The Battle of Informational Ads vs. Emotive Ones

Part of many ad campaigns is the creative. This image, video, and message combination will dictate whether your ads win or lose, rise or fall. They affect customer engagement, how much your ads cost, and ultimately whether you’ll succeed or fail.

At the start of any ad campaign one of the first things we do is gauge how much creative leeway the client will allow. What we’ve found is a great many clients aren’t comfortable trying out-of-the-box ideas, and favor a clean communication of their product offering details. We’re a creative ad agency and very much favor coming up with ideas that will push the limits. Perhaps they’ll run the risk of falling flat, while having a stronger upward potential. When embarking on campaigns with a new client I doubt we’re the only ones who find ourselves “battling the boardroom” and its resistance to any and all creative gestures. Here’s a dramatization of a potential client exchange.

“Stick to the facts or you’re fired!”

When we request creative license, we often find ourselves denied in favor of doing the same thing as everyone else. We may find or feel pressure to present the product offering with an attractive photo and call it a day. This tendency to reach and cling to the safety and security of what we know, proved to be what was holding at least one of our campaigns back recently.

Our initial post as per client request was a stock image of plastic people with brochure type information. It dutifully had all the information one needed to make an informed decision, but it was getting glossed over. It had a very high CPC. After a chat with the boss she gave use the go-ahead to explore other options- just show me results.

And so we launched an ad that used passionate, emotion invoking pictures, accompanied by text that told enough of the story without including every chapter. The results were immediately clear with a 300% decrease in CPC.

The informational ad had over $3 per click, and the passionate one was $1.

To be sure, Facebook’s platform makes it easy to test ad concepts and quicky see which are outperforming the others. Now it’s become our process to always launch multiple ad variations under the same Ad Set so we can let Facebook do its magic and find the winner for us. We internally have informally polls on which “horse” will win the race. Watching how it all plays out makes us better at preparing ads in the future and helps us further become familiar with our audience.