Black Friday: How to Create Powerful Ads with AI?

Black Friday, which takes place on November 29th, drives both physical retail and social media activity, with brands using the period to promote advertisements featuring discounts on products and services. But how can you identify a good ad for this date? A target audience recognizes and interacts with it in seconds, while for marketers, a good ad is one that achieves strong performance, especially when its performance boosts sales results and exceeds goals.

According to research conducted by Wake, in partnership with Opinion Box, 66% Brazilians expect to make purchases during this year's Black Friday; however, 23% people are still undecided. Faced with the multitude of creative options on social media, the challenge for brands is understanding the reasons why people click on a specific advertisement and ignore others.

"Marketing professionals know how to select audiences based on age, interests, and location, as well as produce and test creative materials. However, it has always been difficult to understand which elements of a winning creative influence its performance. Today, with AI and machine learning, it's possible to identify what works, what doesn't work, and, more importantly, why," says Miguel Caeiro, Latam head of Vidmob, a global leading AI-powered creative performance platform that uses data analysis to boost the marketing results of major brands.

To enhance campaign performance, Vidmob has listed five tips for creating creative and effective ads, expanding campaign results. Check them out:

1 – Collect all data

Creating video concepts can be a time-consuming task. Instead, it's more effective to analyze campaign performance data to better understand audience response and make targeted adjustments to creatives. Gathering data from all social media platforms is crucial, as results vary between them. This approach allows for identifying valuable insights that may be missed if professionals focus solely on individual campaign performance.

2 – Compare the creative with best practices on the platforms

Marketing professionals invest effort at every stage of the creative process, from conception to execution, but often decisions are influenced by "gut feelings." To objectively measure the effectiveness of ads, one can utilize data from platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, which offer free analytics and best practices for performance optimization. Following these practices can rapidly improve ad quality.

3 – Connect creativity with performance

Comparing ads to each platform's best practices is just one step. Marketing professionals can eliminate more guesswork by analyzing how individual creative elements impact consumer response. "Step 1" (collecting data) can be used to correlate creative elements – such as backgrounds, product and people images, narratives, and captions – to each platform's ad performance. Depending on the priority, professionals can map creative choices to metrics like sales, conversions, or even downloads. Improving the identification of high- and low-performing creative choices on each platform leads teams to faster and more informed decisions.

4 – Incorporate creative performance into your production process

Integrating data-driven creative insights into every stage of the creative process can expedite decisions and facilitate collaboration between marketing professionals and creatives. For example, they can incorporate insights such as video abandonment times or elements driving engagement in paid campaigns into briefs to help creative teams understand expectations. Another tip is to have a checklist that compares ads to specific platform-published standards. This will help prevent errors and ensure good performance from the start of the campaign.

5 – Add automation

AI usage not only accelerates the creative process but also empowers marketers to achieve better results with a reduced budget. Conversely, Generative AI has elevated content quality overall. The right tools are needed to stand out in this sea of parity. AI-automated creative scoring enables rapid adaptation of the same creative for different platforms, while simultaneously providing professionals with campaign management metrics and tools that unlock the "why" behind performance. 

Understanding what truly resonates with the audience yields better results at every stage of the sales funnel. Furthermore, while technology allows for above-average results, it also saves on creative production costs by making the approach more targeted," explains Miguel Caeiro.