Meta Insider Reveals How £100M+ Disruptor Brands Scale With Andromeda

0:00You work with the top 1 % of brands, the disruptor brands, you will have seen a lot of the nuances, the things that they're doing correctly that gives them that status.

0:14should we go for it let's go let's do it feels a bit like a therapy a double therapist i think it's probably more gonna be a therapy session for us yeah the creative in the room exactly exactly but super excited today we've got maxim from meta uh who works as a creative strategist there with some of the most disruptive black brands on the platform, including the likes of Space Goods, who we also work with. Super excited to have you here today because I think we can see a slightly different perspective from what's happening on the inside, how you're perceiving things, and also where we are going with Meta.

0:51We're also going to look back at things like Andromeda, partnership ads, as well as creative diversity. So Maxim, welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's great to have someone from the inside of the operation where we spend so much time so much so much of our time talking about yeah to get the inside scoop so much of it is uh us just um almost yeah wondering is is this the right way you just kind of have to test we're just making things up yeah we act like the experts but hopefully i don't break your dreams to me we saved multiple six figures in q4 by changing the way that we make ad creative.

1:29And we did it with Lens by Foreplay, a creative analytics tool that's built for speed and clarity. And you see, I've used a lot of these creative analytics tools before, but genuinely for me, Lens is the best. In seconds, you can get a bird's eye view of every creative test plotted. The UX for me is one of the best parts. Like if you've used one of these creative data tools before, you will know that loading times for reports can be incredibly slow and tedious whereas with lens is literally instant just insights on demand that you can just hand directly to your creative team to your designers or your creators lens also connects to foreplay's research tool i'm sure you've used their inspiration function before and for me it's so so valuable having optimization and inspiration all centralized in one place so if you want genuinely better creative, faster decisions and less wastage, you need to use Lens by Foreplay.

2:22Link down below. Well, yeah, we'd love to, I guess, start with just a bit about your role. It'd be great to get an overview of what does a typical day look like as part of the Disruptors creative strategy team within Meta? Yeah, I mean, my days are very varied. But my role in general is about basically leading transformation when it comes to creativity within the disruptors world basically so that means it can help disruptors finding new insights to to explore new creative or running workshops basically with creative team and and data teams all the way to helping really into business transformation when it comes to creative creativity and creative teams makes sense and disruptors for everybody watching is just like brands doing pushing the boundaries i guess of facebook and um in terms of results in terms of scale.

3:14How much of a has the role transformed, I guess, over the last, that whole disruptor team transformed over the last couple of years within Meta? I'm assuming it's got a much greater focus on creative now than it did previously. Yeah, I think it's really interesting because I'm coming from like a more traditional world, a more like CPG traditional world. So really exploring the disruptors is really bringing the knowledge that you get from the old world and really getting on this journey with those people who are not following any rules and trying to build the new rules, the new playbook basically when it comes to creative.

3:45So it's really, really exciting. It's nice that you guys are pushing the same narrative as us. I can't have so many conversations with brands that are still trying to scramble to figure out how to set up an operation, how to even think about creative strategy for Meta. I feel like we've come a long way since even like six months ago, so I can't imagine what it was like then. I wanted to start with Andromeda. Again, for everybody watching, this will be the last time we talk about this on the podcast because I feel like we've really milked this. We were saying it's become a bit of a meme that agencies just talk about Andromeda all the time, but I think it would be rude not to discuss it today.

4:24It'd be great for you, I guess, just to give your interpretation of Andromeda, what it is. We've talked about it. We've talked about our best interpretation, but I think hearing it from the inside would be great. so it may be your last time talking about andromeda but i know it won't be my last everybody wants to talk about andromeda and like you're saying in the past few months it has been on everybody's lips so it's quite interesting but in in plain terms and how i explain to clients is like think of andromeda as like a super intelligent librarian right so the old school librarian or the old school system was looking at ads as like book cover to the andromeda is capable of going inside the book and going through the content of the book.

