B2B Ads that Don't Suck (with Shlomo Genchin, Unbore.com)

0:00Dasha Shakov: Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Dasha Shakov: And Marissa.

0:30Shlomo Genchin: I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks. At Showtime, I hand it back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio.

1:06Shlomo Genchin: With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running the big game back there.

1:18Dasha Shakov: So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. And don't just take our word for it. Come and see firsthand. And we run these every other Friday. It's called Exit 5 Live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events. So come and check us out, see this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit five. That's zoom.com slash exit five. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy.

1:51Dasha Shakov: Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties. Trusted by companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site so more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering Exit 5 listeners a free AI search review.

2:22Dasha Shakov: They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out. It's convertive.com slash exit5. That's convertive.com slash exit5. And you can also see the link in the show notes. You're listening to The Dave Gerrard Show.

3:02Shlomo Genchin: What's up? It's Dasha. Today, I've got an amazing guest on the show. His name is Shlomo Genshin, and you might recognize him from your LinkedIn feed. I had been following Shlomo for years leading up to this episode. He is one of the first profiles I send marketers when they join my marketing team because his breakdowns of what makes a B2B ad good are amazing. He runs a company called Unbore. He calls it the unofficial school for B2B ads. And on the show today, we get into tactics for creating ads that are genuinely good and fun. And then we get into some nitty gritty topics like how do you hire actors for ads if you're filming them in-house?

3:44Shlomo Genchin: How to do all of this on a huge budget or a low budget. I walked away with a lot of great takeaways and I hope you do too. Enjoy the pod. How's it going?

3:54Dasha Shakov: Thank you very much. It's great to be here and I'm doing well. And you, Dasha?

3:58Shlomo Genchin: I'm doing great. I'm so excited to have you on. You are someone that I've followed on LinkedIn for a very long time. And you know the little thing on LinkedIn where you can save people's posts and then like you can go back and see like a little swipe file of things you've saved.

4:13Dasha Shakov: Yeah, absolutely.

4:15Shlomo Genchin: I would bet that like 30, 40 % of them are just you breaking down ads, like what works about them and what doesn't work. So when I knew I'd be interviewing you, I was so, so excited. Okay, let's give listeners kind of a preview. So you are the founder of unbore.com. Tell us for people who don't know what is unbore and what do you do?

4:37Dasha Shakov: Yeah. So sometimes I call on board the unofficial B2B ad school or creative, I don't know. Yeah. Like basically an ad school for creative B2B ads. And so that's one thing we do. We have this educational part with courses and different educational products, newsletter, and so on. But there is also the actual part where I operate as a creative studio and I write and produce ads for boring B2B companies.

5:06Shlomo Genchin: What is your background? Like how did Unbore come about? You just got tired of seeing boring ads?

5:11Dasha Shakov: I actually went to an ad school called Miami Ad School, but it's in Berlin. There are a lot of branches, but I went to the one in Berlin and I wanted to become a copywriter. And I went there and then like I started the whole like traditional ad agency journey, being an intern, then working for different brands and ad agencies. And that was super fun. But at some point I started freelancing and I found and I got a couple of gigs with tech companies. And I really fell in love with that because it's funny because I call like those products boring B2B products, but actually I found them way more interesting.

5:43Dasha Shakov: All the cool features and the tech, and it seemed so interesting. And it also felt a little bit like the Wild West, right? Because if in the consumer space, everything has been done already, every kind of ad creative angle, you know, if you think about like Coke, Burger King, like the big brands, Heinz, it's crazy how many agencies and creative people are working on those at the same time. But then you think about other more like B2B and software companies, and some of them don't even have a brand. Some of them never produced an actual creative ad. And I thought, wow, this is such a big opportunity.

6:17Dasha Shakov: So I started trying those techniques that I learned in ad school, working with some tech startups. And I noticed that time after time, we managed to outperform their previous ads using the creative techniques I learned working for ad agencies. And I thought, well, it seems like there's something here. And yeah, and since then, that's what I've been dedicating most of my time to.

6:39Shlomo Genchin: Yeah, I love that. I always tell my team when you're looking for inspiration, you almost don't want to go to a B2B brand. Look at what the CPG brands are doing, because I feel like that space is I mean, B2B is competitive, but CPG is so much more competitive, right? Like you can have 20, 30, 50 brands of soda and really it's all the same. So you need to get creative and stand out. So yeah, I think it's like one of the best places to get inspiration. And I can see why it would be jarring coming from the agency world entering B2B and being like, whoa, what is with all the sameness?

7:12Dasha Shakov: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And actually, like in the consumer world, there's also a lot of sameness. That's why I always say like when you're stealing ideas, never steal from your neighbor, because even if car companies, all their ads look the same as well. So it's not just our industry, but every industry has this problem. But definitely like B2B and tech, because it's so focused on products and tech and features, we're a little bit behind on that. But I think we're catching up pretty quickly. Like right now, what's happening with Clay, Ramp, like all those ClickUp, all those brands, like it's insane.

7:43Dasha Shakov: And it's great to see that because I feel like people are getting really excited about that. And I feel like maybe in 10 years, just random people will be wearing T-shirts of Ramp or I don't know, maybe those will be like real brands that people are proud to walk around. wearing their merch or something.

