B2B Ads that Don't Suck (with Shlomo Genchin, Unbore.com)

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the X5 community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website Optimizely. Humans, that's us, of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that each year week, so you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing again. I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5. That's Webflow.com/FOR/exit5. What's up, it's Dasha. Today, I got an amazing guest on the show. His name is Shlomo Genshin, and you might recognize him from your LinkedIn feed. I had been following Shlomo for years, leading up to this episode. He is one of the first profiles I send marketers when they join my marketing team because his breakdowns of what makes a B2B ad good are amazing. He runs a company called UnBore. He calls it the unofficial school for B2B ads. On the show today, we get into tactics for creating ads that are genuinely good and fun. Now we get into some nitty-gritty topics. How do you hire actors for ads if you're filming them in house? How to do all of this on a huge budget or a low budget. I walked away with a lot of great takeaways and I hope you do too. Enjoy the fun. How's it going? Thank you very much. It's great to be here and I'm doing well and you, Dasha. I'm doing great. I'm so excited to have you on. You are someone that I have followed on LinkedIn for a very long time and you know the little thing on LinkedIn where you can save people's posts and then like you can go back and see like a little swipe file of things you've saved. Yeah, absolutely. I would bet that like 30-40% of them are just you breaking down ads like what works about them and what doesn't work. So when I knew I'd be interviewing you, I was so so excited. Okay, let's get listeners kind of a preview. So you are the founder of UnBore.com. Tell us for people who don't know what is UnBore and what do you do. Yeah, so sometimes they call UnBore the the unofficial B2B ad school or creative be I don't know yet. Like basically an ad school for creative B2B ads and that's so that's one thing we do like we have this like educational parts with courses and different educational products newsletter and so on. But there is also the the actual part where I operate as a creative studio and I write and produce ads for boring B2B companies. What is your background like how did UnBore come about? You just got tired of seeing boring ads? I actually went to an ad school called Miami ad school but it's in Berlin. There are a lot of branches but I went to the one in Berlin and I wanted to become a carpenter and I went there and then like I started the whole like traditional ad agency journey being an intern then working for different brands and ad agencies and those super fun but at some point I started freelancing and I fun and I got a couple of gigs with tech companies and I really fell in love with that because it's funny because I call like those products boring B2B products but actually I found them way more interesting. All the cool features and the tech and it seems so interesting and it also felt a little bit like the Wild West right because if in the consumer space everything has been done already every kind of ad creative angle you know thing about like Koch Burger King like the big brands behind it's it's crazy how many agencies and creative people are working on those at the same time but then you think about other more like B2B and software companies and some of them don't even have a brand some of them never produced an actual creative ad and I thought wow this is such a big opportunity so I started trying those techniques that I learned in ad school working with some tech startups and I noticed that time after time we managed to all perform their previous ads using the creative techniques I learned working for ad agencies and I thought well it seems like there's something here and yeah and since then that's what I've been medicating most of my time right to yeah I love that I always tell my team when you're looking for inspiration you almost don't want to go to a B2B brand looking with the CPG brands are doing because I feel like that space is I mean B2B is competitive but CPG is so much more competitive right like you can have 20 30 50 brands of soda and really it's all the same so you need to get creative and stand out so yeah I think it's like one of the best places to get inspiration and I can see why it would be jarring coming from the agency world and B2B and being like whoa what is with all the sameness yeah absolutely yeah and actually like in the consumer world there's also a lot of sameness that's why I always say like when you're stealing ideas never steal from your neighbor because even if car companies all their ads look the same as well so it's not just our industry but every industry has this problem but definitely like B2B and tech because it's so focused on products and tech and features we're a little bit behind on that but I think we're catching up pretty quickly like right now what's happening with clay ramp like all those click up all those brands like it's it's insane and it's and it's great to see that because I feel like people are getting really excited about that and I feel like maybe in 10 years just random people will be wearing t-shirts of ramp or I don't know maybe those will be like real brands that people are proud to walk around wearing their merch or something so funny I have a friend who's like really into sass and for his birthday we had a competition where everyone had to acquire a piece of merch from different sass companies and gift them for his birthday so he like exclusively will wear other branded hoodies yeah the people that that work with you like the clients that you have talked to me a bit about like what type of company will come to you how big are they because I think the person listening wants to know like okay everything we're about to talk about today different techniques do they apply to me so give us a little bit of a taste like who are you working with yeah so personally I like to work with companies that are sort of around the one billion dollar valuation because these are the most interesting cases for me with the most like with the biggest opportunity to actually scale new creative ideas and invest in production and like do a lot of fun stuff but that doesn't mean that like I said when I started I started with actually working at a VC firm and starting with like small startups and that work for them