5:04So it's like a super intelligent librarian that knows everything about every book that is in the library. That's a really good analogy. That's better than any analogy we've used. It's very good. Yeah, for sure. And I guess what that's helped the platform do is just deliver better ad inventory to the users and therefore drive better results for the advertisers if you're producing the right diversity and volume of creative is that correct yeah yeah exactly i think we're going to get into it in more details but it's basically blending art and science right andromeda is really getting into the content like the sentiment the the actual meaning of the ad right so you're moving away from basically this targeting game and really getting into what is the creative content why did they feel like they needed to make that change i guess what was broken in the customer experience that led to meta completely reimagining the way that they deliver ads?

5:58I think there's two parts to this answer. The first one is completely understanding that today we're not in the business of disturbing, but about earning attention, right? So the whole ecosystem has to be about earning the attention of the consumer on the platform, right? The other is that today we're receiving millions of millions of ads per minute, right? So you get that people are starving for attention or brands are starving for attention, the people are losing attention span also. So you have more ads, more people, but less attention span, sorry. And then more ads being served, basically.

6:34So the idea is like, how can we make the experience on the platform for the consumer completely tailored for them? Yeah. I feel like Meta does a really good job of being like non-intrusive and it's ad inventory compared to things like YouTube, compared to a lot of other advertising platforms where it's very hard to skip. It's very obvious when you face an ad. Obviously, they rolled out the whole subscribe for no ads on platform, and that was a big narrative the last few weeks. But I definitely feel like the platform's got a strong balance. Yeah, 100%. I think especially because from a creative strategy perspective, you're seeing more and more brands leaning into that very raw native approach that fits the platform in which they're distributing ag content on.

7:22What are your thoughts? I don't know if this is something that you think about much, but it very much aligns with, which we're going to get into soon, creative diversity, but also Andromeda. This idea of soulmate theory, there's a perfect piece of creative out there for everyone. How are you thinking about that when you're talking to these disruptor brands? yeah i think it's funny that you're mentioning that but it's like it's about the brands and i think that's the work we're doing with disruptors today it's less about thinking what piece of content i'm putting out there but who am i building this piece of content for and which motivation or barrier i'm trying to tackle with this with this piece of content sorry yeah so very much persona driven in the way that exactly yeah exactly yeah and we'll definitely be getting onto that shortly.

8:10And I guess just coming back to Andromeda, because I think there's a lot of misconception, isn't there, about how we are creating ads for Andromeda, how we're delivering ads for Andromeda, what it means in terms of how we change from a volume and output perspective. What would you say is the biggest misconception that people have around Andromeda? I mean, I think it's around volume, right? And I think we're going to get into that later, this idea of you have to have thousands of ads. And it's about iteration. it's not about iteration i think it's about being smart in the volume it's strategic volume and understanding really like we're gonna get into it like motivators and barriers when you build the content it's not about flooding the platform with content it's really about finding the right motivation and the right barriers to create the right content yeah 100 i mean we actually did a um with created that campaign article with meta where we did the controlled study all around volume and um you know doing a creative volume a b test where we essentially compared five ad variants with 25 variants while uh and essentially from that test it came out that definitely the volume was the was was where more of the performance came from 171 more purchases despite reaching 59 000 fewer people uh 50 cheaper cost per conversion but i think the key there the learning there the hypothesis around that is that you know volume for volume sake as you say isn't isn't enough like it's important that we are driving that through the lens of the persona and also going deeper into how we speak to those individual personas through that volume 100 and we've sorry go on no no i was gonna say to link to the article it's exactly that it's and when we talk about strategic volume think of it as like how much flavors you're giving to the algorithm basically right so if you're giving 10 times the same flavor you are basically reaching for the same audience if you varied your flavor you're giving more signals for the algorithm to find new audiences basically for your content it's as simple as that that's why we talk about strategic volume yeah i love that so it's like flavor is is the more flavor the more strategic depth which essentially then translates into incremental reach exactly yeah i feel like and even we've been guilty of it towards the end of last year of just throwing more more at a problem and i think that is that is creative strategy right i think brands the brands that got on the volume hype early went a lot of them went really far into like four five thousand assets a month and um and we do a lot of audits where we'll look at an account and they've been making more and more assets every 30 days and their reach is going down or their cac is going up rather than taking a step back and being like are we being really intentional do we really understand the different customer types we're going after do we understand what their content preferences are and how we're building those blocks of diversity up um which yeah i know we're going to come on so we've spoken a lot about andromeda but then we've got gem and then lattice as the three building blocks of the new delivery system within meta's algorithm how has this fundamentally changed i guess not just the creative portion of the approach but the general approach to add accounts and growth on the channel holistically for brands before we go deeper into creative.

