Take bigger swings
The speaker advocates for taking bolder, more creative risks in advertising and landing page testing, especially when operating at smaller scales. Rather than making incremental variations on existing winners, marketers should test diverse, extreme concepts to discover new winners and build account stability.
Summary
The speaker emphasizes that many marketers are too conservative in their approach to creative testing. When they find a winning ad, they make only minor adjustments—such as replacing an older model with a younger one with a broken leg—rather than fundamentally rethinking their creative strategy. The speaker argues this is the wrong approach, particularly for accounts that haven't reached optimal scale yet.
Instead, the speaker recommends embracing creative diversity as the primary driver of success. They reference this as being in the age of Andromeda and stress that testing a large number of completely new and different concepts is the proven method for finding stability in an account and discovering new winning creatives. This principle applies not just to ad creative but also to landing page optimization.
The strategy involves testing extremes rather than minor variations. The speaker advises that marketers should continue taking bold risks with radically different concepts until they reach a volume of scale where small, incremental improvements in conversion rate optimization (CRO) will yield substantial results. Once at that scale, the focus can shift to refinement. Rather than creating tiny variations of existing winning creatives, the speaker recommends analyzing what variables made those winners successful and then building entirely new concepts based on those insights.
Key Insights
- The speaker observes that most marketers make only incremental creative variations on existing ad winners instead of fundamentally rethinking their approach to creative testing
- The speaker claims that creative diversity is universally recognized as the most important factor in achieving stability and finding new winners in advertising accounts
- The speaker argues that testing a large number of completely new concepts is the proven mechanism for finding account stability and new winning ads, rather than optimizing existing ones
- The speaker contends that marketers should test extreme variations until reaching a volume threshold where minor CRO changes produce significant results
- The speaker suggests that winning variables from successful creatives should be identified and used as the foundation to build entirely new concepts, rather than creating minor variations
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] Take much bolder risks. Be much bolder with your creativity. I see a lot of people testing new ads and saying, “Okay, cool. "I have this one winner." And you're like, "Okay, I'll replace the old man with a young guy with a broken leg." No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you are not yet at the right level of scale, take bolder risks. Test more variety. This is the age of Andromeda. Everyone knows that creative diversity is the most important thing. Everyone knows that testing a large number of completely new concepts is the way to find stability in [0:30] an account and new winners. Even in the context of landing pages, this is also…
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