as well so like creative techniques it doesn't matter it can be a very simple static category could be a hundred thousand dollar production it's still like underneath it's still the same creative inside it's still the same pain points and those techniques would work for absolutely any any tech company or any company at all but I personally like to focus on bigger companies just because I feel like they have more room to play obviously they're not like pinching pennies yeah no that makes sense okay well you mentioned creativity let's talk about where creativity actually comes from a lot of marketers I mean less so now with AI but there is nothing more daunting than a blank page so when you are starting to think about how to make your ads how do you get over the blank page problem yeah so I think the first thing that I want to do and people often say in the creative industry that if you don't have ideas it just means that you haven't done enough research so I always do two types of research one research is practical research and the other type of research is personal research so the practical part is understanding the features understanding the actual practical problems that my users have and how my product solves them and the personal research is more about understanding all the personal problems that my users have when they're not using the product so then I usually end up with this three column table and on the left side I have the practical problem, then in the middle I have the personal problem, and then on the right I have the solution, like the specific feature of the product that solves that. And once I have this table in front of my eyes, once I sort of mapped out all the main relatable pain points, then I start actually working and trying different creative frameworks and techniques. But usually by that point, by the time I already have that table, and by the way, just using AI to create it, like, of course, I use AI also to help me with that. But part of it is also reading, going to Reddit, but one tool that I really like to use is Reddit answers. It's Reddit's AI research tool. It's completely free, and it's great because I can dive into what my target audience is doing and thinking. And once I sort of look through that kind of material, then immediately I start getting different interesting ideas. So always research is the first step. Can we walk it through with a real example, maybe something that you've done in the past? I'm curious what topic you would research, and then does the practical have to match up with the personal, like walk me through that, make it real with an example. It doesn't even have to be an example from the past, but let's think we're making, and we're going to talk about one of my favorite clients, high ball of later, but let's actually even think that right now we're making an ad for HR software. So the first thing I would do is I would go to Reddit answers, so it's reddit.com/ensers, and it's completely free, and I would just type, what are some relatable, and I'm always looking for something that is actually relatable. Pain points and frustrations that HR managers are experiencing in their work. And I would hit enter and immediately like 30 seconds later, I would get a nice report with all the subreddits with all the relevant threads. Where I can already start looking and finding different directions. I would of course also speak to my client, and I would ask them to provide me with some gong, some call recordings, and different stuff like that that I can also use transcripts. So I can also see what their actual users are saying. These are the things that are also interesting. And from all of that, I would start listing all my favorite pain points. If it's a lot of material, I would definitely also use AI to summarize that. But sometimes I would just read through that to actually find those little insights, the language that my customers use, and that would help me get this personal part of the research. So this is for the HR software. Then I would also go, and I would try to understand the different features. Sometimes I would actually reverse engineering. So I would go through all of their features, everything that they want to promote, and they're selling, for example, different payroll features, or different things that help employees communicate between themselves, or anything that any charge manager would need. And then I would think, okay, so what is the problem? What is the practical problem that this feature is solving? And I would sort of think back trying to understand like, why did they even create that? What was the problem originally? What are we trying to do here? What would the user do if they didn't have that? And yeah, it's a whole like rabbit hole after a rabbit hole, but it looks exactly like that, you know, like it's, of course, like you can make it linear in a way, but also what makes it fun and creative is just like sort of floating between all those different sources and trying to find that those answers and insights, because you never know where the inspiration will be. Sometimes it's in a hidden somewhere in a core recording, sometimes it's on Reddit, and sometimes even Claude would give you some idea that I wouldn't think about by myself. The difference between a practical problem and a personal problem, what does that sound like? Yeah, so a practical problem would be, for example, if you're thinking about let's say payroll, which is part of HR software sometimes. So the practical problem would be the numbers don't match, right? For example, the numbers, I don't know, people got their salary late or something in the numbers was wrong, right? This is very practical. It's something that is actually happening in a real world, and it's a problem. And then the personal impact of it is that HR person is being yelled at, or people are blaming them, or they're not getting their promotion and so on, right? So like something that was actually practical and not very relevant, it wouldn't be very relevant if they were, I don't know, an AI agent is very relevant to a real person who's just trying to make it through through their job. And this is a big part of it, because after all B2B is just people at work, and we spend so many hours of our day at work, most people at this, the people we're selling to. And this is very important, because sometimes people think that B2B is boring, but it's actually such a big part of our lives. Like, we wake up, we go to work, and then we go back home, and we still think about