7:59Shlomo Genchin: It's so funny. I have a friend who's like really into SaaS. And for his birthday, we had a competition where everyone had to acquire a piece of merch from different SaaS companies and gift them for his birthday. So he like exclusively will wear other branded hoodies. The people that work with you, like the clients that you have, talk to me a bit about like what type of company will come to you? How big are they? Because I think the person listening wants to know like, Like, okay, everything we're about to talk about today, different techniques, do they apply to me? So give us a little bit of a taste.

8:33Shlomo Genchin: Like, who are you working with? Yeah.

8:35Dasha Shakov: So personally, I like to work with companies that are sort of around the$1 billion valuation because these are the most interesting cases for me with the biggest opportunity to actually scale new creative ideas and invest in production and do a lot of fun stuff. But that doesn't mean that, like I said, when I started, I started with actually working at a VC firm and starting with like small startups and that worked for them as well. So like creative techniques, it doesn't matter. It can be a very simple static ad or it could be a$100 ,000 production. It's still like underneath, it's still the same creative insight.

9:14Dasha Shakov: It's still the same pain points. And those techniques would work for absolutely any tech company or any company at all. But I personally like to focus on bigger companies just because I feel like they have more room to play. Obviously, they're not like pinching pennies.

9:28Shlomo Genchin: Yeah, no, that makes sense. OK, well, you mentioned creativity. Let's talk about where creativity actually comes from. A lot of marketers, I mean, less so now with AI, but there is nothing more daunting than a blank page. So when you are starting to think about how to make your ads, how do you get over the blank page problem? Yeah.

9:52Dasha Shakov: So I think the first thing that I want to do, and people often say in the creative industry that if you don't have ideas, it just means that you haven't done enough research. So I always do two types of research. One research is practical research, and the other type of research is personal research. So the practical part is understanding the features, understanding the actual practical problems that my users have, and how my product solves them. And the personal research is more about understanding all the personal problems that my users have when they're not using the product. So then I usually end up with this three column table.

10:28Dasha Shakov: And on the left side, I have the practical problem. Then in the middle, I have the personal problem. And then on the right, I have the solution, like the specific feature of the product that solves that. And once I have this table in front of my eyes, once I sort of mapped out all the main relatable pain points, then I start actually working and trying different creative tech frameworks and techniques. But usually by that point, by the time I already have that table. And by the way, just using AI to create it, like, of course, I use AI also to help me with that. But part of it is also reading, going to Reddit.

11:03Dasha Shakov: But one tool that I really like to use is Reddit Answers. It's Reddit's AI research tool. It's completely free. And it's great because I can dive into what my target audience is doing and thinking. And once I sort of look through that kind of material, then immediately I started getting different, interesting ideas. So always research is the first step.

11:24Shlomo Genchin: Can we walk it through with a real example, maybe something that you've done in the past? I'm curious what topic you would research and then does the practical have to match up with the personal? Like walk me through that, make it real with an example.

11:36Dasha Shakov: It doesn't even have to be an example from the past, but let's think we're making, and we're going to talk about one of my favorite clients, HiBob, later. But let's actually even think that right now we're making an ad for HR software. So the first thing I would do is I would go to Reddit Answers. So it's reddit.com slash answers. And it's completely free. And I would just type, what are some relatable, and I'm always looking for something that is actually relatable. pain points and frustrations that HR managers are experiencing in their work. And I would hit enter and immediately like 30 seconds later, I would get a nice report with all the subreddits, with all the relevant threads where I can already start looking and finding different directions.

12:21Dasha Shakov: I would of course also speak to my client and I would ask them to provide me with some gung, some call recordings and different stuff like that, that I can also use transcripts. So I can also see what their actual users are saying. These are the things that are also interesting. And from all of that, I would start listing all my favorite pain points. If it's a lot of material, I would definitely also use AI to summarize that. But sometimes I would just read through that to actually find those little insights, the language that my customers use. And that would help me get this personal part of the research.

12:56Dasha Shakov: So this is for the HR software. Then I would also go and I would try to understand the different features. Sometimes I would actually reverse engineer it. So I would go through all of their features, everything that they want to promote and they're selling, for example, different payroll features or different things that help employees communicate between themselves or anything that an HR manager would need. And then I would think, okay, so what is the problem? What is the practical problem that this feature is solving? And I would sort of think back, trying to understand like, why did they even create that?

13:29Dasha Shakov: What was the problem originally? What are we trying to do here? What would the user do if they didn't have that? And yeah, it's a whole like rabbit hole after rabbit hole, but it looks exactly like that. You know, like it's, of course, like you can make it linear in a way, but also what makes it fun and creative is just like sort of floating between all those different sources and trying to find those answers and insights because you never know where the inspiration will be. Sometimes it's hidden somewhere in a call recording, sometimes it's on Reddit, and sometimes even Claude would give you some idea that I wouldn't think about by myself.

14:06Shlomo Genchin: The difference between a practical problem and a personal problem, what does that sound like?

14:12Dasha Shakov: Yeah, so a practical problem would be, for example, if you're thinking about, let's say payroll, which is part of HR software sometimes, So the practical problem would be the numbers don't match, right? For example, the numbers, I don't know, people got their salary late or something in the numbers was wrong, right? This is very practical. It's something that is actually happening in a real world and it's a problem. And then the personal impact of it is that HR person is being yelled at or people are blaming them or they're not getting their promotion and so on, right? So like something that was actually practical and not very relevant, it wouldn't be very relevant if they were, I don't know, an AI agent is very relevant to a real person who's just trying to make it through their job.

