💎 Growth Gems #128 - Creatives and Paid UA
Gems from Aazar Shad (Consultant & Founder at The Performers) and Marco Lange (CEO at Creative Factory) in Creative Testing Strategy Masterclass in 2025
Hi, fellow growth practitioner!
This week, I’m bringing you insights on Creatives for Paid UA.
I hope these gems will be valuable!
🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
I’ve been going down a creative strategy rabbit hole and I’ve found a lot of value in Aazar Shad’s videos (also Manson Chen’s videos).
I’m sharing insights from one of them this week. I particularly liked the “messaging test” approach and using customer research as input.
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💎 Have a creative testing campaign where you can have multiple ad sets. Each ad set should be used to test a specific concept or hypothesis.
(02:55) by Aazar
💎 Look at the past winners which were previously turned off and relaunch those into a single or two ad sets and see if it's worth re-running them.
(03:28) by Marco
💎 Go through your Meta ads' comments and try to come up with a UGC mashup based on them. Look at what people are commenting and used that for your creative angle.
(03:48) by Marco
Aazar shared that this also helps you understand what people’s objections are and enables you to address these objections in a creative. You can also leverage customer reviews and Reddit (he mentioned the giga brain).
💎 First, you need to validate messaging.
Come up with headlines in different categories: general, testimonial, pain-point, desired-based, loss aversion, selfish unspoken desires.
Test all of these headlines on a few different static ad formats so you can understand what works.
(06:12) by Aazar
You can start with multiple headlines on 1 creative format if you’re confident in the format already.
Once you have your winning headlines with your initial formats, you expand to other creative formats.
This is a similar approach to what Hannah Parvaz advocates (if you want the full deck, you can get it in the welcome email of her new Substack newsletter).
What’s not shown above is that the very first step is “Talk to customers and develop 8-10 clear themes to test”.
💎 Creative testing allows you to find new pockets of people on Meta so you can scale. Testing multiple headlines with multiple formats gives Meta the ability to find these new pockets.
(11:50) by Marco
💎 Don't start with video without knowing what's working first. Start by figuring out what messaging works via statics before moving to video, because video is more expensive to produce.
(16:10) by Aazar
It’s true that video tends to be more complex, but I’d be more nuanced than that: if you already have UGC videos/footage that you know performs well, you can use that to do your messaging tests.
Plus, there are video formats that are really straightforward (like these “text walls” shared in Growth Gems #126) while some statics can actually require a designer.
So don’t let that stop you!
💎 Leverage jobs to be done interview to figure out motivation, triggers, deciding factors, USPS, etc. Use this as input as well along with customer reviews (e.g., TrustPilot) to generate ad concepts.
(18:11) by Aazar
Biggest low-hanging fruit I’ve seen in terms of creative strategy? Being satisfied with having found a creative win and not iterating on it like crazy.
💎 Founders and people in a team that are close to the customers are a gold mine because they have a lot of insights. Interview them to get more creative ideas.
(19:10) by Aazar
This can help you prioritizing which “messaging buckets” to focus on first.
💎 When testing, sometimes a creative is not going to be an immediate winner. Use leading indicators to understand if there's potential, particularly for purchase campaigns : cost per click, cost per unique landing page view, cost per initiate checkout (or cost per email signup).
(26:50) by Aazar
Marco rightfully mentioned the hook rate doesn’t matter if your CPA is shit…
I recommend you identify the patterns of other metrics for creatives you know are a winner. Then keep an eye out for good performance for these leading/proxy metrics whenever you’re testing new creatives.
💎 Meta metrics like "Impression to post engagements rate", "Impressions to 3-second video play", and "Video plays to links click rate" are all early indicators to figure out if the ad might be a winner.
(28:38)
Something else worth having: a ready-to-go brief/doc for agencies and freelancers that contains product/brand info, creative wins & learnings, user research (or input to user research like reviews and comments).
💎 There are 2 stages to creative iteration on a winning ad:
Stage 1: take the exact same creative and make minor changes to it like changing the headline, or show another bestseller product
Stage 2: apply the psychological concept to a different format. Example for watch bands: go from a "Us vs. Them" format and re-use it in a “review “ad.
(28:38) by Marco
💎 A no-brainer iteration for videos is to give the exact script from the winning ad to another creator (w/ same demographics, similar personality) and have them redo it.
(32:04) by Aazar
I’ve also seen this fail multiple times, where it was impossible to create another winner even when trying to be as close to the original ad as possible. But it’s worth a try!
💎 Not giving the creatives enough time to spend is a common mistake: a lot of people turn a creative off after 2-3 days.
(35:05) by Marco
💎 Do comment grooming on your ads by:
Cleaning out negative comments
Replying to positive comments
(35:22) by Marco
Guess what tool ALSO allows you to easily go through your Meta comments? AdManage. Get a demo here (and a discount if you move forward).
💎 Don't only focus on iterating on your winning ads and never testing anything new. 80% of your creatives should not be on the same concept.
(35:36) by Marco
💎 Common mistakes:
Not doing creative strategy
Not learning enough from creatives (tracking which creatives won and why)
Not enough people in the team knowing the ads that you're running
Being limited in creativity
(36:17) by Aazar
Regarding creativity, Aazar shared that one of his favorite newsletter is The Creative Marketer and mention this edition in particular on brainstorming creative headlines.
💎 Dynamic ads ("Flexible") can work but it's very hard to know what's working or not. If you use it, group by ad sets with ads that have similar concepts to at least get some directional idea of what performs.
(41:45) by Marco
See you next time.
Stay curious!
— Sylvain
Chief Insights Miner at Growth Gems ⛏️
(Fractional) Head of Growth at Reading.com
Growth Consultant/Advisor for high-potential subscription apps (hit reply if you want to chat - bonus if you’re in Education, Meditation & Cooking categories)
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