The Weekly Sharpener #106 - Creative Cuts

Hey Fam 👋,

Welcome to the Creative Cuts ⚔️ Edition of the Weekly Sharpener:

We're going break down an ad and discuss why it does and doesn't work with the goal that you'll have some actionable takeaways on how to improve your creatives and grow your business. 🚀

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This week we are tackling one ad, no episode of the show, just quick value. Tell us your thoughts!

Db 🎒

Our structure is as follows:

• Hook

• Trust

• Benefits

• CTA

• Possible Changes

Let's dive into this great-looking ad! 

Watch the entire ad with sound and better video quality on Foreplay (which is where I go to look/save ads for inspiration.)

Hook

• 3 different beautiful locales - you can imagine yourself in at least one of these places (signaling - this product is for everyone)

  • Desert

  • Beach

  • Forest

• All the imagery is VERY high quality - which is a great signal for the premium nature of these products (some backups are $700+)

• The backpack flies into frame - that kind of dynamic motion catches your eye.

• The product they chose is yellow - this is intentional because it catches the eye + stands out from the background - VERY SMART.

• The Copy is the best part of the hook for me:

  • Ready for anywhere is a catch-all that can mean a lot of things but adding Award-winning travel gear gives you an understanding of what you're ready for: Adventure.

• The hook is good but not great. It grabs my attention but not my emotions - a person would have done that, running through each of these locations or just one of them. We want to place customers in an emotional place so they HAVE TO KEEP watching or click to your website ASAP!

Trust 

• Award-Winning Travel Gear - because of the high quality of the ad - you believe that it's award-winning.

• The quality of the creative is also supposed to imbue the trust for a high AOV product like Db.

• They could add something here to make it feel more human.

Benefits 

• Each scene has a new benefit - but it moves too fast for me to catch up or understand the unique benefits so I kind of tuned out.

• They ask the viewer to swap between benefits in the top/bottom of the screen. It's hard to choose which one is more important.

• I got a little taxed trying to read each thing.

• Choose 2-3 benefits to lean into that are emotional, don't over-signal - people are inundated with complexity, they want to understand things quickly.

• EXAMPLE: Ready for your next: climbing adventure (terrible example) but

CTA

• SHOP NOW + 6 different SKU's. If you've gotten this far and the hold rate is high then you've are treated to seeing 6 different colors of the product, one of which might be your color.

Possible Changes

• Not so much copy on each scene. Focus on singular value props in each scene.

• More people using the product - I want to see why this is important for me to buy and how it works for people.

• Less shots of the bag swirling - it feels overkill after a while.

• Focus on a single narrative use case - climbing for instance - you can carry through all of the ways the bag is useful. People from other sports will see themselves in the story.

• Add some possible social proof: "tested by top climbers" or something else.

• Image example from a product page on the site 👇 

TLDR

• Focus your story on something emotional.

• Layer more people into this emotional story

• Have more focused copy.

It looks like our mantra for this ad is FOCUS. That is imperative when making ads - we get very little time to make an impression - if you are trying 3 different things at once, what is the viewer supposed to feel?

Work backward from what you want them to feel and how that lines up with your product, then build your narrative from there 

That's it for this week's edition of The Weekly Sharpener - Creative Cuts⚔️. Let us know if there are brands you think we should be looking at. Until next time keep 

All my best,

Chase

PS - ICYMI 🤖 - here is our most recent episode of ADD CREATIVE 👇