14:57Dasha Shakov: And this is a big part of it because after all, B2B is just people at work and we spend so many hours of our day at work, most people, at least the people we're selling to. And this is very important because sometimes people think that B2B is boring, but it's actually such a big part of our lives. We wake up, we go to work, and then we go back home and we still think about work. And all of this is like great material for ads and for interesting things, stories that we can tell.

15:22Shlomo Genchin: Do you know or have any data? Does the practical ad outperform the personal or vice versa?

15:30Dasha Shakov: So they have to go together. I mean, I would never do them separate.

15:34Shlomo Genchin: One or the other.

15:34Dasha Shakov: Yeah. I would never separate them and like do an ad that is just about, I don't know, like the benefit you're getting or just about the pain point without actually explaining why you practically need that. And I would probably never make an ad. Maybe on a landing page, I would do that. But in an ad, I would probably never just advertise different features or different problems without any personal context. So usually it's the combination of the two that works the best.

16:00Shlomo Genchin: What have you found is the biggest myth that marketers believe when it comes to where creative ideas come from?

16:07Dasha Shakov: There are probably two myths. One is that if you want to create something, you have to come up with something completely new. Like you need to sit like some sort of musician or an artist, and you just need to wait for inspiration for the muse to shine on you. So that's something that we don't have to do that. And actually we can do that as creative professionals because we have deadlines and we have goals and we need to deliver those ideas. So that's, I guess, one side of the scale. And then the other side of the scale is usually like the very number driven marketers who think that everything, we only need to steal what's already working.

16:42Dasha Shakov: We only need to go with the safest option. Like if this performed for our competitor, we just need to steal this ad and do the same thing. So I guess these are the two sides of the scale. And we're trying to be somewhere in the middle. We're trying to sometimes steal a little bit, steal some interesting ideas, but also make them ours. And we're trying to come up with something very unique, but also rely on frameworks that we can use time after time instead of just being stuck and thinking, yeah, like maybe I'm not creative.

17:09Shlomo Genchin: I think the saying is like, steal like an artist.

17:11Dasha Shakov: Yeah, exactly. Steal like an artist. And part of stealing like an artist is, yeah, just like I said in the beginning, not stealing from your neighbors. That's the first thing. And the second thing is just stealing very specific elements, not stealing the whole piece rather than going and saying, okay, I'm going to steal this entire ad, the camera angle, the script, everything that which a lot of companies do. But the smartest thing to do is to actually say, okay, like this hook is very interesting. Maybe I can take that and write a completely original script on top of that. Or this call to action is pretty cool.

17:44Dasha Shakov: So maybe I can use that for my ad, but take the hook from another ad and sort of find something that would work together from a few different ads. So I think that's one of the most important things about stealing like an artist, stealing small pieces from others and not the whole work.

17:59Shlomo Genchin: Totally, yes. One resource I've loved for stealing like an artist, Have you heard of adfolio.design?

18:07Dasha Shakov: Absolutely, yeah. Andrea, the creator, and her partner are good friends of mine. They're great. And yeah, they're fantastic. And it's one of my favorite collections. Every time I create an ad, I also want my ads to go there as well. It's like B2B Hall of Fame.

18:22Shlomo Genchin: Oh, that's the dream. Yeah, you know you've done well when they pick it up.

18:26Dasha Shakov: Exactly, yeah.

18:27Shlomo Genchin: For those who don't know what adfolio is, It's like a collection, a curated collection of good B2B SaaS ads. It's awesome. Do you have other examples of collections like that?

18:38Dasha Shakov: Yeah, there is another great one. It's called BlackCaml.agency. So it's actually an agency. And if you go to their website and then resources, they have this B2B video library. So the founder of this agency, he also created, I think, hundreds or maybe even more than a thousand different ads. And these are fantastic as well. these are more focused on video ads, but there's some very good stuff there.

19:02Shlomo Genchin: I didn't know about that one. I'm excited to check it out. Okay, well, let's get in. You're going to share three techniques that marketers can take away immediately and apply to their businesses. Kick us off. What is the first technique?

19:14Dasha Shakov: Let's do it. Yeah. So I think that even before that, I would say that the three most important elements of an effective B2B ad or any ad is to make it scroll stopping. That's the first thing is to make it relatable, which relates to the personal part that we just talked about, and to make it clear so people actually know what the message is. So these are the three most important principles and pillars that I'm basing all my work on. And then all the techniques that I'm going to show you are also based on those things, each technique in its own different way. So the first technique I want to show you today is world without, and you're going to see it on screen right now.

19:55Dasha Shakov: So in this technique, we're basically thinking about the world without our product. And we don't just want to think, obviously, most software products, if they wouldn't exist, nothing would really change. Probably the sun would shine like every day and everything would be pretty much the same. But because we're marketers and because we want to make fun ads, we actually want to exaggerate that. And we want to think, what is the worst thing that can happen in a world without your product. So this is a great example of this technique. It's not even about software, but you can see that it's one of the most famous ads on the internet ever.

20:32Dasha Shakov: And it's very simple, right? They're just saying, we're looking for a graphic designer. I don't even know who created that originally, but it's a great example of this sort of thinking, right? They don't have a graphic designer. And because of that, they had to make the ad by themselves. And because of that, they used paint. And because of that, this is how their billboards, this is what their billboard looks like. And this is a big problem. So we can do the same thinking process in B2B. So here's an example that I created for my client. And this is exactly how I thought about it. I started with your payroll software is outdated.