work. And all of this is like great material for ads, and for interesting things, stories that we can tell. Do you know or have any data? Does the practical ad outperform the personal or vice versa? So they have to go together. I mean, I would never do them separate. One or the other. Yeah, I would never separate them and like do an ad that is just about, I don't know, like the benefit you're getting or just about the pain point without actually explaining how, why you practically need that. And I would probably never make an ad, maybe on a landing page, I would do that, but in an ad I would probably never just advertise different features or different problems without any personal context. So usually it's the combination of the two that works the best. What have you found is the biggest myth that marketers believe when it comes to where creative ideas come from? There are probably two myths. One is that like if you want to create something, you have to come up with something completely new. Like you need to sit like some sort of musician or an artist, and it just needs to wait for inspiration for them used to shine on you. So that's something that we don't have to do that. And actually we can do that as creative professionals because we have deadlines and we have goals and we need to deliver those ideas. So that's I guess one side of the scale. And then the other side of the scale is usually like the very number driven marketers who think that everything we only need to steal what's already working. We only need to go with the safest option. Like if this performed for our competitor, we just need to steal the sad and do the same thing. So I guess these are the two sides of the scale. And we're trying to be somewhere in the middle. We're trying to sometimes steal a little bit, steal some interesting ideas, but also make them ours. And we're trying to come up with something very unique, but also rely on frameworks that we can use time after time instead of just being stuck and thinking, yeah, like maybe I'm not creative. I think the saying is like steal like an artist. Yeah, exactly. Still like an artist. And part of stealing like an artist is, yeah, just like I said in the beginning, not stealing from your neighbors. That's the first thing. And the second thing is just stealing very specific elements, not stealing the whole piece, rather than going and saying, okay, I'm going to steal this entire ad. The camera angle, the script, everything, which a lot of companies do. But the smartest thing to do is to actually say, okay, like this hook is very interesting. Maybe I can take that and write a completely original script on top of that. Or this call direction is pretty cool. So maybe I can use that for my ad, but take the hook from another ad and sort of find something that would work, work together from a few different ads. So I think that's one of the most important things about stealing like an artist stealing small pieces from others and not the whole work. Totally. Yes. One resource I've loved for stealing like an artist. Have you heard of adfolio.design? Absolutely. Yeah. Andrea, the creator is, yeah, and her partner are good friends of mine. They're great. And yeah, they're fantastic. And it's one of my favorite collections. Every time I create an ad, I also want my ads to go there as well. It's like B2B Hall of Fame. Oh, that's the dream. Yeah, you know, you've done well when they pick it up. Exactly. For those who don't know what adfolio is, it's like a collection, a curated collection of good B2B SaaS ads. It's awesome. Do you have other examples of collections like that? Yeah, there is another great one. It's called blackcamel.agency. So it's actually an agency. And if you go to their website and then resources, they have this B2B video library. So the founder of this agency, like he also created, I think hundreds or maybe even more than a thousand different ads. And these are fantastic as well. These are more focused on video ads, but there's some very good stuff there. I didn't know about that one. I'm excited to check it out. Okay. Well, let's get in. You're going to share three techniques that marketers can take away immediately and apply to their businesses. Kick us off. What is the first technique? Let's do it. Yeah. So I think that even before that, I would say that the three most important elements of an effective B2B ad or any ad is to make it scroll stopping. That's the first thing is to make it relatable, which relates to the personal part that we just talked about and to make it clear to so people actually know what the messages. So these are the three most important principles and pillars that I'm basing my all my work on. And then all the techniques that I'm going to show you are also based on those things each technique in its own different way. So the first technique I want to show you today is world without and you're going to see it on screen right now. So in this technique, we're basically thinking about the world without our product. And we don't just want to think obviously most softer products. If they wouldn't exist, nothing would really change probably the sun would shine like every day and everything would be pretty much the same. But because we're marketers and because we want to make fun ads, we actually want to exaggerate that and we want to think what is the worst thing that can happen in a world without your product. So this is a great example of this technique. It's not even about software, but you can see that it's one of the most. famous ads on the internet ever, and it's very simple, right? They're just saying we're looking for a graphic designer. I don't even know who created that originally. But it's a great example of this sort of thinking, right? They don't have a graphic designer. And because of that, they had to make the ad by themselves. And because of that, they used paint. And because of that, this is how their billboard, this is what their billboard looks like. And this is a big problem. So we can do the same thinking process in B2B. So here is an example that I created for my client. And this is exactly how I thought about it. I started with your payroll software is outdated. And then I thought, this is technical and this is vague. And this is not very interesting. But I thought, and because of that, you keep making payroll errors. And because of that, you end up working on vacation. And because of that, you end up ways deep in the ocean fixing payroll errors. So this is already very personal and specific. And