11:27Yeah. Let's cover Andromeda and Jim, how they work together, basically. So let me go back to the librarian image, right? So if Andromeda is the librarian, basically selecting the best ads, fathens of best ads, you would think that Jim is like the discerning reader, right? And what we mean by that is like out of those fathens of ads, they will be able to scan the content and the context from a consumer perspective. So it's not just about finding or getting the right ad, but it's getting the right ad at the right moment for you, basically. So those two work together. Andromeda will basically filter the best content and Gem will exactly know and predict how to basically deliver it to the right person at the right time.

12:10So you've got Andromeda, which is retrieval, and you've got Gem, which is the ranking system of ads. how is that changing i guess the approach to um ad accounts like the way that people are approaching the media buying the the the i guess the people and the operation that need to sit around that to grow consistently on facebook compared to maybe like 12 months ago so we're talking about account structure right yeah account structure and even just the resource that brands need to be thinking about and bringing into that that approach some creative resource or yeah i I think one thing that is quite hard for internal team and agencies is when we talk about radical simplification.

12:52I think the old ways of thinking was like multiple ad campaign, multiple ad sets with those campaign, right? We see now that if you do that, if you overcomplicate, and if you manually create all those layers, basically you're actually not helping the algorithm to reach new audiences. That's why we talk about radical simplification, right? And I know it's scary because of the old ways of thinking of like account structure but it's it's about trusting the algorithm to the about finding so the idea is recruiting those creative strategists uh that we've mentioned before so the people who have like a mix of heart and science i like to explain them like that so people who have who understand creative but also can read data right and those people are the golden employees of the future those those department used to be separated right she had the people the left brain people and the right brain people.

13:43Here, now the golden child of the disruptors are those creative strategies that can do both, basically. Which is why it's such a hard role. Exactly, exactly. Because you also sometimes play the missing link between those two still existing team within a company, right? So the old ways of thinking. So you're playing this role, basically. The idea of this team and the team to really understand is that your job today is not to create those layers, but to provide the creative fuel for the AI and let the AI find the destination, basically. Yes. So creative truly becomes the targeting. I mean, it shows how it's like flipped from pre-iOS 14 where there was much more complexity from an ad account perspective and targeting versus probably more simplicity from a creative perspective as to what would actually work.

14:32Now it's all about the creative and how we really talk through that psychographic state of the persona and ensure that we're tapping into the right motivators fears desires um to get in front of the right person yeah i think so the other way was like basically define your audience as restrictive as possible and then a b test your way to your winning to your winning assets basically and then once you have this winning asset just iterate and iterate and iterate basically the golden era of just so easy i was in the older ways though rather than the golden era I remember when I first started I first started doing some media buying on Meta whilst I was at university and at one point we were running 1 % lookalike audiences of every single event on like 200, 300 pound campaign with one asset per ad set and there was like you'd go in the account there'd be like a thousand campaigns or as many as we could run and it was literally the opposite literally like the arbitrage was in the campaign set up not the creatives it has completely flipped And I think we've definitely seen that journey of consolidation play out, especially for brands who are spending larger amounts where reach and ad delivery becomes even more important, getting in front of new audiences consistently to inform today's performance and future performance and ensuring that we're getting the right creative volume and variety.

15:56and with Space Goods is a good example of that where we've kind of pursued that consolidation approach over a period of a few months and it's contributed to better and better results over time. So definitely think everybody who's watching needs to go on that journey and find a way to simplify their account structure even if it's giving all of the power back to the machine in a way. Feed the algorithm and then trust the algorithm. Yeah. So I want to dive into creative similarity. which is something that yeah we've again spoken a lot about we've done multiple masterminds on but again it's still let's say early it's not it's not that early anymore but there's still a lot of unknowns around creative similarity I guess just to start what could you just give some context for those that maybe don't know what is creative similarity in meta and how How important is this for brands that are listening?