21:06Dasha Shakov: And then I thought this is technical and this is vague and this is not very interesting. But I thought, and because of that, you keep making payroll errors. And because of that, you end up working on vacation. And because of that, you end up waist deep in the ocean fixing payroll errors. So this is already very personal and specific. And this is exactly how we use this technique. So we go from something that is technical and pretty generic to something that is personal, specific, and sometimes even an interesting hook. So we say that the first principle was to make it scroll stopping. And this is exactly how we come up with those scroll stopping ideas, like the previous one, or like one of my client's best performing ads.

21:47Dasha Shakov: And it goes like this.

21:49Shlomo Genchin: That's amazing. And it's done well for them.

21:52Dasha Shakov: It's one of their best performing ads ever. Our thumb stop rate, specifically, we spoke about scroll stopping. It also brought leads and so on. But what we saw with this one is that the hook worked really well. In fact, 32 % better than their other ads. They're most than the average. And this was a really good thing and a really good sign that we actually did this world without process well, because we thought about the most absurd situation and it performed pretty well for us. And by the way, when using this technique, it doesn't even have to be, this one specifically was done, I guess, for a hundred dollars with just AI.

22:30Dasha Shakov: And we're going to talk about AI production versus not AI production, but this can also be done even more simply and quickly with just AI images, right? Almost every idea, like I said in the beginning, can be a static ad. And this is another ad that worked pretty well that I created for my client AppSfire. So mobile attribution doesn't have to be frustrating, right? And it's a very simple idea of what's happening in that marketer's mind when the attribution is frustrating and how we all feel. So here as well, right? We have this combination of the practical problem, right? mobile attribution is not accurate and it's frustrating.

23:06Dasha Shakov: And the actual personal part where how we feel about that. And this is very simple, right? You don't need any budget to produce something like that. Anyone can do that, any startup, and you can start right away.

23:17Shlomo Genchin: The coolest thing about the AI piece too is before you would have to scroll. I remember scrolling so long. You have an idea and you're like, okay, like the thing that's going to make this ad really sing is I need this hyper-specific photo of a cat kind of spilling coffee on a keyboard. I worked at a backups company and we would always have this like idea of a cat messing up your whole, we did backups for Shopify store. So a cat walks across your keyboard and deletes your Shopify store. Well, guess what? There's like no stock footage of a cat on a keyboard. It's so specific. But today that you're like one Gemini prompt away from creating these really hyper visual images, which it sounds like all of this is like, it's kind of like this exaggerated vision of the worst possible outcome.

24:01Dasha Shakov: Exactly. Yeah. And that's all you need now. And I mean, if it's done well, and if there is an idea behind it, that there is no reason for it not to work. So better than other boring ads. So that's definitely a great place to start. And it's very simple and yeah, low hanging fruit, as they say.

24:19Shlomo Genchin: What's the next technique? Cool.

24:21Dasha Shakov: So the next technique is visual analogy. And this one is, yeah, if in the first part, We spoke about being scroll stopping. Then here, we also visual analogies. They help us make our ideas more clear. So you can see how Windows here, for example, Microsoft, how they use this. They take this abstract concept, right? This confusing concept, because a lot of things in software are not just confusing. It's also sort of hard to show them because you can't actually show a product screenshot because a piece of software has thousands of different screenshots and screens and dashboards. So you take an abstract concept like software upgrades and updates, and you compare it to something visual and familiar that we all know, like an outdated haircut.

25:07Dasha Shakov: So this combination together creates a really fun ad that both explains the message that you want to bring across and also makes people stop scrolling. So here's one example that I created, again, for my client, HiBob, using this technique.

25:23Shlomo Genchin: This is epic.

25:26Dasha Shakov: Thank you. Yeah. And this was also one of our best performing ads. And we took this concept of email ping pong and those never ending ping pongs and compared it to actual ping pong, used it as a visual analogy and sort of baked our message in. And this worked really well for us. One of the two great things here that worked really well was the cost per meal. So the views were at least 53 % cheaper than other videos. So it meant that it was very easy for the platform to find people who would watch this video. And that was a great thing. And the second thing, which was even more interesting was the hold rate.

26:04Dasha Shakov: So usually if you look at a graph of a video, usually in the beginning, you have the most viewers and then it sort of drops quite immediately after five seconds. But here it was pretty different. If people actually stayed and watched it, then usually they watched it almost until the end. And there was 144 % lift from average. And that was a pretty cool thing to see. And again, this is the power of a visual analogy because you can tell a story while promoting your product, while explaining it, while explaining the problem and so on.

26:36Shlomo Genchin: One question that comes to mind for me is when you have an ad that performs this well, like we all know about ad fatigue, someone just gets tired of seeing the same ad. Does the lifespan of an ad increase if the ad is like genuinely really good? Can you run that ad longer?

27:20Dasha Shakov: built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeel did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list.

27:53Dasha Shakov: Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeel did. Check them out at Optimizely.com slash exit5. That's Optimizely.com slash exit5. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader. I was a real marketer and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high-growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use.

28:24Dasha Shakov: They've helped an enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168 % year-over-year with full-funnel media, and an HR tech company grow 48 % through paid search. And they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full-funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit5 to see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals.

29:02Dasha Shakov: That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit5. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in general, I think that some ads are running for years. I'm noticing it both with my clients and with other companies. I mean, some winning ads just literally run for years and they just keep working. And sometimes you can make new variations, you can re-edit them, you can do a lot of things. But if the thing is working, then yeah, there's no reason for it to stop working. It's like, of course, at some point there will be changes, but usually it's like the company itself that decides to sort of change their ads and not necessarily even because the ad itself stopped working.

