HelloFresh thinks like a TikToker to make creative social media ad campaigns

Advertisers face a critical challenge when it comes to planning and generating effective campaigns: Over a third (38%) of marketers said personalizing ad creative so that it’s native to a specific platform is difficult, according to Smartly.io’s annual digital advertising trends report.

Dovas Zakas, general manager of EveryPlate at HelloFresh, sees his own teams’ experiences reflected in that figure.

To cook up platform-specific inspiration, Zakas and his colleagues slid into each others’ DMs; HelloFresh’s teams set up internal group chats on each social platform to share content and ads that they liked and wanted to reproduce.

“Don’t create ads, create TikToks,” Zakas said during a recent Insider Intelligence webinar.

“We took [that] to heart. Now we think about the consumer. We think about ourselves as users when we go through the content in our downtime,” he said. “We think about what we would like to see and what would make us pay attention to the ad and want to learn more.”

Creating trendy, user-generated campaigns in-house had been time-consuming. But an EveryPlate campaign that was developed in about 30 minutes with zero production budget through HelloFresh’s new creative approach has become an “ad anomaly,” and the brand’s top-earning ad for over a year. In 2022, TikTok awarded EveryPlate with the “Top Performing Creative” award to acknowledge that the campaign exceeded 100 million impressions and resulted in over 4,000 conversions.

Here are Zakas’ tips to make a “science out of what makes [an ad] tick”:

1. Content inspiration can come from anywhere.
2. Don’t rely on one data source, and optimize your data in real time to push out the best-performing ads as fast as possible.
3. Put some of your social budget aside for testing, because ad performance is unpredictable.
4. Get creative with your content by producing three to five iterations with different hooks, music, text overlays, and other elements.
5. Automation can give teams their time back for creativity, replacing tasks that were previously done manually, like testing, developing iterations, and ad buys.

Watch the full webinar.

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