Mike Taylor

When you have a lot of internal stakeholders that want to give their opinion (it’s on brand, it’s good, their opinion has been heard), you need to optimize everything else in the process around that one bottleneck.

Borrow memes from a category or thing that your customers like already. Example: Monzo bank, which targets mostly students, made their card orange which was very different at the time. It started because one of their designers had bright orange Nike shoes, which was also in line with their target audience.

When you have a lot of internal stakeholders that want to give their opinion (it’s on brand, it’s good, their opinion has been heard), you need to optimize everything else in the process around that one bottleneck. In creative production, this translates into having a “creative lake”: fill up your reservoir with already-approved modular creatives. Example: you shouldn’t say, “I want to show this ad” but instead, “Can you approve these 6 stock photos, these 7 illustrations, and these 20 copy lines”.

Post-ATT, you should only “actually” split test your most existentially important things. Keep it for big conceptual differences, the one or two very important things. Don’t waste your testing slots. They used to call this performance branding. Example for a digital bank: splitting the bill with friends when traveling might resonate with students but not with someone that mostly eats with their wife. Cheap currency exchange might work well with both students and couples that travel, but not for other groups.

At a big scale, the difference between paying $100 or $500 for creatives is nothing. Something that might seem inefficient, like having 4 people working on the same task, might be efficient in light of your bottleneck.

Build a Swipe Files of all the examples of success in a specific domain you want to conquer and tag the recurring patterns. This works great to spot recurring themes for ads that perform well (or don’t perform well). Then, you can decide what to copy and when to innovate.