Welcome back to another edition of Nice Ants. This week we're going to be talking about:
How to create the perfect VSL
Creative tips to make your UGC look native
An easy win for your ad account.
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Humantra
We've covered the VSL format a couple of times in this newsletter, but I just wanted to reiterate how powerful it has become over the past couple of months. Particularly in the health and wellness sector, education is one of the core types of ad creative that we make. The reason is that people want to know what they're putting in their bodies and why. That's why this format works so incredibly well.
Since this is a UK brand, everybody knows the incredible voice of David Attenborough. When our creative strategist was writing this, she asked our producers to find someone who sounded as close as possible to the man himself. I think they did an incredible job, and this shows that real voice-overs, rather than AI, can be a great way to make your ads stand out.
This video was pieced together using a mix of brand B-roll and stock footage from sites like Artlist for higher-quality visuals, along with one of my favourite services, Gridbank. This gives you UGC stock footage that's perfect to put inside VSLs or even AI UGC.
Unless you're very purposeful with high production stock footage, it can look very cheesy very quickly. I often find that the more artistic visuals from niche websites work much better than traditional stock footage.
There are so many ad accounts that we're in where VSL ads are the number one top spender. If you don't have any live right now, this should be your priority this week.
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Solys Beauty
I want to share another example of creating native-looking UGC. The style that was popular three years ago, where you have a lot of staged B-roll and a ton of captions all over the screen, simply doesn't work anymore. I'm pushing my creative strategies to move further and further away from that style because I see it perform less and less.
If you look at the example above, you'll notice a couple of things:
It's just one shot the whole way through, very similar to the type of content that you see on the TikTok feed.
The captions: a main headline at the top of the video explains what the video is about, along with an emoji and the basic TikTok font. When that top headline disappears, they show subtitles at the bottom of the screen again, in the standard TikTok font.
When visuals are shown outside the main A-roll, they don’t fill the entire screen; instead, they appear as overlays. With the main video still showing behind, the images have literally just been placed on top of the screen.
You might not have even noticed these three things, but that's why they're so brilliant, because they go unnoticed. It's not heavily edited, but it is edited. It matches the style of editing that you see people do on platforms like CapCut, where most of the time is being done on a phone. You don't have the time or the ability to do fancy animated text, full-screen overlays, and film a load of b-roll of yourself using the product.
I truly believe that every brand should have at least a couple of these yapper-style ads in their account
TLDR:
UGC is changing, and you need to make sure that you keep up to date
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Dr Squash
I think I may have discussed this ad format before, but I want to revisit it because I see it perform well. It's so incredibly simple that you should be making one of these today. That's this example from Dr Squash.
The idea is simple: a big headline with an apology or something that would grab people's scroll because they want to know the gossip. Then you basically write what looks like a note from the founder or from the team that is essentially just a big call to action about potentially new products or a sale, something of the like
the reason these work is people are very nosy. They love a bit of gossip, and if they sense that a brand that they know is in some kind of controversy that they're apologising for, then they want to know. It hooks people in, which is usually quite difficult to do with a static.
But that also allows you to easily pitch your product or an offer to people without having to hide anything.
Pair it with a product image and your logo so that people recognise who the ad is from, and happy days
TLDR:
People love controversy, and it will make them stop scrolling.
That's all for this week's Nice Science. I appreciate you taking the time to give this a read. Remember to forward it to someone who you think might enjoy it. Also, you can watch my newest YouTube video on creative diversity and how it affects your ad account here
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