I've seen a lot of Facebook Ads. No, listen: A LOT. Of. Ads. I'm dreaming in Facebook Ads. I have reaction buttons at the bottom of my field of sight in my dreams and a never-ending comment section. THAT'S how many ads I've seen.
Naturally I should know what works - and not. But it's still pretty difficult to know, to be honest. But a couple of days ago, we struck gold.
My colleague Emma was sitting in Ads Manager creating new ads for our Facebook Automation Tool that we want people to sign up for a trial for (since it's an incredible tool 🤓).
She got a great idea for an ad. Some months earlier - we had recorded a pretty fun company video featuring a hologram Elon Musk and a lot of other crazy stuff (watch it here, if you're curious).
In one part of this company video, Anton (Client Success Manager at Zalster, but also incredible in front of the camera), is playing Morpheus from Matrix - holding a red and a blue pill. In this video, he's asking the viewer if they want to...
...take the blue pill. The story ends; you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.
or
...take the red pill. You stay in wonderland and I'll show you how high the ROAS goes.
So a pretty clever marketing-take on this infamous quote from Matrix.
Emma created an ad for this with the slightly new "poll" feature with a red emoji as one option and a blue pill as another option.
The ad went live. And boom.
Reactions, shares and comments started flooding in.
I mean, these are the kind of comments you want for an ad:
I guess you're curious to see what the ad looks like? Click here to see it in a preview. As you can see - a LOT of engagement.
And - it generates a lot of conversions for us, which is ultimately the goal.
But why? And how can you learn from this? That's next step.
So why did this ad work?
First of all, you have to remember that the audience for our ads is - marketers.
It's a difficult audience to attract, since they're on the other side of this as well.
But marketers are of course also regular people. And people hate boring ads. Especially, if you're trying to get them to do something.
Building brand is easier. That's just spending a lot of money towards an audience with an ad that gives the right message and brand affinity. But getting people to be curious about your product, read about it, consider to try it - and then ending up becoming customers. That's difficult.
So, using humour is a great way to break the barrier. And in our case, we used a reference almost everyone knows (Matrix). People know the character Morpheus and this scene. Now, they are Neo - and they have to make the choice.
It's not harder than that.
What you should do now:
- Watch your own Facebook ads and ask yourself: "Would I care about this? Would I engage with this ad if I saw it and had NO idea about my brand?" 🧐
- Since the answer probably is "no" on that question (if you're honest to yourself) - ask yourself how you can use humour and popular references to get people to stop scrolling. 💡
- Sign up for a trial for our automation tool to become an even better marketer (and get more of these nuggets from us). 😍
