by Mike Stern, Chief Client Officer at The Gold Studios
There is a particular kind of ad that seems to follow you around social media. Type zooms in. A caption shouts the offer. The hook changes, the graphics move a little faster and the noises get louder. Somewhere behind it all, an acquisition team is testing its thousandth variation and wondering why the numbers have stopped improving.
There is only so much optimisation you can do when the starting point is an ad people are desperate to escape.
Performance marketing inherited a lot of its habits from digital display. Static, quick-to-load assets made sense when the job was retargeting somebody across the web. Those habits have travelled into social, where brands are spending heavily on video in the same feed people use for hours of entertainment. A glorified banner with a bit more animation is still a glorified banner.
And that is where brands are leaving money on the table. The next gains in performance will not come from more optimisation, but from better creative. Brands that connect entertainment and acquisition can turn attention into lower acquisition costs and more customers.
The company your ad keeps
Context changes the standard. A banner ad sits beside other banner ads and often static web copy. A social ad sits between a comedian, a football argument, a creator somebody has followed for years and whatever their closest friend posted that morning. The advertising has to give them a reason to pause, whether it entertains them or feels relevant to their day. Otherwise, their thumb has already made the decision.
Acquisition creative often gets whatever is left. The brand team hands over a template, or the performance team gets the final five minutes of a shoot and asks for something that can drive a sale. Quelle surprise, it comes out the other end looking fairly uninteresting.
The people making it are then asked to optimise their way out of the problem. They change the image, resize the text and rewrite the hook 1,001 times. Some versions will beat others, because some banner ads work better than other banner ads. The ceiling remains low when nobody wanted to watch the thing in the first place.
Let entertainment build the trust
A better starting point is the entertainment people already choose to watch and the talent that keeps them coming back. A brand can build familiarity with that audience by helping make something they enjoy. That gives the acquisition team people and formats to work with that already mean something to the viewer. There is no need to make every episode carry a sales pitch.
The acquisition message can come from that same world without being shoved into the show. Familiar presenters or creators can appear in separate paid ads, bringing some of the audience’s goodwill with them. The offer still needs to be clear, but there is room to deliver it in their own words. Someone who is funny and relaxed on a channel should be allowed to sound that way when they are selling something too.
Sometimes those assets look a lot like the shows themselves. They are still built for a different job. A presenter can explain a simple offer in the same colloquial way they discuss the weekend’s football, rather than suddenly sounding as if a promo code has been pushed into their script by somebody in another department.
Entertainment can still be accountable
This approach worked for Betway. Its sports entertainment network passed 208 million views, creating a pool of recognisable talent and formats around the brand. Those voices were then used to deliver acquisition creative. The work delivered a 27% lower cost per acquisition than any other assets in the campaign.
Those numbers are useful because performance teams are understandably suspicious of anything that sounds soft. They are given a budget and expected to account for it. Entertainment can sound like somebody else’s brand project, especially when client organisations still split acquisition, brand and organic social between different teams that barely discuss the work appearing on the same platforms. That was not the case at Betway, where the entertainment and acquisition work were connected.
The split makes little sense to the person seeing the ad. They experience one brand in one feed. Behind the scenes, one team may be building trust while another spends millions serving creative that feels unrelated to it. Joining those efforts gives acquisition teams better ingredients to work with: familiar people, a credible voice and an audience that already understands why the brand is there.
Give performance teams something worth testing
None of this removes the need for craft. A conversational delivery still needs scripting, and simple work can take a surprising amount of effort to make simple. It also needs testing, targeting and a clear offer. Optimisation becomes far more useful once the creative has earned a second of attention.
The opportunity reaches well beyond sport. Beauty creators have spent years showing how a trusted voice can move somebody from interest to purchase. Subscription businesses and other categories with a clear click-to-trial or click-to-buy journey can use the same principle. Find people audiences genuinely choose to watch, then let them deliver a commercial message in language that belongs in the feed.
Brands are now spending serious acquisition money in spaces built around entertainment. The creative standard has to reflect the company the ad keeps. Performance marketing needs to be entertaining because performance depends on somebody staying long enough to hear the offer. The next gains in performance will come from making ads people actually want to spend time with, then giving the data something worthwhile to optimise.
