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Hope you all are having a great Monday and are ready to tackle this week.

In this week’s news, Tesla continues to struggle, Apple is carefully navigating geopolitical concerns in Taiwan, and Meta is faced with a censorship problem in India.

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Strategy

The term “ad creative” refers to the visual and textual elements of an ad, designed to capture the audience’s attention and call them to action. It’s a pretty broad term but a loaded one nonethless.

Effective ad creative not only communicates your brand's message but also resonates with your target audience on a deeper level, prompting them to take action.

This week, we’ll be taking you through examples of ad creative, showing you what some of the best campaigns in history did right and what the biggest takeaways are.

Live There
When you think of the most disruptive companies in the past 20 years, Airbnb is a name that cannot go unspoken.

But, with such disruption comes great adversity in getting users to trust your product. The company’s “Live There” ad campaign that ran from 2015-2016 was a huge catalyst for user growth and revenue growth at a time where the company was really beginning to achieve scale.

Airbnb conducted a customer survey that found that 86% of their users preferred the platform because they want to feel like a local when they travel.

In the “Live There” campaign featured in the clip above, Airbnb captivated audiences with storytelling that captured this exact sentiment.

Commercials like this showcased Airbnb’s USP: unique travel experiences in not-so-unique places. Sure, many people travel to Paris for vacation each year, but not many people engage with the culture as a local. Don’t just “do” Paris. Live there.

This campaign resulted in an estimated 400% increase in bookings for featured destinations, demonstrating the power of authentic storytelling in driving engagement and inspiring action among consumers.

UGC & Audience Engagement
After seeing the success of the ad campaign, Airbnb engaged its socials.

In today’s age of advertising, getting your commercial in front of customers is only attempt number one. If you don’t hook them on the first try, you have plenty of opportunities to do it again on social media.

However, Airbnb can’t generate enough high-quality commercials fast enough to keep their socials prolific. So, what do they do? They ask their audience for help.

It is often said that satisfied customers tell three friends, and angry customers tell 3,000. Although that’s an intimidating proposition, Airbnb focused on the former group and encouraged its happy customers to share their experiences.

Around the time of the ad campaign, the #LiveThere hashtag went viral. It galvanized Airbnb fans to share their experiences, serving as an endless source of positive reviews, and when potential customers went to Airbnb’s social media to see if it was worth booking, they found hundreds of posts just like the one above to validate their decision to rent.

User-generated content is frequently a favored method for developing ad creative, especially for social media where consistency of content is the name of the game.

As shown in the graphic above, UGC takes up roughly 10% of brands’ budget. It’s cheap because it puts the cost of shooting content back onto the customer, who is often eager to assist for free.

Interestingly, shoppers would prefer brands to lean into user-generated content, as expressed by the circles on the right, since it is more authentic and peer-reviewed.

This isn’t to undermine the importance of branded campaigns, since the entire goal of ad creative is to differentiate your product and tell the customer what you’re all about.

But, the companies that know how to create campaigns that utilize UGC and engage the audience will be the ones that thrive in the coming years.

GoPro vs. RedBull
Balancing UGC with branded content is an increasingly uncertain challenge.

Take a look at GoPro’s “Experience Different” commercial from a few years back. As you’ll notice, they utilize user-generated by including almost exclusively footage of customers using their POV cameras.

This approach has not only led to a wealth of compelling content but also contributed to a 40% increase in engagement on GoPro's social media channels.

Compare this with Red Bull - the energy drink company is unrivaled in the marketing space, and they don’t use UGC for their biggest campaigns.

Red Bull generates their own branded content, and it is nothing short of epic. The company spends nearly a third of their revenue on marketing, but they make it worthwhile because the quality of their content is so absurdly engaging.

Red Bull’s brand awareness in the U.S. is 91%, so they must be doing something right.

So… Which Is Better?
This is all to say that UGC is a critical and cost-effective element to advertising, but there will be no users to generate your content if you don’t put in the effort on the branding side.

Generating branded ad creative is the result of two important elements:

First is the ability to engage your audience with compelling content. This is done by testing different color schemes, video styles, and narrative perspectives until you find the combination that gets the best response.

Second is running marketing campaigns that align with your brand’s values. As we see with Red Bull, the high-octane adventurous content is directly correlated with the exhilarating feeling of pounding an energy drink. Airbnb’s messaging is all about unique travel experiences and distinguishing what they offer from what a hotel offers.

If you can run a campaign that highlights the unique selling proposition of your brand, you are sure to make the most out of your marketing dollars.

Looking Ahead
Lots of examples this week! If you guys preferred this media-heavy style, let us know in the feedback survey below. As for next week, we’ll be diving into a fun topic: virality! What makes ads go viral? Is it a worthwhile strategy to pursue? All will be answered next Monday in your inbox.

For a sneak peak into the rest of the month, check below:

Advertising 101
Week 1: Advertising Metrics
Week 2: Audience Targeting
Week 3: Types of Ads
Week 4: Creating Your Ads (This Week)
Week 5: Virality

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