16:52Yeah, of course. So think of that the algorithm analyzes what we call visual signature, right? So that means that it goes through your creative, like we were talking earlier, analyze the content, the emotion, the message behind it, not just the file name, basically, which was maybe before, which means that like you may have 200 ad files on your account, but the system recognizes only 20 different signatures, right? That means that it's not about having, like we were saying, hundreds of different assets, but the right assets. Because again, the algorithm will only recognize 20 different signatures, and that means that your 200 assets are fighting for the same audience, right?

17:35So it's moving beyond those superficial tweaks when we used to call it iteration. And I think we need to be careful today when you use the word iteration, because I think in everybody's mind, iteration is changing the background or changing a word in the title and really understanding that it means meaningful changes in the DNA of the creative and the assets. So what are some of the things that Meta are looking at most in terms of whether they're deciding if something is the same or not? I mean, it's not Meta as us. I am not behind the algorithm, but there is basically, like we were talking earlier about visual and creative signals, right?

18:16So I think the algorithm is looking as many as possible different signal. That means like different talent or creators, different background or environment, different type of filming or camera angle, different type of messaging. The more you're feeling the algorithm different, like I said, creative signals, the better your asset is about to stand out basically from this crowd of 200 assets. Yeah, it's definitely changed the approach that we've taken. And we've definitely gone on this journey where, you know, Andromeda, we had changed our whole process when, when, you know, when we started kind of leading more so into that of Andromeda.

18:55And I think that became, okay, we need to iterate more on a weekly basis and drive more volume. But then with creative, diverse similarity, it completely changed the approach again, because actually, we have to be, we can still iterate, but we've got to be like truly intentional about the iterations that we're doing so if we had say three hours to do 50 iterations in that same time now maybe we could only do 10 to 15 but as a result they're going to drive more diversity and therefore more impact more incremental reach within the account yeah yeah i think it's it's quite interesting when we talk about iteration and like like you were saying in the back when you have when you found your winner you would change background or the music when it comes to video now it's about completely shifting the way you're thinking about a winning assets right so it's less about the execution and more about what has convinced people about this asset so really about what is the inside behind this asset that has really struck a chord in people's mind and then that's why it's a winning asset it's not because of the color or the visual it's really the insight and really the motivators right behind the assets one of the things I've I think is an interesting challenge which we haven't quite figured out I guess internally is like I think some assets can really work because they're a combination of things working together so it could be like a format and a persona and a message that all works together to resonate with a with an audience and it's trying to strip out like which of those has been the the real contributor the the biggest driver is it the message or is it that we've done it as a podcast um but yeah we're definitely looking at that as more of like what's the what's the fundamental building blocks rather than those like small things in a creative that we can then take into output yeah one of the latest things that we'll get onto in a moment is the idea of how do we how do we go into more depth with the personas that we're targeting and i think previously we would have just macro personas which really were quite broad in many ways like technically ollie and i could fall under the same class of persona but we've got different fears we've got different motivators um you know we've we've got different things that that drive us as individuals that are going to resonate with us and therefore really we shouldn't be sat under the same class of persona yeah so this is kind of why now we're viewing personas as macro which maybe we fit under the same and then micro uh which through that you're looking at okay what is the primary desire what's the core fear what's the belief and that's then kind of really governs how we speak to each of those individuals.

21:33Yeah, I think it's quite interesting because before it was, we will all be part of the same demographic, right? Like male living in England, liking football, for example. That would be a proper demographic, like 25 to 35, if I'm older than 35, but 25 to 35, liking football and living in England, basically. Right now we're looking at personas and it's more like the emotional and psychological level, which is much more interesting when we talk about creative diversity certification. We can talk an example like Space Good, for example, which is a wellness brand, right? If your target only male who like football, you're going to get the same message over and over.

22:10But then if you start thinking of like why people would like to try Space Goods, the different products, right? There may be the person who is like a high achiever. And in that case, the messaging is around productivity and scaling and getting more active and getting better at your life. Then you're on the other side of the spectrum, you may have someone who is like the stressful newbie or the stressful worker and the benefit is all going to be being like peaceful mind and and and wellness really the the core of the brand so it's really interesting to think of it like that because immediately you get diversification by thinking about your audience from a completely different perspective and you could also if you yeah when you go when you're approaching it in that way you can you can often and we've done this for a few clients you'll find through research audiences that you didn't even know existed for your brand and that can open up like another huge leap in spend and exactly leaping growth um massively and i think they yeah and the deeper you go on those sub-personas the more of those you'll find more more scale you'll be able to drive just on that what what advice do you have for brands that maybe are in that position where they are seeing frequency increase they're needing to unlock new new personas, new angles?