29:40Dasha Shakov: And another thing about that is that you can also create different variations like we did here. So once you have a winning video ad, you can also create different static ads to go with that. And these can also, you can use them, for example, for retargeting, or you can just use them to extend that concept to more channels and places. So this is also part of it. Even if one ad was impacted by ad fatigue, then the other variations maybe would work for even longer.

30:11Shlomo Genchin: This is brilliant. Because if you're someone who watched the video ad and then you get retargeted, you're kind of like, oh, yeah, I remember that funny ping pong ad. And it works even if you hadn't seen that ad. The static ad just stands on its own. You don't need one or the other. It's not like a multi-series thing. But yeah, this is so, so smart.

30:31Dasha Shakov: Yeah, exactly. That's the game, like meeting them at different points and saying the same thing in a lot of different ways. It's a little bit like content where people are repurposing their content and one YouTube video can become a newsletter. One newsletter can become five LinkedIn posts. So it's pretty much the same with advertising. One video can become a few static ads and so on. And by the way, again, like these are well-produced ads and, you know, we had actors and we had everything, designers and so on. but it doesn't have to be expensive at all because here is a low-cost version and the low-cost version is actually memes.

31:07Dasha Shakov: So this is, I created hundreds of ads for my client AppsFlyer but after all that time working together this was actually the best performing ad that I created for them. It's so simple but it works really well. It's just a simple meme and if you think about it memes are analogies too, right? It's just that instead of coming up with our own analogies like ping pong or something else or that guy with the haircut. We're just using different templates that are repeating. So this rollercoaster thing is just a simple meme, simple analogy that worked really well. And anyone can do that in literally five minutes.

31:42Dasha Shakov: You just need to know the pain points of your customers and you're good to go.

31:46Shlomo Genchin: Did you generate this image or was this an existing meme?

31:50Dasha Shakov: So here I worked with AppsFires designer. And in the beginning, I gave them sort of a combination of a few existing memes. Like there was something with a roller coaster. I don't even remember if it was a kid, I think like, but it was like two people riding roller coaster. One of them is like super chill. The other one is screaming. And I think like from there, the idea started. And then together, I don't remember if they used AI or like a combination of stock footage because it was almost two years ago. So AI images weren't that good at the time. We still used a lot of Photoshop. Now it would be much easier and probably would be even easier to make it even more realistic.

32:26Dasha Shakov: but back at the time it worked really well and now you can literally create it with one prompt.

32:32Shlomo Genchin: Have you found that AI is helpful at creating analogies? My personal experience is that all of the analogies are a little bit bland and I'm wondering if you have found a way to make them less bland or if you come up with them just from your own brain.

32:47Dasha Shakov: No, for sure you can do it better. I mean, yeah, I agree that's part of it that like it's still hard for AI to match those because analogies eventually, a big part of them, if you think about great writers, usually they come from your personal experience. And that's when they work best. And AI still doesn't have that wide world experience. And especially like it doesn't have this like personal experience that you may have. So this is why when it comes to analogies, it's also very good to just look into your inner world. And that's what I always tell my students that you don't even need your like Wi-Fi right now.

33:21Dasha Shakov: You can literally close your laptop, close your eyes and think of different experiences that remind you of that or that you could compare to that and you'll find a hundred ideas even faster and better than AI. But at the same time, yeah, of course. I mean, what I did is I trained a cloud skill on all my favorite analogy ads. So I fed it all my favorite analogies with some of my favorite analogy ads and stuff from different places. And then now it's gotten a little bit better. So now when I need an analogy, I also use that sometimes when I'm stuck. And yeah, and the ideas are not bad. it's still like some of them are still like repeating you'll see because i do a lot of workshops so i see that how the ideas are always repeating like running a marathon in flip-flops and and yeah and there are a few ideas that always repeat but once you develop that skill both that human skill and that clod skill sometimes you get pretty cool stuff and sometimes i get pretty cool stuff that i didn't expect or like i didn't come up with myself we always joke at i'm the vp

34:19Shlomo Genchin: marketing at this company. And we always joke that when Claude goes down, the day is just like over because there's nothing else you can do. So what I'll be doing now instead is closing my laptop and thinking, what are some analogies that from my personal experience would be relevant for the world of our end user?

34:37Dasha Shakov: This is great. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Or just open chat GPT. That's another option. Right, exactly.

34:42Shlomo Genchin: Yes. Yeah. All right. Should we do tactic three?

34:46Dasha Shakov: Oh, yes. Let's do it. So far, we had scroll stopping. We had clear. And now the third one is relatable. And for relatable, we're going to use personification. And this is one of my favorite techniques because it's much easier to relate to people than products, tech companies, or software or anything like that. And when we can compare our product or its enemy or the thing it's fighting against to a real human being, then we can get some very interesting stories. So the most classic example that everyone knows is this Mac versus PC ad. It's this ad from, I think, 2004 or 2006 that Apple created where it was very simple.

35:30Dasha Shakov: Like one guy was like, yeah, hi, I'm Mac. And the other guy was like boring and wearing this like suit. And he was like, hi, I'm PC. and it was yeah just a simple idea to show that Mac is much cooler and much more advanced and smooth and so on. So I did the same thing and I used this technique for Highbob and I basically compared Highbob as I showed it as the cool and popular character and compared it to legacy HR software and you can notice that I didn't even said the name of that HR software first of all because that's not the kind of marketing I want to do. And second, because probably our users and our potential users, they're using a lot of different variations of legacy HR software, just using spreadsheets.

