We asked the Pilothouse creative team about the biggest mistake brands make with their Facebook ad creative.
Their answer?
Being too brand-oriented in your ad creative.
Oftentimes marketers approach FB creative the same way they approach their organic social content.
Ads that are too “on-brand” can lead to overly-polished content that doesn’t perform.
In many cases, the ads that perform well would rarely be featured on your brand’s organic social feed.
You have to get scrappy.
Differentiate your paid from your organic content and recognize that they have different goals.
Nike is a perfect example. Check out their product-focused ads compared to their social feed:
Social feed:
Different goals require different content.
If you’re running conversion objective ads, Facebook doesn’t care about your brand or the lifestyle you’re trying to sell.
Facebook cares about finding the people most likely to buy your product.
Your creative needs to increase motivation or decrease friction.
If your content doesn’t do either of those things, it’s likely going to fail. 🥴
We’re not saying that strong branding is a redundancy. In fact, we’d stress the opposite. However a hyper-reliance on branding in DTC media buying won’t allow for scale.
We’re also not saying that your Facebook Ads have to be scrappy UGC and your organic has to be aesthetically pristine lifestyle images.
It isn’t a zero-sum game and scrappy isn’t synonymous with shitty. It’s possible to diversify your library in a branded way.
Hims is an excellent example of balancing branded and lifestyle aesthetics with scrappy UGC in their Facebook Ads library:
Bottom line: don’t put your brand in a box, and don’t be afraid to experiment and diversify your library.