23:23How would you approach a situation like that, I guess, through the lens of reporting or research? I think it's both reporting and research. I think there's a work to be done by brands of understanding the consumer better. And again, not on the demographic level, but more on the psychological and emotional level, right? So it's like, it's almost shifting role. I always say to marketeers or like clients or brands that are coming to us, put down your marketeer cap for a moment and think of yourself as a simple consumer, right? Like when you're targeted by ads, when you feel that you may be targeted because you are a male living in England, liking football, you're not relating to this ad, not in today's world.

24:02But when they start talking about emotional trigger or it feels like they know you as a consumer, it's much more interesting, much more relatable. So there's a lot of tools now. There's a lot of AI capabilities. Meta AI, for example, is a great way to start asking questions about different audiences, what drive people, a certain group of people to purchase a certain category, for example. It's a great place to start. Yeah, I think that's, we speak about that a lot. I think like research is the 80-20 of creative. I think it's like people should spend so much more time on like review mining, surveys, looking at organic videos that are trending against a certain problem or product and trying to find those like, it's trying to find the way that your customers and the different personas talk about the problem that because that is often so different to how the brand will talk about the problem and that alignment and just finding those small turns of phrases can have such a massive impact on performance yeah the because the right it's like we're going through this inflection point in the business right now where the role of the creative strategist is changing as execution becomes more commoditized by ai it means that the role of the creative strategist becomes vulnerable unless they are truly strategic in their approach so they become more of the strategic spine versus i guess what you know notoriously they've been is kind of a jack of all trades they have to do scripting concepting ideation reporting optimization everything in between um and yeah because of that like we are we're really putting an emphasis on how we spend more time on the research because i think sometimes brands think you do research once and you know they then don't touch it for for a year two years but it almost if if not a monthly thing it has to be a quarterly thing and it needs to it needs to be a big part of that ongoing approach yeah we have a saying uh within the creative department at metais creative will be automated creativity will never be.

26:06And I think that's a good thing to understand and to take for brand and understand and investing in the creative strategy department, right? It's like AI will help you automate the execution, but creativity, which is really to understand your consumer, your brand, and the markets that you function within, this will never be replaced by AI. Because like you're saying, it's about emotion. It's about understanding the geopolitical environment, the socio-economical environment of your consumer also, and really act quickly upon that. 100%. That's definitely the kind of ethos we're approaching our growth of that department through.

26:44We touched on how Meta looks at creative similarity and why it's so important. You mentioned signals, which I want to come back to because we think a lot about signal engineering within accounts, which I think many brands don't think about that enough. How can we engineer the signals in the platform to find new audiences but i know meta's got a lot of creative similarity updates coming from like a reporting perspective and a um and i just wanted to chat about that the view of like creative fatigue creative similarity score top creative themes um and how you're looking to arm brands with with more data and insights to improve creative similarity over the next few months?

27:33Yeah, I think for me, the most exciting one is themes. And because you're going to be able to not only understand what is working for your brand, and double down on that, but also understanding when you're saturating your audience with a type of content, right? So let's say you have 8 % of your content that is around humor, but you see that this content is really performing. And that means that like double down on humor that doesn't mean that it has to become 80 of your content right we see brands that have 80 of their content that is that look like a podcast yeah good like today right and it's true also specifically in in the disruptor world right i don't think there's it's a ride of fastest for disruptors to have this ad that looks like a podcast it always works yeah i know i know it's still ripping it's still ripping it's like people will come and they're like we've done podcasts I'm like you've not done them well enough our thought process now is like what's the next evolution of a podcast so we've tried to innovate on the same approach but the idea is that if 80 % of your content is the podcast you may want to evolve in terms of content or diversify again the content I think I've been thinking about this recently because it's like survivorship bias in a way it's like when you analyze when you're creating more assets and you're analyzing what's working you're you're always looking to double down on what's working and i was reading a ben horowitz book recently from andreessen horowitz and he said that he used to go into his strategy meetings and write up like what are we not doing and start from there and i think that especially for brands that have quite broad appeal have a lot of personas to go after have broad time big market i think you do need to balance doubling down, doing more, refreshing what's working with trying to activate just completely different styles of content and completely different types of people.

