What if we told you there's an all-in-one ad framework that will quadruple your advertising ROI and help you scale to the moon? Travis Chambers, the Founder and Chief Media Hacker at Chambers Media came up with a proven “7 foundational ads approach” that can help online marketers to see a dramatic increase in the success rate of their ad creatives.
In this article, we are sharing with you the 7 foundational ads approach by Travis Chambers that he highly recommends online marketers and media buyers observe. He also shares the details on the best ad type to use for each niche and even the worst-performing ad type that you should avoid.
Travis and his team were able to come up with this approach after an experiment whereby they gave names to 100 different ad types and what they found is that those 100 ad types actually fit into seven categories hence building something called the “7 foundational ads”.
“As you can see here we've tagged ads by product demo, we've estimated the revenue generated from these Shopify stores, and we even looked at all of the landing pages and home pages for every single brand to develop the product price and the average order value, we looked at how long these ads have been running how many views they have and by that we were able to build formulas to determine what the top 1% of ad creatives are so that we could model and mirror them.”, Travis explains.
The 7 Foundational Ads
Travis and the team at Chambers Media broke down 100 ad types into 7 categories of ads that have proven to be the highest performing ads in 2021 and 2022 so far. Those 7 foundational ad categories are:
- Spokesperson achor ads
- Product demonstration ads
- Social proof ads
- Dynamic ads
- Case study ads
- Lifestyle ads
- Unboxing ads
1. The spokesperson anchor: This is a highly engaging video ad explaining the product and highlighting its features. This is like the Dollar Shave Club video ads whereby you’d have a spokesperson talking and, walking and speaking directly right down the pipe into the camera.
2. Product demonstration: This highlights the product features and demonstrates the value points to the consumers.
3. Social proof ads: These ads contain brand or product opinions by consumers, influencers, blogs, etc that are leveraged to create trust between the consumers and the brands. These are more of like a press feature, customer reviews or user-generated content, and more.
4. Dynamic ads: These include computer-generated creatives assets to A/B test at scale.
5. Case study ads: These are ads based on a controlled study or testing of products that end up proving that the product offers a superior performance or increased quality of life. This is like a before and after comparison. A side-by-side comparison that might be some kind of empirical scientific case study done by an independent research lab.
6. Lifestyle ads: These are ads showcasing the product being used in everyday life.
7. Unboxing ads: These are ads that showcase the product’s packaging and unveil the product from the package.
The Everything Ad
Travis says that there is something new and special they have come up with at Chamber Media called “The Everything Ad”. This is a 30 seconds or five minutes long ad that has integrated every single one of the 7 foundational ads, all in the same clip.
The Dollar Shave Club ad that came out about 10 years ago was one of the first times that marketers had done this. They had included every single type of ad in one ad.
“These don't always work, but when they work, holy hell do they scale to the frickin moon!”, Travis says.
The Performance of the 7 Foundation ads in Different Niches
“We so often get brands coming to us and saying, well how do you know what type of ad creatives to make for us? “We are in electronics or we' are in food and drink or we are in women's clothing”. And that's when a light went off and we started thinking, maybe different ad types work in different industries. So we had to go back and make a deeper study based on niches.”, Travis says
The performance of these 7 ad types varies in different niches. Some ad types will work well in some niches and flop in other niches. Travis and the team at Chambers Media studied this data on the performance of the ad types based on niches we are going to get you the insights into the data that he has collected.
Electronics Niche
For the electronics industry, it was found that there is a 20% higher chance of success with the spokesperson anchor video ads, 17% success chance with social proof ads, and 15% success chance with product demo ads. Dynamic ads and lifestyle ads have a lower chance of working well when it comes to electronics.
Men's Clothing
Apparently, men and women purchase things differently. Men are interested in a spokesperson anchor video. They want an authoritarian figure that they can trust and to whom they can relate. If you've seen chubbies shorts ads or the Youtube channel Teaching Men Fashion by Jose Zuniga, The Modest Man by Brock Mcgoff, and a lot of spokesperson actors and authoritative charismatic figures.
The second-highest performing ad type for men’s clothing is unboxing ads. Apparently, men are really into visually gratifying things — shocking, right! They want to see that box open and see the product sit in front of them.
Women's Clothing
Women are different. Women are more likely to buy apparel from a lifestyle ad. Women want the aspirational feeling of, "What is my life going to be like and how am I going to feel when I buy this apparel."
The second-highest performing for women's clothing is a case study ad. Women are somewhat skeptical of apparel and of clothing and the quality of the fabrics because there's a lot of low-quality apparel out there. So case study ads are really important.
Other Niches
Below is a table showing different niches and the top 2 ad types that perform in that niche.
“When we first pulled this together, I got a little tingle down my spine because I was so excited. It was like the cheat code.”, Travis says.
As an advertiser, you have to make sure that you are running the right ads for your niche because running mismatched ads is a quick way to waste money.
The Overall Worst Performing Ad Type
In aggregate, this is what the data from Chambers Media shows dynamic ads are the worst performing ads in almost all industries. However, data shows that 25% of ads in the food and drinks industry are dynamic ads yet dynamic ads underperform the rest of the ad types by 21%.
“In fact, dynamic ads are the worst ad type to use in the food and drinks industry! So if you're a drop shipper and you're making these auto-generated footage ads in the foot and drink industry you're gonna have a bad time.”, Travis says.
Conclusion
Coming up with winning ad creatives needs a lot of strategizing and research but luckily, we have got Travis Chambers, sharing with us all of that information here. Together with his team, he found the 7 key ad types that advertisers must ensure they model and mirror in order to scale their campaigns fast. This was all discovered after testing and analyzing the performance of hundreds of ads in multiple advertising campaigns.
Travis insists, “I promise you that if you guys use the 7 foundational ads approach, you will see a dramatic increase in the success rate of the ad creative that you're making.”