this is exactly how we use this technique. So we go from something that is technical and pretty generic to something that is personal, specific and sometimes even an interesting hook. So we said that the first principle was to make it scroll stopping. And this is exactly how we come up with those scroll stopping ideas, like the previous one or like one of my clients, best performing ads. And it goes like this. That's amazing. And it's done well for them. It's one of their best performing ads ever. Our thumb-stopperate specifically, we spoke about scroll stopping. It also brought leads and so on. But what we saw with this one is that the hook worked really well. In fact, 32 more percent better, percent better than their other ads. They're most than the average. And this was a really good thing. And a really good sign that that we actually did this world without process will because we thought about the most absurd situation. And yeah, and it performed pretty well for us. And by the way, when using this technique, it doesn't even have to be. This one specifically was done, I guess, for $100 with just AI. And we're going to talk about AI production versus not AI production. But this can also be done even more simply and quickly with just AI images, right? Almost every idea, like I said in the beginning, can be a static ad. And this is another ad that worked pretty well that I created for my client apps fire. So mobile attribution doesn't have to be frustrating, right? And it's a very simple idea of what's happening in that marketer's mind when the attribution is frustrating and how we all fill. So here as well, right? We have this combination of the practical problem, right? Mobile attribution is not accurate and it's frustrating. And the actual personal part where how we feel about that. And this is very simple, right? You don't need any budget to produce something like that. Anyone can do that. Any startup and you can start right away. The coolest thing about the AI piece to is before you would have to scroll. I remember scrolling so long, you have an idea and you're like, okay, like the thing that's going to make this ad really sing is I need this hyper specific photo of a cat kind of spilling coffee on a keyboard. I worked at a backups company and we would always have this idea of a cat messing up your whole, we did backups for Shopify store. So a cat walks across your keyboard and leads your Shopify store. Well, guess what? There's like no stock footage of a cat on a keyboard. It's so specific. But today that you're like one Gemini prompt away from creating these really hyper visual images, which it sounds like all of this is like, it's kind of like this exaggerated vision of the worst possible outcome. Exactly. Yeah. And that's all you need now. And I mean, if it's done well and if there's an idea behind it, that there's no reason for it's not to work. So better than other boring ads. So that's definitely a great place to start. And it's very simple. And yeah, low hanging fruit as they say, what's the next technique? Cool. So the next technique is visual analogy. And this one is, yeah, if in the first part we spoke about being scroll stopping, then here we also visual analogies. They help us make our ideas more clear. So you can see how windows here, for example, Microsoft, how they use this, they take this abstract concept right, this confusing concept because a lot of things in software are not just confusing. It's also sort of hard to show them because you can't actually show a product screenshot because a piece of software has thousands of different screenshots and screens and dashboards. So you take an abstract concept like software upgrades and updates. And you compare it to something visual and familiar that we all know, like an outdated haircut. So this combination together creates a really fun ad that both explains the message that you want to bring across and also makes people stop scrolling. So here's one example that I created again for my client high above using this technique. This is epic. Thank you. Yeah. And this was also one of our best performing ads. And we took this concept of email ping pong and those never ending ping pongs and compared it to actual ping pong. Use it as a visual analogy and sort of baked our message in. And this worked really well for us. Like one of the two great things here that worked really well was the cost per meal. So the views were at least 53% cheaper than other videos. So it meant that it was very easy for the platform to find people who would watch this video. And it was a great thing. And the second thing, which was even more interesting was the hold rate. So usually if you look at a graph of a video, usually in the beginning, you have the most fears. And then it sort of drops quite immediately after five seconds. But here it was pretty different. If people actually stayed and watched it, then usually they watched it almost until the end and there was 144% lift from average. And that was a pretty cool thing to see. And again, this is the power of a visual analogy because you can tell a story while promoting your product, while explaining it, while explaining the problem and so on. One question that comes to mind for me is when you have an ad that performs this while like we all know about ad fatigue, someone just gets tired of seeing the same ad. Does the lifespan of an ad increase if the ad is like genuinely really good? Can you run that ad longer? Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished, engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom. Just really the high quality. It just something feels different. Our webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team shout out to Marissa Maria. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right. And it really helps us run these exit five live sessions and put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there are attendees. And our team has been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration, built in promotional tools, live engagement features and post event follow up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's a difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out the webinar product and come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out. Check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. This episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled demand and agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. And I think that's because they understand the job. The founder, John came from this background knows what it's like. Knows the life of a marketing leader and they help high growth, cyber security and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO, modern paid advertising strategy and a dedicated go to market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for B to B tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focused on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI, how much you should be investing in demand, capture versus creation and how to invest up funnel effectively. Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out, compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Bye bye. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in general, I think that some ads are running for years. I'm noticing it both with my clients and with other companies. I mean, some winning guys just laterally run for years and they just keep working. And sometimes you can make new variations. You can re-edit them. You can do a lot of things. But if the thing is working, then yeah, there's no reason for it to stop working. It's like, of course, at some point, there will be changes. But usually it's like the company itself that decides to sort of change their ads and not necessarily even because the ad itself stopped working. And another thing about that is that you can also create different variations like we did here. So once you have a winning video ad, you can also create different static ads to go with that. And these can also, you can use them, for example, for retargeting or you can just use them to extend that concept to more channels and, yeah, and places. But this is also part of it. Like, even if you have, even if one ad was impacted by ad fatigue, then the other variations maybe would work for even longer. This is brilliant. Because if you're someone that doesn't have a winning video ad, you can use it to create when you watch the video ad and then you get retargeted, you're kind of like, oh, yeah, like, I remember that funny ping pong ad and it works. Even if you hadn't seen that ad, like the static ad just stands on its own. You don't need one or the other. It's not like a multi-series thing, but yeah, this is so, so smart. - Yeah, exactly. That's the game, like meeting them at different points and saying the same thing in a lot of different ways. It's a little bit like content where people are repurposing their content and one YouTube video can become a newsletter, one newsletter can become five LinkedIn posts. So it's pretty much the same with advertising. One video can become a few static ads and so on. And by the way, again, like these are well-produced ads and you know, we had actors and we had everything but the designers and so on. But it doesn't have to be expensive at all because here is a low-cost version and the low-cost version is actually memes. So this is, I created hundreds of ads for my client app slayer, but after all that time working together, this was actually the best performing ad that I created for them. It's so simple, but it works really well. It's just a simple meme. And if you think about it, memes are analogies too, right? It's just that instead of coming up with our own analogies like ping pong or something else or that guy with a haircut, we're just using different templates that are repeating. So this roller coaster thing, it's just a simple meme, simple analogy that worked really well and anyone can do that in literally five minutes. You just need to know the pain points of your customers and you're good to go. - Did you generate this image or was this an existing meme? - So here I worked with app slayer's designer and in the beginning I gave them sort of a combination of a few existing memes like there was something with a roller coaster. I don't even remember if it was a kid, I think, but it was like two people or adding a roller coaster, one of them is like super chill. The other one is screaming and I think like from there, the idea started and then together, I don't remember if they used AI or like a combination of stock footage because it was almost two years ago. So AI images weren't that good at the time. We still used a lot of Photoshop. Now it would be much easier and probably it would be even easier to make it even more realistic, but back at the time it worked really well and now you can literally create it with one prompt. - Have you found that AI is helpful at creating analogies? My personal experience is that all of the analogies are a little bit bland and I'm wondering if you have found a way to make them less bland or if you come up with them just from your own brain. - No, for sure you can do it better. I mean, yeah, I agree that's part of it that like it's still hard for AI to match those because analogies eventually, a big part of them, if you think about great writers, usually they come from your personal experience and that's when they work best. And AI still doesn't have that wide world experience and especially like it doesn't have this personal experience that you may have. So this is why when it comes to analogies, it's also very good to just look into your inner world and that's what I always tell my students that you don't even need your Wi-Fi right now. You can literally close your laptop, close your eyes and think of different experiences that remind you of that or that you could compare it to that and you'll find 100 ideas even faster and better than AI. But at the same time, yeah, of course. I mean, what I did is I trained a cloud skill on all my favorite analogie ads. So I fed it all my favorite analogies with some of my favorite analogie ads and stuff from different places. And then now it's gotten a little bit better. So now when I need an analogy, I also use that sometimes when I'm stuck. And yeah, and the ideas are not bad. It's still like some of them are still like repeating. You'll see because I do a lot of workshops. So I see that how the ideas are always repeating like running a marathon in flip flops and the end there are few ideas that always repeat. But once you develop that skill, both that human skill and that cloud skill, sometimes you get pretty cool stuff and sometimes I get pretty cool stuff that I didn't expect or like I didn't come up with myself. - We always joke at, I'm the VV marketing at this company and we always joke that when cloud goes down, the day is just like over because there's nothing else you could do. So what I'll be doing now instead is closing my laptop and thinking