Happy Monday! Welcome to Dice Ads, the newsletter where I teach you creative strategy, one ad at a time. This week, we are going to be learning.

We're officially in Q4, which means that ad creative might be something that you are thinking more about. If you're looking for an agency to help take that load off your plate, then click here and let's have a chat.

👉 Watch in full here

Let's talk about variations. Since the release of Andromeda, there have been many misconceptions about what is considered viable to test in ad creative variations.

At Fraggell, all of our ads come with variations. These can range from hooks to new scripts to re-edits, essentially anything we can do to squeeze out as much as we can from that messaging and persona. I still think that doing this is a very valuable way to test, particularly net-new ad creative, and this video above is proof of that.

We made this over the summer and launched a couple of different hook variations. This became a winning ad, and two of those variations were among the top five in the ad account at the time, which means the same ad was winning in the account twice. This is proof that, as long as you differentiate that hook enough, Meta will still categorise it as a different entity.

The gurus would like to sell you a narrative in which you need to triple your ad creative output, make them as different as possible, and limit the number of variations. That is simply not the case. However, if you do create variations, you need to make sure that they are different, that the hook isn't just a caption change, and instead is a different location with a different audio and a different visual element.

Meta released Andromeda to stop lazy advertising. For all of you who are actually taking time and effort into your ad creative, this shouldn't affect you. That is the reason I wanted to share this ad this week: not only is it a winner and a great ad, but it's also a good example of traditional UGC. It's also proof that you can have multiple variations and still win.

If you want an agency which is actually going to look out for your brand, it might be worth speaking to me and -apply to work with us here.

👉 Watch in full here

Engagement often leads to winning ads because Meta loves people who use its platform. You'll often see that your top-spending ads have the most social proof (i.e., the most engagement). This normally increases performance. A great way to get a lot of social engagement is to give people a reason to comment.

This video is the epitome of that. It's a fairly standard UGC promotion ad, nothing groundbreaking. Pretty good, charismatic creator with a solid script. However, what makes it stand out is every single clip has something strange happening. Within the first 10 seconds, the guy is pulling the deodorant from strange places. He has a banana down his trousers. There is something happening for people to comment about, which might not necessarily be about the product, but does it really matter? Because people still comment, Meta pushes that to more people, and you get more sales.

It's the same engagement bait that people do on TikTok. They purposely spell something wrong or say something weird to get people to correct them in the comments, so they can beat the algorithm and push their video to more people. The same thing works in your ads. It might feel weird at first, but when you see it perform, it will completely change the way you make certain ads.

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👉 Watch in full here

At Fraggell, we make a lot of high-production-value ads, and this technique I saw on my feed is a fantastic way to get people to watch a video they might otherwise not be interested in. Unfortunately, when you make a high-production-value ad, there is a much higher chance users will scroll past because they see it's an ad.

What you can do to game the system and to attract more viewers is by glueing a UGC hook on the front of it, whether it's a behind-the-scenes shot of you filming the ad or, in this case, it's a staff member saying, "Our marketing team made this weird advert. I want to show it to you." Suddenly, that makes the ad feel more organic in the feed, and for some reason, people will watch it because when they get hooked in, they see the value.

It's a short little technique you can use to game the system a bit when making ads that people might not usually want to watch.

I've covered this before with a couple of other brands that have done something like Mannors Golf. They often invest a lot of money into high-production ads. They will run the high-production ads on platforms like YouTube, but then they will add a UGC hook when running it on social to get people to watch it.

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That's all for this week's Nice Ads. Appreciate you taking the time to read this one. As usual, a brand-new YouTube video is out now, breaking down my methods for making winning ads in this new Meta climate.

I'll see you next week

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