Black Friday: How to create powerful ads with AI?

Black Friday, occurring on November 29th, drives both brick-and-mortar and social media commerce, with brands taking advantage of the period to publish advertisements offering discounts on products and services. But how can you identify a good advertisement for the date? The 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 surpasses targets.

According to research conducted by Wake, in partnership with Opinion Box, 661,000 Brazilians are expected to shop during this year's Black Friday; however, 231,000 people are still undecided. Given the abundance of creative options on social media, the challenge for brands is understanding the reasons why people click on a specific ad and ignore others.

"Marketing professionals are skilled at selecting audiences based on age, interests, and location, as well as creating and testing creatives. 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, Head of Latam at Vidmob, a global leading AI-powered creative performance platform, which uses data analysis to boost the marketing results of major brands.

To improve 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, analyzing campaign performance data is more effective for understanding audience response and making targeted creative adjustments. Gathering data from all social media platforms is crucial, as results vary significantly between them. This approach allows for identifying valuable insights that might be missed if professionals focus solely on individual campaign performance.

2 – Compare the creative with best practices on the platforms

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

3 – Connect creators with performance

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

4 – Incorporate creative performance into your production process

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

5 – Add automation

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

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