36:14Dasha Shakov: So I didn't even need to be specific with that. I could just use this broad category. And I created this ad that actually from even like more than the previous two, this was our best performer, probably the best performing ad that I ever created for them.

36:29Shlomo Genchin: I love it.

36:32Dasha Shakov: Thanks, Dasha. Yeah. And here the process is super simple, right? So the first thing you want to do is pick an enemy. You want to decide if in Apple's case, it was PC. In our case, it was legacy HR software. Then in the second step, you want to build a character. So you want to decide like, okay, my product maybe would be the cool and popular one and the smart one. And the other character would be boring or unreliable or whatever we want to make them. And then the third step is actually putting them in a situation, in different scenarios. So that's where it gets interesting because if we just, I mean, in the original Apple ad, they just stood there.

37:08Dasha Shakov: They just stood there, but that was 20 years ago. So the whole concept of personification was pretty new, but now we need to make it even more interesting and put them in different situations. So in this case, I wanted to, when I, as a kid, I used to watch a lot of those like Turkish soap operas with my grandma. And I still always remember those cheesy dialogues and all those funny conversations that they used to have when breakups and so on. So I wanted to use this one, but it could be basically any situation. It could be a podcast. What would your product do on a podcast? It could be a date.

37:43Dasha Shakov: It could be basically anything as long as it's an interesting story and there is an actual conflict in it. And yeah, and this one was also great. big lift in conversions, 80 % cheaper leads, 50 % cheaper views. So yeah, again, one of our best performing ads ever.

38:01Shlomo Genchin: This is awesome. Do I need to get paid actors if I want to do this well?

38:05Dasha Shakov: Yeah, I think it's the best option. I mean, actors comparing to marketing budget, actors are not that expensive. And yeah, a lot of actors are looking for work. So there are a lot of Facebook groups with actors and a lot of platforms where you can hire them. So I think almost every company I know that it's doing well both on social and with paid ads. They're working with actors, even if they're using some AI for static ads, even if they're using a UGC with real users. They have a lot of different assets in their mix, but for their more high-end ads where they actually want to tell interesting stories, they're using actors.

38:42Dasha Shakov: And I think it's fun and it's basically the most creative and real way to bring truly fun ideas to life. Cool.

38:49Shlomo Genchin: What is an example of what one of these Facebook groups would be called? I imagine it's like a local Austin or like New York. How do you find one of these groups?

38:58Dasha Shakov: Yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, actors, if it's, yeah. So if you're in Europe, then it would be English speaking actors in Berlin or in Paris and so on. If you're in the US, UK and Canada and so on, then it would be just actors looking for gigs, extras and so on. So like you look into all those groups and it could be in a lot of places. Like once you start digging into their world, you speak to one actor, you ask them where they hang out. And all of a sudden you have a list of like a hundred actors you can work with. And it gets pretty fun because actors are awesome. They're true artists. And when you bring them on board, they make your ideas even better.

39:35Dasha Shakov: I mean, these actors were great. And when I wrote the script, like I couldn't even think that they would, I mean, they added their own art into it and it was great.

39:44Shlomo Genchin: That's awesome. We did this personification tactic at the company where I'm working now. Yeah. And we didn't hire actors. So hot take, we didn't hire actors. Yeah. Instead, I lead marketing and the BDR team sits on the marketing team. Yeah. And so I said, okay, on, I don't know, Tuesday, you're taking the day off. You're coming into the office and we're doing a shoot. We paid a videographer to come in and set up. We gave them scripts.

40:10Dasha Shakov: Yeah.

40:11Shlomo Genchin: Which were written by our team with the use of AI. we did the personification we turned our product into a person as if the product had come to life we put him into a t-shirt with our little logo on it and a hat so that he was like more or less identifiable yeah and we did it all in-house minus the videographer yeah and i'm always blown away by the talent that can exist on your com at your company without hiring the actors granted we are not, we probably don't have, I know we don't have high Bob's marketing budget and it worked out well to the point where some of our customers were asking if they can use the ads to like announce that product to their teams.

40:52Shlomo Genchin: So we ended up using them for ads and our customers were like, give those to us. We want to use them. So I can definitely say that it works.

40:59Dasha Shakov: I totally agree. I mean, I hadn't even like, because I'm always doing that as an external studio, then I never even like suggest that option. So I didn't think about that, but you're actually, it's so true. I mean, when people from your own team can do that, that's even better because it's cheaper and you don't have to deal with royalties and payments and all of that. It makes things way easier. And I think that we have a lot of great examples like Duolingo, probably one of the first ones where like the employees are doing everything and it's all in-house or Cluelay where they're making their own content and videos.

41:34Dasha Shakov: So it can definitely work. I mean, most marketers I know are shy and they don't even, they don't really want to be in front of the camera. But if you have those kinds of people on your team who want to do that, that's perfect. I think another company is Synthegy. I think they're doing those like corporate training videos and I'm pretty sure I love their ads. They're awesome. I never spoke to them, but they do a lot of really creative stuff. I highly recommend it. And I think they actually work there. It's just a couple of people. And I think they're in the marketing department and they're doing a great job.

42:07Dasha Shakov: So for smaller companies, I think your method is way better.