what are some analogies that from my personal experience would be relevant for the world of R and user. This is great. - Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. They were just open chats you could be. That's a hundred off. - Right, exactly, yes. (laughing) - All right, should we do Taptic 3? - Oh yes, let's do it. So far, we had scroll stopping, we had clear and now the third one is relatable. And for relatable, we're going to use personification. And this is one of my favorite techniques because it's much easier to relate to people than products, tech companies, or software, or anything like that. And when we can compare our product or its enemy or the thing, it's fighting against to a real human being, then we can get some very interesting stories. So the most classic example that everyone knows is this Mac versus PC ad. It's this ad from, I think, 2004 or 2006 that Apple created where it was very simple. Like one guy was like, yeah, hi, I'm Mac and the other guy was like boring and wearing this suit and he was like, hi, I'm PC. And he was, yeah, just a simple idea to show that Mac is much cooler and much more advanced and smooth and so on. So I did the same thing and I used this technique for high-bob. And I basically compared high-bob as I showed it as the cool and popular character and compared it to legacy HR software. And you can notice that I didn't even said the name of that HR software. First of all, because that's not the kind of marketing I want to do. And second, because probably our users and our potential users, they're using a lot of different variations of legacy HR software, just using spreadsheets. So I didn't even need to be specific with that. I could just use this broad category. And I created this ad that actually from even more than the previous two of this was our best performer, probably the best performing ad that I ever created for them. - I love it. (laughs) - Thanks, Dasha, yeah. And here the process is super simple, right? So the first thing you want to do is pick an enemy. You want to decide if, in Apple's case, it was BC, in our case, it was legacy HR software. Then in the second step, you want to build a character. So you want to decide like, okay, my product maybe would be the cool and popular one and the smart one and the other character would be boring or unreliable or whatever you want to make them. And then the third step is actually putting them in a situation in different scenarios. So that's where it gets interesting because if we just, I mean, in the original Apple ad, they just stood there, they just stood there, but there was two years ago. So the whole concept of personification was pretty new. But now we need to make it even more interesting and put them in different situations. So in this case, I wanted to, what I, as a kid, I used to watch a lot of those like Turkish soap operas with my grandma. And I still always remember those like cheesy dialogues and all those like funny conversations that they used to have when breakups and so on. So like, I wanted to use this one, but it could be basically any situation. It could be a podcast. What would your product do on a podcast? It could be a date. It could be basically anything as long as it's an interesting story and there is an actual conflict in it. And yeah, and this one was also great. Big lift in conversions. 80% cheaper leads, 50% cheaper views. So yeah, again, one of our best performing ads ever. - This is awesome. Do I need to get paid actors if I wanna do this well? - Yeah, I think it's the best option. I mean, actors comparing to marketing budget actors are not that expensive. And yeah, and a lot of actors are looking for work. So there are a lot of Facebook groups with actors and a lot of platforms where you can hire them. So I think almost every company, I know that it's doing well both on social and with paid ads they're working with actors, even if they're using some AI for static ads, even if they're using a UGC with real users or like a lot of, they have a lot of different assets in their mix, but for their more high end ads, where they actually want to tell interesting stories, they're using actors. And I think it's fun and it's basically the most creative and real way to bring truly fun ideas to life. - Cool, what is an example of what one of these Facebook groups would be called? I imagine it's like a local Austin or like New York. How do you find one of these groups? - Yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, actors, if it's, yeah. So if you're in Europe, then it would be English-speaking actors in Berlin or in the Paris and so on. If you're in the US, UK and Canada and so on, then it would be just actors looking for gigs, extras, and so on. So like you look and do all those groups and it could be in a lot of places. Like once you start digging into their world, you speak to one actor, you ask them where they hang out, and all of a sudden you have a list of like 100 actors you can work with, and it gets pretty fun because actors are awesome, they're true artists, and when you bring them on board, they make your ideas even better. I mean, these actors were great. And when I wrote this script, like I couldn't even think that they would, I mean, they added their own art into it, and it was great. - That's awesome. We did this personification tactic at the company where I'm working now, and we didn't hire actors. So hot tape, we didn't hire actors. Instead, I lead marketing and the BDR team sits on the marketing team. And so I said, okay, on, I don't know, Tuesday, you're taking the day off, you're coming into the office and we're doing a shoot. We paid a videographer to come in and set up, we gave them scripts, which were written by our team. him with the use of AI, we did the personification. We turned our product into a person as if the product had come to life. We put him into a t-shirt with our little logo on it in a hat so that he was more or less identifiable. Yeah. And we did it all in-house minus the videographer. Yeah. And I'm always blown away by the talent that can exist at your company without hiring the actors. Granted, we are not. We really don't have, I know, we don't have high-bobbs marketing budget. And it worked out well to the point work. Some of our customers were asking if they can use the ads to announce that product to their teams. Love it. So we ended up using them for ads and our customers. We're like, give those to us. We want to use them. So I can definitely say that it works. I totally agree. I