Stay original or imitate

Why you need to be careful in taking inspiration

Hey there! đź‘‹

Europe’s been heating up 🥵 hope you’re staying cool with the AC/fan on and drinking enough water. Gotta stay hydrated. Been trying to make sure I hit 3 to 4 Liters of water every day. Been doing this for a long time, so it’s not that big of an issue for me. Expert tip: get a big 1 litre bottle (from glass) that you can fill up 3 to 4 times a day, easy peasy!

So to get into this week’s subject, I want to cover something we also get trapped into from time to time which is to spy on other brands and try to copy what they’re doing because “they do a lot of revenue, so this ad concept or angle must also work for me”. Well, it might. But it can also backfire big time. Why?

Something that works for one brand will not work for another brand. Simple as that, you might see Magic Spoon cereal run an ad that is very simple and focuses on the 3 reasons why people should ditch regular cereal and switch to their cereal instead. This could print like clockwork for them.

However, if you’re a brand just getting started this can fail big time for you as no one is interested, you don’t have social proof, you don’t have a proof of concept and you honestly don’t even know the 3 reasons why people should buy your product as you haven’t been in business for a long time to get statistically significant data back.

Obviously, this is a very simple example which makes sense, but in general, you do want to watch out for big brands and taking inspo from them. Brands like Athletic Greens, Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, Huel etc… all run ads that make sense for their brand at their stage. If you’re not on their level you might want to watch out what you imitate. Instead, try to study their ads and see what emotional triggers they are trying to target with their ads, as all successful ads do. They all target an emotional trigger for the brand to show why someone needs a specific product in their lives. Another big one is to try and watch brands that are around the same level as you are. Doing 50K a month, try to look at brands doing the same kind of numbers as you are to see what is working for them at that stage. As a 9 figure brand relies on a lot of different channels and for them it might make sense to have an ad active for 9 months just doing video views targeting because they know it helps their top of funnel ads perform better.

Going back to the point of being original or imitating other brands, I feel both need to be taken into consideration when trying to come up with new concepts for your next winning ad. Yea, go study other brands and take elements from what they are doing and from there try to see if you can fit those elements into your own ads and give your own spin to it. Like every brand has done a comparison image, for example, comparing their product to a competitor or an alternative. For some brands it works, for some, it doesn’t. Should you be testing it? Hell yeah, test everything until you find that concept that keeps working. The reason I say concept and not an ad is because you have to think in concepts that are backed by data. So for example, you have a toothpaste brand and know one of the main reasons to buy is because people struggle with tooth decay. An ad concept for that could be a mashup of UGC with an AI voiceover speaking about how thousands of customers have battled tooth decay using your toothpaste. If that concept works, you know you can iterate from there and test a different concept using the same elements from the original concept, change the hook etc. Be careful to test one element at a time to not fall into the trap of not knowing what exactly worked!

In our agency we tend to use other brands as inspo but make sure our video/image editors take it as inspo and not just straight copy it. It’s important for the ad to be original and not just a ripoff. From there we tell them to make it fit the brand’s guidelines, fonts, colours etc. We usually have a split of 70/30 of iterations from past ads and original new concepts to make sure we’re always testing something new.

That’s all I wanted to cover today, as a gift of making it to the end I wanted to give away a swipe file of the 25 best Facebook ad libraries. You can find them here. I hope you find value in it!

I've been using Foreplay for months now, and I can honestly say it's one of the best value-for-money tools for any eCommerce brand, agency owner or anyone that runs paid media.

It allows you to save ads from TikTok's and Facebook's ads library and keep them forever in your inspiration boards!

That's a wrap!

See you next week at 7 PM CEST.

All the best,

Dennis đź’š

P.S. On Twitter? Follow me here for daily value bombs about eCommerce and DTC!