42:11Shlomo Genchin: It's so much cheaper too. And it allows you to test it. I mean, like if it works with free actors, you can always kind of scale up.

42:17Dasha Shakov: Absolutely.

42:17Shlomo Genchin: All right. I think you've got another example for us here.

42:20Dasha Shakov: Yeah. Just one more thing that I wanted to show for each one of those. I also always want to show the low cost version. So yeah, so just like you suggested, it could be people from your office, or even simpler, could be just pure copy. Sometimes you can use personification and just write the thing. So this is a headline from Ram that I really like, receipts now organize themselves. And this is super simple, right? So you also give those receipts sort of a human trait, right? Like they do it themselves. And you can see those a lot of examples like these, like from Oreo, for example, milk's favorite cookie and so on.

42:54Dasha Shakov: So like even in your taglines and even in your copy, which you don't need any budget to write copy, it's just words. Then you can also use that technique to make things a little bit more interesting and exciting.

43:04Shlomo Genchin: I love it. What if you're working at a company that is maybe marketing to a more sophisticated senior audience and you have this fun idea, but you're worried that your CEO is going to look at it and think, look, we're not the fun company. Like this isn't going to work for us. I'm sure this has come up with your clients. The marketers are like, hell yeah, but there's some fear around going to present it to leadership. What do you recommend? How do you coach people when that's the situation?

43:32Dasha Shakov: That happens all the time. And I guess this is one of the biggest problems because there are so many great ideas that just die in the meeting room because, yeah, for a lot of different reasons. So I think that, first of all, even before, like there are a lot of methods to make to sort of encourage stakeholders to buy into our weird ideas. But even before that, I think that one of the most important things is to actually think about the side. Think about the perspective of the CEO or the executive that is against that, right? Because it's always easy to be the one pitching the ideas. But once you're on the client side, and I've experienced that many times, then you all of a sudden you see that, okay, it's not that easy to commit to all your budget to a crazy idea like that because so much is at stake.

44:18Dasha Shakov: Like you can lose your job, you can lose that important budget and it's scary. So the first thing we need to do as creatives is to sort of be aware of that and not just be like, yeah, the client is so worrying. They never approve our ideas. No, wait a second. Like they have a lot of responsibility. So we need to think about that. And we need to understand their perspective first. And only then we can start and think how we can actually convince them. And now to this part. So there are a few things. The first thing is to start small. If you come all of a sudden, you come with a big brand campaign.

44:50Dasha Shakov: Yeah, let's buy 100 billboards in New York and do this insane thing. Then, of course, they will probably say no. But if you say, OK, look, I created this one meme. Let's add it into our LinkedIn ad mix just for one week and see what happens. If that works, and usually it would work in one way or another, whether it's clicks or even leads, even better. Although those things can take time sometimes. But even if you see a little spike and you see that something is working, then usually they would ask for more. Or at least at this point, you already have a case. You can already say, okay, like I have a way to justify and there is positive ROI on that.

45:25Dasha Shakov: And all of a sudden it gets way easier because you have that proof. So that's the first thing, to start small. The second thing is to actually own the process end to end, right? Because it's very easy to just go and suggest ideas like let's do this, let's do that. But the hardest part is to actually follow through and make that thing happen to, like you said, like to take those two team members and book a whole day for them to bring a videographer and actually say like, okay, you know what? Like you have enough on your plate and you won't have to worry about that thing. I'm going to take care of it end to end.

46:00Dasha Shakov: I'm going to produce it and I'm going to give you the final results. And often this is the biggest problem, right? Because when people hear a cool idea, it's not even like they don't like it. They do like it, but they think about all the implications. Like we'll need to do so many things and it's all the money, all the logistics, time and so on. So if you say, yeah, I already know how much it's going to cost. I already spoke to a videographer. Like I have everything figured out. Here's the project. You just need to say, yeah, just green light it. then it's way easier for executives to say, yeah, sure, just do it.

46:30Dasha Shakov: I see that you've done your homework. It's not just like some crazy idea that you want to do all of a sudden.

46:36Shlomo Genchin: We call it a low friction ask, like making it as easy as possible to say yes to.

46:41Dasha Shakov: Love it. Yeah, love it. Okay, I'm going to steal that.

46:44Shlomo Genchin: A low friction ask. I think it comes from sales, but it's the same thing in just any executive comms. Like execs are really busy. And so you want to eliminate the decision fatigue as much as possible. And like, if you can say like, Like, look, all you have to do is say, yes, here's everything I'm going to do. Here's the cost. I've already done this. Then you de-risk saying yes to you. Okay, let's talk about AI. Everyone wants to know about AI. Your personal philosophy around using AI in the process. We've touched on this a little bit. Sounds like you're using it. What should AI do? What shouldn't AI do?

47:16Shlomo Genchin: How much are you outsourcing AI in your agency? Talk to me about that.

47:21Dasha Shakov: I'm a big believer that advertising should follow culture. and not the other way around. Because I think that a lot of marketers say that advertising should create and lead culture, but usually that's not the situation. Usually there are musicians, filmmakers, artists, like they're, I don't know, fashion icons, influencers. Those people are actually setting the tone on what's cool and on what's interesting and on what we should be paying attention to. Like it or not, that's the situation. Usually, especially not a tech company would decide that, I mean, sometimes some products, but not their marketing department would decide what is the next cool thing.