mean, I hadn't even, because I'm always doing that as an external studio, then I never even suggest that option. So I didn't think about that, but you're actually, it's so true. I mean, when people from your own team can do that, that's even better, because it's cheaper and you don't have to deal with royalties and payments and all of that. It makes things way easier. And I think that we have a lot of great examples like Duolingo, probably one of the first ones where we're like, the employees are doing everything and it's all in-house or clearly where they're making their own content and videos. So it can definitely work. I mean, most marketers I know are shy and they don't even, they don't really want to be in front of the camera. But if you have those kind of people on your team who want to do that, that's perfect. I think another company is seeing fisi, I think they're doing those like corporate training videos. And I'm pretty sure I love their ads. They're awesome. I never spoke to them, but they do a lot of really creative stuff. I highly recommend it. And I think they actually work their own. It's just a couple of people and I think they're the marketing department. They're doing a great job. So for smaller companies, I think your method is way better. It's so much cheaper too. And it allows you to test it. I mean, like if it works with free actors, you can always kind of scale up. Absolutely. Alright, I think you've got another example for us here. Yeah, just one more thing that I wanted to show for each one of those I also always want to show the low cost version. So yeah, so just like you suggested, could be people from your office or even simpler, could be just pure copy. You can use pre-signification and just write the things. This is a headline from Ram that I really like, receipts now organized themselves. And this is super simple, right? So you also give those receipts sort of a human trait, right? Like they do it themselves. And you can see those. A lot of examples like these like from Oreo, for example, milk's favorite cookie and so on. So like even in your taglines and even in your copy, which you don't need any budget to write copy, it's just words. And you can also use that technique to make things a little bit more interesting and exciting. I love it. What if you're working at a company that is maybe marketing to a more sophisticated senior audience and you have this fun idea, but you're worried that your CEO is going to look at it and think, look, we're not the fun company like this isn't going to work for us. I'm sure you this has come up with your clients. The marketers are like, hell yeah, but there's some fear around going to present it to leadership. But do you recommend how do you coach people when that's a situation? That happens all the time. And I guess this is one of the biggest problems because there's so many great ideas that just die in the meeting room because yeah, for a lot of different reasons. So I think that first of all, even before like there are a lot of methods to make to sort of encourage stakeholders to buy into our weird ideas. But even before that, I think that one of the most important things is to actually think about the side, think about the perspective of the CEO or the executive that is against that, right? Because it's always easy to be the one pitching the ideas. But once you're on the client side and I've experienced that many times, then you all have a sudden you see that, okay, it's not that easy to commit to all your budget to a crazy idea like that because so much is at stake like you can lose your job. You can lose your that important budget and it's scary. But the first thing we need to do as creatives is to sort of be aware of that and not just be like, yeah, the client is so boring, they never approve our ideas. No, wait a second, like they have a lot of responsibility. So we need to think about that and we need to understand their perspective first. And only then we can start and think how we can actually convince them and out to this part. So there are a few things. The first thing is to start small. If you come all of a sudden, you come with a big brand campaign, yeah, let's buy 100 billboards in New York and do this in same thing, then of course they'll probably say no. But if you say, okay, look, I created this one meme. Let's add it into our LinkedIn ad mix. Just for one week and see what happens if that works. And usually it would work in one way or another whether it's clicks or even leads even better, although those things can take time sometimes. But even if you see a little spike and you see that something is working, then usually they would ask for more or at least at this point, you already have a case. You can already say, okay, I have a way to justify and there is positive ROI on that. And all of a sudden it gets way easier because you have that proof. So that's the first thing to start small. The second thing is to actually own the process and to end, right? Because it's very easy to just go and suggest ideas like that's let's do this, that's that. But the hardest part is to actually follow through and make that thing happen to like you said, like to take those two team members and book a whole day for them to and bring a videographer and actually say like, okay, you know what, like you have enough in your play, then you won't have to worry about that thing. I'm going to take care of it and to end. I'm going to produce it and I'm going to give you the final results. And often this is the biggest problem, right? Because when people hear a cool idea, it's not even like they don't like it. They do like it, but they think about all the implications like we'll need to do so many things and it's all the money, all the logistics time and so on. So if you say, yeah, I already know how much it's going to cost. I already spoke to a videographer, like I have everything figured out. Here's the project. You just need to say, yeah, just green light it. Then it's way easier for executives to say, yeah, sure. Just do it. I see that you've done your homework. It's not just like some crazy idea that you want to do all of a sudden. We call it a low friction ask, like making it as easy as possible to say yes to you. Love it. Yeah, love it. Still that. A low friction ask. I think it comes from sales, but it's the same thing in just any executive comms, like execs are really busy. And so you want to eliminate the decision fatigue as much as possible. And like if you can say, like, look, all you have to