3 Insights From Marketing Maestro Eric Seufert

Welcome back to the latest issue of Funnel Vision, the weekly newsletter that puts performance creative & growth marketing in focus. Brought to you by the crew at Ready Set.

Happy Friday! Our thoughts go out to anyone using a Windows computer, waiting for a flight, or working on the CrowdStrike QA team.

In today’s issue, we’re covering:

• Top insights & takeaways from this week’s masterclass with Eric Suefert

• Combining top-performing elements for monstrously successful ads

• A deceptively simple ad format for you to test

Reading time: 4 minutes

Unfiltered thoughts on creative from Eric Suefert

Yesterday’s Screen Share session was one for the books!

Renowned performance marketer Eric Seufert is one of the most innovative minds in the digital advertising space. He rarely talks about creative.

On Wednesday, he did.

Catch the full conversation right here, or keep reading for our top takeaways.

1. Feed the beast 👹 

The recent development of ad platforms has been dominated by two themes:

1. Platforms (Meta, Google, etc.) got exponentially smarter with both more data and better tech.

2. Targeting became harder and harder with each new privacy framework—think Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT).

Oversimplification? Most definitely.

But the result is one that all performance marketers felt: Platforms automated more and more controls, taking them away from users.

In Eric’s words: “They automated away all the inefficiencies of running campaigns.”

Meaning creative isn’t just an important lever...

It’s the ONLY lever left.

“Creative is even more important now than it was a couple years ago,” says Eric.

“Platforms are experimentation machines. You need to feed the beast. Give that automated system as much ammo as it needs to experiment. That’s what it does.”

2. Test to root out low-performers 👩‍🔬

Eric’s philosophy to creative testing may strike some as contrarian:

“What you're trying to do is root out the losers as fast as possible.”

• Platforms are powerful enough to identify high performers and deliver them more often

• Focusing on eliminating low-performing ads should therefore be the real goal of testing

This approach raises an interesting question: Are smaller, incremental changes valuable for testing, or should you aim for big, drastic changes?

It all comes down to your budget.

💰 “With smaller budgets, some changes are too small to be effective,” says Eric.

Instead, focus on testing big, radical concepts rather than minor tweaks.

“If I'm running five ads a month they better be radically different, because that's going to give me the most opportunity for exploration.”

💰💰💰With larger budgets, explore variations within successful concepts.

“If I'm running five million a month, then I'll have a couple of concepts, but within those concepts there's a lot of different variants being tested against each other.”

3. AI & blank canvas thinking 🤖

Where do creative strategists fit in the new world of platforms generating the creative?

“Your goal is to super-serve the most relevant person with creative that’s most likely to activate them.”

The problem, according to Eric, is as an advertiser that it's becoming harder and harder to do. Again, platforms are becoming more automated, so more tools are taken out of the advertiser’s hands.

The role of the creative strategist is to power blank canvas thinking.

“Creative strategists should empower the exploratory part of the process, coming up with new ideas and letting the machines scale them,” says Eric.

“I don’t think generative AI tools will introduce new concepts out of nothing any time soon. That’s the hardest part of good advertising.”

The takeaway? To keep performance high, you need to generate original ideas that machines can't.

STEAL THIS AD TACTIC

Combine top-performing elements to create new ads

Just as Dr. Frankenstein meticulously constructed his monster from the best available parts, so too can you create your next top-performing ad by combining the best elements from various winning campaigns.

(Albeit from far less morbid building blocks.)

This top ad from women’s health brand Hers is a living example of this monstrously successful tactic.

Here’s a rundown of the anatomy:

• Opener: The “no in-person appointments” value prop scaled efficiently in a previous campaign and is used again here.

• Top thumbstoper: The opening shot has an exceptional 50% thumbstop rate. Transitioning from living room to virtual beach is an engaging visual hook and repurposed from another high-performer.

• Features call out: The one-two punch hook combo is followed by a features point-out that clearly shows the product & shares key info—a concept borrowed from other high-scaling client ads.

Shout out to the incredible Ready Set creative strategist Shannon Coast and her team behind this top-performer! 

Takeaway: Analyze your top-performers to isolate winning elements that can be combined into brand new ads. Then, wait for lightning to strike ⚡

That's all, folks!

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