying to do is make sure that we talk to the subconscious and present it something that it's going to love so that we can make more money and scale our brain. Thank you, guys. Hopefully I've got time to talk fast. Does amazing. That's what we all want. We've got one question in the chat here from Rafael is that obviously, like, you know, customers, consumer psychology is like a super probably like deep my gosh, they go down.

00;31;40;01 - 00;32;00;09

And so do you have any give any like go to books If someone wanted to level up kind of their knowledge of anything else, even like TED talks or anything like that, I have so, so many so obviously one of my favorite books, Marketing to Mindstate States that was written by Will Leach. He's the guy obviously built the psychology model for the nine different emotional motivators.

00;32;00;11 - 00;32;28;11

That's my top book in general. Always outside of that, predictably Irrational was a really good one. That one, I have to remember this guy's name, Dan Ariely. And of course, Steve, I should have forgotten that. Anyway, particularly rational is one of my second favorites. He's just like It will blow your mind once you start to study how your brain works and how you make decisions.

00;32;28;11 - 00;32;55;07

Because it just it's quite scary how little of our decisions are our decisions, right? But when you start studying it because you might start to get terrified because it really it's all emotional, It's very reactive. Every choice we make is just very reactive. So those are my top two. Outside of that, YouTube has a ton of really good ones on neuromarketing, so if you go on YouTube and just type in neuromarketing, you'll find a really, really good set of TEDTalks in particular that go through this topic.

00;32;55;07 - 00;33;15;26

So Okay, amazing. And we have one other question from Jess. I'm assuming you did a dope mantra. Yeah. Yeah, I love this budget. It was weird. Like, let me just tell you, that was a really weird experience. I didn't mean to. It was more just like, okay, I'm slowing down for some big project. So I think now's the time to just take some time off.

00;33;15;28 - 00;33;42;12

So I decided to go complete dopamine fast. So no TV, no email, no social media, and like limited phone use. I did watch YouTube. I'm not going to lie. I did watch what we do because I guess I just could start off. Biggest thing that I found is that I felt sleepy earlier, which is weird like I felt tired at about 945, whereas before I think because I was just like rolling my brain all day long, I didn't use of all sleep to like 1030 11.

00;33;42;14 - 00;34;11;06

So sleep was interesting. And then the next part, for some reason, I constantly felt like I had to check something, like I was forgetting something and that kind of went away. So like anxiety of What are you forgetting all day long? Just isn't there anymore Downside though, to dopamine baths? I have a really hard time saying motivated. I've got it now to the point where I'm like, I just don't want to do things I don't know anything about.

00;34;11;12 - 00;34;21;20

It was interesting. I suggest everybody do it. Cool. Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time and thanks for dropping all of the psychology knowledge through the marketing lens.

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Using Psychology in Your Ad Creative

Sarah Levinger

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