29:31It's like the call earlier today about with one of our brands where you were saying exactly that, where are the gaps? We need to do some gap analysis. Yeah, we're like so over leveraged into 40 plus, but we're not really telling anything to people under the age of 40 and the product has appeal. So it's like, right, how do we do that? Because we'll activate so much more volume and they're already spending a lot so it's like there's a big big opportunity there but yeah theme sounds really good yeah i think i think to your point i think it's it's really it's really interesting what you're saying because this is also what we're working with brand in terms of like shifting mindset right and it's less about like short-term results and more like long-term how you build a brand we usually tell brands don't try to to have this winner loser ad mentality or like the concept and the ad and try to build more of like a creative portfolio right and within your creative portfolio you'll have the themes that you know are working but if you think of your content as a creative portfolio then you may want to have more risk with 15 to 20 percent of your content right try new theme for example or try new formats within within this portfolio because you still have those 80 85 percent where you know you'll get performance from so it's this idea of like really building from the future and not just being short-term vision yeah 100 yeah we we've started we've always categorized by like framework or big swing and then you know that's that's a layer within the creative strategy what percentage splits are we doing of each but the one we've added into that is calculated risks as well um so i agree it's like actually labeling what that looks like in the with each piece of creative as well like is it a biggest is it a big swing is it a framework which is something we know has worked before.

31:14And I think that's, again, like I guess almost before we get to that point of those like scorings, are we approaching it? Are we being proactive in the way that we are approaching that diversity or the way that we can ensure that we aren't over-indexing in one vehicle? Yeah, it's the calculated risk, right? And I think if you go back to like, like you're talking about framework, like if we go back to personas, it's this idea that like, think of like three to five personas on your brand or campaign level, basically, and within those three to five personas, three to three different angles per persona, then you can take, like I said, calculated risk with each of those personas with a specific creative angle that you're testing to actually, like you were saying, reach a new audience that you may have not thought about before.

32:00I wanted to ask one really practical question because I get this is a question that gets asked by clients really frequently. So we've obviously talked, Creative similarity is a big message. People are looking at diversity, but then an example of a question that I'll get asked by clients is, if I have a UGC video with the same creator in the same setting, but completely different scripts, is that enough differentiation for Meta to not see that as the same asset? In most cases, I would say no. Right. Again, earlier we talked about creative signals, right? if you think of literally those assets that you're talking about now there's not enough difference or dominant differentiation between those two assets right yeah and let's remove meta and the algorithm and again let's go back to think of yourself as a consumer right if you're serving a piece of content about let's event like a burger brand basically and it's a chef in the kitchen and you watch the first 10 seconds and he talks to you about the fact that it's a beef burger, right?

33:06Then let's say six hours later, you're being served another piece of content. It's the exact same chef in the exact same kitchen. And you start by saying, the burger, you're skipping the ad, right? Because you've seen this ad already. This is what the algorithm is doing basically on behalf of the consumer. And when we talk about iteration or tweaking, this is what we mean by that, right? But if I give you and that's also the consultation that we do. If we go on set with clients, for example, we tell them, if you rent a house, why is the chef only at the kitchen? Can it not be in the bedroom or in the garden, right?

33:38You rented a house, use the entire house or basically hire different type of creators within the sub kitchen. But you need to have a real visual differentiation in order for it to be sure. And again, and I'm not behind the algorithm, but to be sure, to be 100 % sure that it's differentiated, you need to give multiple visual signals that it's a different ad. That's why we've started thinking about that through that because we will do full podcast days in the same podcast studio and even you know you could have you could have one one uh actor and another actor in this podcast um and maybe you swap out one of them but you've still got the same or the other same setting probably not enough signals there that we've uh to to actually kind of deem as creative difference right so that's something we're thinking about in terms of logistically on those days you might be filming multiple ads but in a same studio same location like actually you need to to view that in a slightly different way even if potentially the angle is different in which you know and the messaging as well yeah i think like i was saying there's no right formulas right and i don't want to give the wrong signal but like you were saying like it's quite interesting when you like start swapping actors but you keep the same background you have a different speech or a different angle like we were talking earlier the algorithm would probably recognize it as different as right because it's not the same human, it's not the same actor.

