How to Iterate on Winning Ads: Write Great Copy With The Advanced Iteration

Moving on from foundations

So far in our journey we have talked about the creative hierarchy of needs, and how each level of success in creative strategy is predicated on success of the previous level.

We've reviewed the law pertaining to, and the practice of, copying others, and decided there are generally few protections afforded to direct response advertisers by way of stealing.

And in our last entry we talked about basic iterations, which are the foundations of every strong creative strategist – akin to a great musician's mastery of the notes and chords.

Ascending the pyramid

If basic iteration is learning the notes and the chords, advanced iteration is learning how to play melodies, and understanding how chord progression affects the feel of a song.

More concretely, in basic iteration we categorize and test every component of an ad to find our control elements. The advanced iteration is working with the flow and shape of things, changing the sequencing of the underlying elements in order to reframe our concepts and reach a new type of person.

The advanced iteration can work for a lot of elements in ads, such as visual sequencing, but it's particularly relevant to copywriting in video ads (so this particular article might not be super relevant for those that use a lot of statics).

In many ways effective copywriting for direct response video is analogous to traditional storytelling – there are foundational shapes of stories that click with the collective consciousness and unlock a desired end state. Archetypes such as the Hero's Journey, Creation Myths, and Flood Myths have pervaded storytelling for thousands of years, unlocking folks sense of purpose, belonging, and existence – and just like in storytelling, there tends to be a handful of archetypes that are perennially successful for ads, unlocking a willingness to buy.

When am I ready to start practicing the Advanced iteration?

You are ready to move on from the basic iteration when you have satisfied it's two core purposes:

1) To get a sense for all of the key levers and value propositions of your product
2) To generate a menu of successful creative elements to pull from for more advanced iteration.

The beauty of DR advertising is the immediate feedback loops. Things either work or they don't work, and the process of moving forward is trial by combat, with conversions as the ultimate judge.

As a result, you have satisfied the first requirement when you have integrated a few copy frameworks from the wild using the competitor comp and have successfully iterated out a few winners using basic iteration, as proven with data.

The generation of at least 3 or 4 clear value propositions, plus a few other copy elements, like various forms of social proof (testimonials, accolades, scientific facts, etc), are required to satisfy the second.

Lastly, you will have needed to breakdown your winners into your creative menu, to set-up your workflow for iterating at the next level.

This can be found in the workbook I have made for The Meta Game, here

Now that we have a few of the ingredients lined up, it's time to start cooking!

Laying out the shape of copy

Start by laying out the structure of all our current ads scripts, according to each element of copy.

Then analyze each of our scripts individually and see what larger blocks you can extract. These are the "meta-scripts" so to speak, which we can use as mental shortcuts in our scripting.

I've mentioned before that good creative strategy is kind of like playing with legos. You take a few blocks, and put them together to make larger structures. You throw a few structures together, and next thing you know you have a racecar.

But cooking is probably a better metaphor Every individual line of copy is a flavor and when combined in different ways make a new dish, even though are fundamentally the same stuff. In cooking we might see the four core flavors as salt, fat, acid and heat. In copywriting we have appeal to reason, social proof, story telling and education (there are others, but these are very critical). It's important to be able to have a sense for how a script is shaped, and how the addition of an ingredient can create a new taste. Try imagining what shapes are missing, and bring them into being, thus reaching a new audience.  

There are essentially three paths forward to making a new dish from these same ingredients:

1. Recombining known blocks together in new ways to make new scripts
2. Adding accents and syncopation by interspersing more connecting elements, with smaller blocks
3. Adding or recombining the underlying elements in new ways to create new blocks
   

Long blocks of the same theme (such as value proposition, or social proof) have a hypnotizing and rhythmic feel to them. They can pull and hypnotize an audience but they also have the ability to drop their attention. You can think of this consistent pulsing like the four-on-the-floor of the bass in electronic music.

Interspersing alternating elements with smaller connecting blocks has a jazz like feeling. You can feel the syncopation and the build of anticipation. Layering on longer, rhythmic blocks at the end can then resolve the chaos you've created and drive home a more profound feeling to the audience.

Let's take a look at how we might iterate on our first example (which is a combination of social proofing, an onboarding flow education, and then selling folks with an appeal to reason -- a mashup of all the typical, bread and butter elements of a long-form value oriented ad) in the more traditional, rhythmic feel.

An easy layup of an iteration is a flipping in the ordering of our blocks. We lead with our appeal to reason, and then reinforce with social proof, speaking to an audience that is primarily driven by logic, rather than emotion.

We can make this even more pointed, by simplifying our appeal to reason and removing all forms of social proof, resulting in a short form, logic based script.

A more syncopated feel to this would be to alternate between value propositions and social proof, like so

And then you might further iterate on this type of ad by introducing new blocks from other ads – for example, by re-inforcing the final value propositions with objection handling.

Driving it home

Once you've dictated the final shape of scripts you would like to pursue, it's time to drive it home by filling in the copy.

This step is kind of like madlibs for adults, matching items from our creative menu to the respective hooks, value propositions, testimonials, etc.

As always, the goal of iteration is to change as few of the elements as possible.

E.g., if an iteration was a simple restructuring of larger blocks, ideally you change very little about the underlying copy and just grabbing whole chunks of prior top performing scripts.

However, other changes, such as our example of syncopation, may break the context of the original ad. This requires adapting the copy to make the ad more contextually relevant, while trying to maintain the original key elements that made the ad work.

For instance, in our example of syncopated value props and social proof, I adapted "How men are treating ED with hims" to an oldie but a goodie hook, "3 reasons men treat ED with Hims".

Moving forward

We've laid down the basic foundations, and starting to build some serious infrastructure for scaling our deliverables by combining things into larger blocks. Moving into the next chapter, we're pulling ourselves up even higher to the next level of abstraction, by taking the birds eye view, and getting into the basics of concepting by working with mind mapping techniques.

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