3 creative video ads. 2.75M authentic subscribers. Barnum-style Qs. — The Frontier

~Happy 2024 to all, and to all a good year~

I have some exciting plans for our content this year.

If you like this newsletter, our playbooks, and our past events—you're gonna love it.

Topics for the day: 3 creative video ads. 2.75M authentic subscribers. Barnum-style Qs.

Let's dive in 🪸

– Neal

3 creative video ad ideas to test out

Insight from Social Savannah.

Even the best content will be ignored if it fails to hook them.

With ads, this is even more true because they're intrusive and every impression costs $$$.

For video, you have max 1-3 seconds to stop the scroll. Here are some creative ideas:

1. Phone-ception 📲

Show your product in a variety of settings and transition using close ups of screenshots on phones from the recording of the next shot in the sequence. Like these earplugs:

(Note this also eye catching due to the dynamism)

2. Text Interrupt

Ads do best when they don't feel like ads.

This selfie video of someone outside doesn't immediately look like one. The text notification coming in is enough to catch you off guard and think it might be yours:

3. Fake Podcast

Create a fake podcast setup and talk about your product:

In summary: get creative with your creative.

When you're paying for every impression, you gotta work hard to get people to pay attention.

2.6M subscribers in 9 months from pure authenticity

Insight from Sam Sulek.

March: 8k subscribers.

November: 1.8 million subscribers.

Today: 2.75 million subscribers.

Sam Sulek is a fitness YouTuber (and college kid) who posts daily vlogs that are barely edited, have dark & uninteresting thumbnails, have no meaningful title, and are always 30-40 minutes with him either in his car or at the gym:

Essentially he's breaking every rule in the marketer's playbook.

The beauty of this is summarized perfectly by these two comments:

The key ingredient here is authenticity.

He just takes his viewers through his day-to-day life and talks shop with them, as if they're hanging out with him. And he's just himself. No content creator voice. No filtering.

(It helps that he's extremely jacked, so it's built-in credibility.)

This is essentially old-school YouTube through and through. Complete with quirky inside jokes repeated in the comments of every video:

Make them feel seen with the Barnum Effect

Insight derived from Katelyn Bourgoin's tweet.

We’re drawn to statements that feel personalized to us.

A classic way that fortune tellers, astrologists, and marketers take advantage of this is with the Barnum Effect (aka the Forer Effect).

In his experiment, Forer gave a personality test to his students, then provided them with a generic personality summary description as a result. Despite it being a vague statement, the students rated the accuracy of the result very highly.

The way marketers often leverage this is with "Barnum-style questions." Here are two examples from the cohort course Ship30for30 that teaches people to write consistently:

Although these are not so vague and general that they apply to anyone, there are a ton of people browsing social media who it does apply to.

And it feels like it's directly speaking to and labelling the problem they're experiencing.

This is powerful for a few reasons:

When someone articulates your problem, you trust that they can solve it.
"Nothing is more important than when you're thinking about it" (Daniel Kahneman). Reminding them of the problem makes the pain more acute and in need of solving.
It makes them the focal point of the story, not your product.

To do this properly, you need to understand your customers:

Goals
Problems
Selfish desires
And trigger events (what moment/experience/feeling in their life makes them buy?)