Advertising Mental Models to STEAL.

Today’s guest needs ZERO introduction. It’s George Mack, aka The Ad Professor, one of my favorite follows across ALL channels.

Hundreds of thousands of followers, building ads for billion dollar brands, and 10 mental models that make great advertising, that’s what today’s email is giving you a sneak peek into.

(For the full suite of 10 mental models listen to the pod here.)

Soooo here’s what George had to say in his own liiiiiightly edited words.

1) The Triad of Great Advertising: 

“I’ve had a 10 year career in advertising. If I was to go back in time, and not have to go through all the wasted money and pain that I went through, what would I do? (TELL ME.)

The first thing I would do is actually understand what the three main components of advertising are, which I don’t think many people know.

It’s art, science and math. 

What you’ll tend to have happen across this little lens here, is the man with a hammer syndrome.

So the artist sees every problem like an art problem. The mathematician sees every problem like a math problem. And the scientist sees every problem like a science problem. 

Whereas actually, the best advertisers and advertising teams have a combination of an artist, scientist, and mathematician ON THEIR TEAM.

But having that frame to begin with of being able to see advertising through three different frames, is the biggest gap that took me ten years of wasted money to figure out.

2) The Art Side of Things: 

The art is the most obvious one which is what The Ad Professor produces all day long, which are beautiful visual ads.

Focusing on how to become a better artist as an advertiser, it’s a combination of taste, it’s understanding what the consumer wants to a level that sometimes you can’t quite test. 

(It’s also the combination of visual and then the copywriting paired with that visual.)

The biggest way I would say to become a better artist as an advertiser, is leaving as many ideas with your subconscious. 

We should always look at what ideas we’re leaving within our subconscious because we don’t do it enough.

Rather than trying to come up with ad ideas, sit still for 20 minutes brainstorming and leave that question open without checking your phone, let the mind wander and see where it goes. 

You’d be amazed at how few Marketers don’t do that (mhm I LOVE THIS).

They’re too busy looking at other Facebook ad libraries or trying to zone in immediately without getting any form of creative input. 

Letting everything go blank and seeing what happens from the subconscious is so damn important.

The next thing I would say on the artist side of things is collecting as many ads as possible. The famous line of “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is a prime example of this. Look at what other ads have worked previously, think how can you apply that today? 

You’re in SaaS, but there’s a cool consumer angle you’ve seen on your timeline, how can you transform it to your industry?

The art of transforming across mediums, time periods, and industries is often where you’re going to make great ads. 

3) The Bottleneck Analysis:

The next mental model relates to the math side of things, which is knowing how to do a bottleneck analysis. 

If you’ve never read the book The Goal, you need to read it now. The book essentially looks at advertising from a supply chain and logistics lens.

When people say their advertisements aren’t working, they need to get more specific than that. 

What part of the advertising isn’t working? 

Imagine your ads are like a giant factory of which advertising money comes in to increase return on ad spend at the other end. 

It’s about getting as specific as possible with your measurements. What is your cpm as a measurement? What is your cost per outbound click? What is your cost per landing page view? What is your conversion rate on that traffic? LTV? AOV?

Getting as granular as possible like a supply chain and then looking at your data at each step compared to the industry average.

Your industry average for the landing page view is 20% above, great that’s not the improvement area to fix. 

The bottleneck will be the thing that’s either highest up the stack or the furthest from the industry average so that’s how you begin to fix bottlenecks in advertising.

Whereas a lot of people will work on the thing that isn’t the bottleneck, they’ll be making more ad creative, but fundamentally their unit economics are broken. 

Or they will be trying to get their cost per click down, but their CPMs are horrific. So being able to analyze things from a bottleneck perspective is so damn important when you’re understanding the math of advertising.

4) How to Judge if an Ad is Going to Work:

To judge whether an ad is going to work or to identify an ad with the highest probability of working is by using the facial expression test. 

When you show somebody an ad, do their facial expression muscles change throughout?

If they do, it’s a good sign. If they don’t, it’s a bad sign.

It’s amazing how simple that is because it’s really hard to fake facial expressions. 

Constantly monitor your own facial expression while you’re watching your ads, or when you’re scrolling in your feed. 

When I see an incredible TV ad and my facial expressions change, I’m mindful of those facial muscles moving. 

All great ads cause emotion, and the only thing you can see when it really comes to emotion is facial expressions.

So constantly observing those as a proxy for whether ads are going to work or not has been such a hack for myself (I’m stealing this LOL). 

If I’m laughing, smiling immediately, my pupils are dilating, my mouth’s open, that’s a good sign. Then likewise, I’ll run that across other people as well. I’ll send them the ad while I’m with them and see their reactions. 

5) Thinking Backwards: 

The actual biggest mistake I’ve seen people make in advertising is building their product without thinking about the advertising distribution first. 

(Read that again.) 

The piece of advice I always give for new business ideas is to think about the advertisement to justify the business idea. Rather than having an elevator pitch, what does the advertisement look like? What does the number one advertisement look like for the product? 

If you can’t justify that, don’t start the product or don’t start the business.

You’d be amazed at how many people build the product and then realize that they need three times the unit economics on advertising for that type of product to be successful. 

Thinking about the advertising distribution first is important, it’s boring, but so few people do it, and the amount of dollars I’ve seen wasted because people haven’t done it is absolutely absurd.”