Black Friday: How to create powerful ads with AI?

Black Friday, which occurs on November 29th, drives both brick-and-mortar stores and social media platforms, with brands leveraging the period to promote ads offering discounts on products and services. But how can you identify a good ad for the date? Audiences recognize and engage with it in seconds, whereas for marketers, a good ad is one that performs well, especially when its performance boosts sales results and surpasses targets.

According to research conducted by Wake, in partnership with Opinion Box, 66% Brazilians are expected 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 particular advertisement and ignore others.

"Marketing professionals can select audiences based on age, interests, and location, and produce and test 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, LatAm Head of Vidmob, a global leading AI-powered creative performance platform that uses data analysis to boost the marketing results of large 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 to better understand audience response and make targeted creative adjustments is more effective. Gathering data from all social media platforms is crucial, as results vary between them. This approach allows for the identification of valuable insights that may be missed if professionals focus solely on the individual performance of campaigns.

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 often decisions are influenced by intuition. To objectively measure the effectiveness of ads, it's possible to utilize data from platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, which offer free analytics and best practices for performance optimization. Following these practices can quickly improve ad quality.

3 – Connect creatives with performance

Comparing ads against best practices for each platform is just one step. Marketers 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 on each platform. 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 across platforms leads to faster and more assertive decisions for teams.

4 – Incorporate creative performance into your production process

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

5 – Add automation

Artificial intelligence not only accelerates the creative process but also empowers marketers to achieve better results with a reduced budget. Conversely, Generative AI has generally elevated content quality. Using the right tools is essential to stand out in this sea of equilibrium. AI-automated creative scoring allows for the rapid adaptation of the same creative across different platforms, while simultaneously providing professionals with campaign metrics and management 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 us to achieve above-average results, it also drives efficiencies in creative production because it becomes more targeted," explains Miguel Caeiro.