35:03We're not talking the same thing. What's left is just the set, right? So I think you have given it enough creative signal. And like you were saying, I think it's interesting when you talk about angles. Now we're being shot today, but like technically you could only shoot me and you could be basically in the background, right? So this ad could be just me talking versus having two people or three people, sorry, or have two or three people talking with each other. So I think there are like creative ways to diversify the content. the idea is like don't expect the algorithm to recognize where you're doing minimum tweaks basically there's loads of ways to do that as well yeah split screen you can put a green screen someone over the top of the original ad talking about the ad in the background switch to third person it's just yeah yeah it just requires that that next that's the work we've done with space good right it's like going on shoot not only talking when we talk about mood board but it's really going on shoots and and and really like practice basically with the with the team on the ground right so you go to one or two two shoots with those teams and then it's a muscle basically they understand that you need to change the angle you need to change the actor you need to change the setting and then then it becomes like a natural creative muscles that you develop yeah and that's i think that's why like actually operationalizing the building of framework databases for your brand is so so important and this is something we've done huge amounts of even if it's like just through something you've seen organically um you know as a reel or maybe it's something you've seen in an ad library and you're just saving a bank of all of these different types of you know messaging frameworks or vehicles that you can deploy a message within because i think you know obviously persona diversification is super super important but when you find winning messaging within um a specific persona like that's like gold dust and you should be testing that against five six seven different vehicles because you know that as it comes back to the idea of soulmate theory yeah every everyone likes to consume information in different ways and uh what what works for one person might not for another true i mean you call it messaging i call it insight i think it's the exact same thing right it's like when you touch upon something that i strike a chord with with the consumer right with those different personas like that's what i call inside is like keep that because like you're saying it's gold right you found a way to cut through the noise and really find relevance within those personalized life right so yeah we saved multiple six figures in q4 by changing the way that we make ad creative and we did it with lens by foreplay a creative analytics tool that's built for speed and clarity and you see i've used a lot of these creative analytics tools before but genuinely for me lens is the best in seconds you can get a bird's eye view of every creative test plotted.

37:48The UX for me is one of the best parts like if you've used one of these creative data tools before you will know that loading times for reports can be incredibly slow and tedious whereas with Lens it is literally instant. Just insights on demand that you can just hand directly to your creative team to your designers or your creators. Lens also connects to 4Play's research tool I'm sure you've used their inspiration function before. And for me, it's so, so valuable having optimization and inspiration all centralized in one place. So if you want genuinely better creative, faster decisions and less wastage, you need to use Lens by Foreplay.

38:26Link down below. The golden question off the back of this is like, what's the right number of distinct creative concepts to run at any given time? I mean, don't put us out of, Don't put us out of a job by saying like five. No, I think, I mean, like it's like talking about Andromeda every day. I think I get this question also at least twice a day. Every time I meet clients, it's the same question. There's not right or wrong answer. But if you go with the persona framework, for example, I would say think of like three to five personas. And like we were saying, for each persona, think of like three to five creative angles or messaging angles, right?

39:05Those different insights. And then based on those creative insights, I have those like vehicles, right? Like being like, or different formats, being static, video or carousel. You end up with a really diverse creative portfolio, right? And you don't realize that you've created dozens of ads, but always with the consumer in mind. And that's the true goal, right? To have a diverse creative portfolio versus what we were talking earlier, creating those hundreds of ads who are saying the exact same thing with the exact same visual. So it's about diversity, but also my role as a creative strategist is also to say diversity cannot come at a compromise of quality.

39:48And I think that's one thing that we talk a lot at Meta is like the quality. We've seen brands try to overproduce and to really hinder the quality of the output. And that will automatically link to also the quality of the performance, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think brands obviously, the easy thing when you've got a bottleneck is just to throw more resource at it. We look at hit rate how many of our ads are winning based on how we define a winner differently by account and it's like we need that to be in a healthy range and we need that to be flat or improving as we add more volume and that for us is like a good creative system because the output is driving results and not just throwing it at a wall in a way.