48:01Dasha Shakov: And that's why I really believe that advertising should fit culture and adjust itself to that. So, I mean, unless people are going to the cinema to watch an AI movie, then I think that ads shouldn't be completely AI. I mean, there are a lot of cool things that you can do with AI. And I also use that for transitions, effects, shots that I wouldn't be able to take otherwise because they would cost tens of or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But overall, I'm not a believer in those ads that are obviously AI because they look cheap. They look like you didn't actually care enough to ask one of your team members to stand in front of the camera and do that, or to hire an actor from a Facebook group, or to actually do this little effort of showing that, yeah, there are humans behind this company.

48:47Dasha Shakov: And you will see that even the most AI driven companies like starting from Entropic and OpenAI and Hicksfield and all of those, like they all use humans for their marketing and they all sometimes shoot their ads literally like on film cameras. So I think that if they do that, then I think that everyone else should follow that as well. And that's what I'm trying to do as well. Like you've seen in those two last ads, I always try to make this production that looks as realistic as possible. And I think that maybe in a year, my answer would be different. If AI would get so good that it would literally be impossible to tell the difference, then maybe that would be different.

49:29Dasha Shakov: And a lot of the productions would become fully AI because there wouldn't be any reason to shoot on a real camera. But maybe even then there will be other ways to show that you're actually human and you're actually authentic. So I don't know what's going to happen. But for now, I'm sticking to real actors, real production. This is what's been working well for me.

49:49Shlomo Genchin: I like that. I think there's a lot of opportunity for marketers to stand up and stand out in a world of AI slop. There is one AI ad that I did like. I will say, I don't know if you saw Fibbler had an AI ad. I think it was like end-to-end AI generated video. Do you know what I'm talking about?

50:07Dasha Shakov: Yeah, the one with the slap, right?

50:09Shlomo Genchin: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

50:10Dasha Shakov: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

50:11Shlomo Genchin: It was good. But I think the reason it's good is because they clearly went, like, it's not a one-shot video that was generated with AI. I feel like that's something that took many people multiple hours. It had a real human in the loop scripting it. They almost did everything with their brain involved, minus the maybe video generation piece.

50:30Dasha Shakov: Definitely, definitely. And I honestly think that it would work even better if it were real actors. I think it would be even cooler, for sure. But as long as you have, you definitely had all the elements there, right? It was clear, you understood the offer. It was scroll stopping because the colors were all interesting. There was this like cool story happening. And it was relatable because every marketer has been in that situation where you're trying to justify your marketing spend and you can't and Fibler solves that. So definitely it had all the elements. I think that if it were a real production, you would first be way more expensive, but maybe more effective and cool.

51:05Dasha Shakov: But I think it was great. And I remember I read that they had great results. So can't argue with that.

51:10Shlomo Genchin: Speaking of expensive, talk to me about budget. If you have kind of a marketing team of one or two people, no budget, what is the highest leverage move you can do to have fun ads with kind of no budget?

51:25Dasha Shakov: I think stick to static ads. This is the simplest thing you can do because even AI video, just like you said, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort if you want to do it well. Just like you said, like you still need to script it. You still need to edit it well. So it's not like a solution that you can just say, yeah, AI will just do our video ads. So I think that static ads and memes are an amazing option. I've seen so many companies that scaled their whole company and their whole ad program just with memes and static ads and some UGC ads from real users and founder-led ads. So all of those things are very cheap.

52:01Dasha Shakov: It's just plain text and some AI-generated or stock images or simple images that you can shoot yourself. But I think these are always the best options. I think it's always better to do something well and to make something that there is thought behind it and it's interesting and it's fun and it's relatable than trying to make videos and trying to make assets that you can't actually afford and make them look cheap. I think that a good static ad or even an authentic screenshot of a testimonial is much better than a poorly made AI ad.

52:33Shlomo Genchin: That's awesome. Sweet. Shlomo, that brings us to the end of the pod. Thank you for walking us through the three things that every ad should have and the three techniques to get fun ads. For people that want to find you, what is the best place to find you on the internet?

52:49Dasha Shakov: I'm on LinkedIn, Shlomo Genshin, and you'll probably also see my weird name in the description of this podcast. And also on Bored.com. That's my website, newsletter, and you can find all my, a bunch of free material there as well.

53:02Shlomo Genchin: All right. That's the pod. Thanks for tuning in.

53:05Dasha Shakov: Thank you very much.

53:31Dasha Shakov: Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit 5. There's nearly 5 ,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 % free to join for seven days.

54:02Dasha Shakov: So you can go and check it out risk-free And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year Go check it out learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community

54:20Dasha Shakov: Hey, it's me dave today's episode is brought to you by customer.io They're one of our longest running sponsors Customer.io helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send so you can reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. What we love about Customer.io is that they have a great team of marketers who really care about the craft. They just get marketing and understand our audience. Molly, Rosie, and the team bring something creative. Every time that we work together at our Exit 5 event in Austin, they handed out cowboy boots in our newsletter. They shared an AI prompt cookbook.

54:51Dasha Shakov: And at Drive last month, they were giving out Airbnb gift cards and AirPods. They believe marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. And no, AI can't do this part for you. The best teams treat AI as infrastructure and built the right way. It actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. Customer.io helps product teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in-app, and webhooks using their own first-party data. And today, more than 9 ,000 brands trust Customer.io to send their messages, including Notion, Les Mills, and Angie. So if you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging or you just want a great marketing team to follow, it's time to go and check out Customer.io.

55:28Dasha Shakov: Go to customer.io slash exit5. That's customer.io slash exit5.