do is say, yes, here's everything I'm going to do. Here's the cost. I've already done this. Then you de-risk saying yes to you. Okay. Let's talk about AI. Everyone wants to know about AI. Your personal philosophy around using AI in the process, we've touched on this a little bit. Sounds like you're using it. What should AI do? What should an AI do? How much are you outsourcing AI in your agency talking about that? I'm a big believer that advertising should follow culture and not the other way around. Because I think that a lot of marketers say that advertising should create and lead culture. But usually that's not the situation. Usually there are musicians, filmmakers, artists like their, I don't know, fashion icons, influencers. Those people are actually setting the tone on what's cool and on what's interesting and on what we should be paying attention to, like like it or not, that's the situation. Usually especially not a tech company would decide that, I mean, I mean, sometimes some products, but not their marketing department would decide what is the next cool thing. And that's why I really believe that advertising should fit culture and adjust itself to that. So I mean, unless people are going to the cinema to watch an AI movie, then I think that ads shouldn't be completely AI. I mean, there are a lot of cool things that you can do with AI and I also use that for your transitions, effects, shots that I wouldn't be able to take otherwise because they would cost tens of, or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But overall, I'm not a believer in those ads that are obviously AI because they look cheap. You didn't actually care enough to ask one of your team members to stand in front of the camera and do that or to hire an actor from a Facebook group or to actually do this little effort of showing that, yeah, there are humans behind this company. And you'll see that even the most AI driven companies like starting from an entropic and open AI and Hicksfield and all of those, like they all use humans for their marketing. And they all sometimes shoot their ads literally like on film cameras. So I think that if they do that, then I think that everyone else should follow that as well. And that's what I'm trying to do as well. Like you've seen in those two less ads, I always try to make this production. It looks as realistic as possible. And I think that maybe in a year, my answer would be different. If AI would get so good that you would literally be impossible to tell the difference, then maybe they would be different and a lot of the productions would become fully AI because there wouldn't be any reason to shoot on a real camera. But maybe even then there will be other ways to show that you're actually human and you're actually authentic. So I don't know what's going to happen. But for now, I'm speaking to real actors, real production. This is what's been working well for me. I like that. I think there's a lot of opportunity for marketers to stand up and stand out in a world of AI Slop. There is one AI ad that I did like. I will say, I don't know if you saw Fibler had an AI ad. I think it was end-to-end AI-generated video. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, the one with the slap, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good. and it's good is because they clearly went like it's not a one shot video that was gendered with AI. I feel like that's something that took many people multiple hours. It had a real human in the loop scripting it. They almost did everything with their brain involved minus the maybe video generation piece. Definitely, definitely. And I honestly think that it would work even better if it were real actors. I think it would be even cooler for sure. But as long as you have, you definitely had all the elements there, right? It was clear. You understood the offer. It was scroll stopping because the collars were all interesting. There was this like cool story happening. And it was relatable because every marketer has been in that situation where you trying to justify your marketing spend and you can't and fibler solves that. So definitely, it had all the elements. I think that if it were a real production, you'd first be way more expensive, but maybe more effective and cool. But I think it was great. And I remember I read that they had great results. So again, are you with that? Speaking of expensive, talk to me about budget. If you have kind of a marketing team of one or two people, no budget, what is the highest leverage move you can do to have fun ads with kind of no budget? I think stick to static ads. This is the simplest thing you can do. Because even AI video, just like you said, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. If you want to do it well, just like you said, like you still need to script it, you still need to edit it well. So it's not like a solution that you can just like say, yeah, like AI will just do our video ads. So I think that static ads and memes are an amazing option. Like I've seen so many companies that scaled their whole company and their whole ad program just with memes and static ads and some UGC ads from real users and founder led ads. So all of those things are very cheap. It's just plain text and some AI generated or stock images or just simple images that you can treat yourself. But I think these are always the best options. I think it's always better to do something well and to make something that there's thought behind it and it's interesting and it's fun and it's relatable. Then trying to make videos and trying to make asses that you can't actually afford and make them look cheap. I think that a good static ad or even an authentic screenshot of the testimonial is much better than a poorly made AI ad. That's awesome. Sweet. Shlomo, that brings us to the end of the pod. Thank you for walking us through the three things that every ad should have and the three techniques to get fun ads for people that want to find you what is the best place to find you on the internet. I'm on LinkedIn, Shlomo Genshin and you'll probably also see my weird name in the description of this podcast and also on board.com. That's my website newsletter and you can find all my a bunch of free material there as well. All right, that's the pod. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you very much. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating and a review, go check it out right now on our website exit five.com. 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