Hacker News Reader

Comment by ab_testing | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question but does anybody know what is Creative ? Is that a software or a generic term for a creative edge - like getting the right slogans and correct catch phrases to grab somebody's attention.

View on HN

The "creative" is, well, the creative part of an ad. It's the text, images, design, etc. It's the "sexy" part of marketing, compared with all the quantitative/analytic work like segmentation, user research, pricing, etc.

I somewhat disagree with the author that the creative is everything - unless you already have all the other aspects locked on and creative is the only place for you to improve

Ok I have another question. On social platforms like facebook, whenever the creatives are refreshed, the ad set is put back into a "learning phase", which we're told to avoid.

So what is the best way to iterate on new creatives without re-entering the learning phase?

Ab test say 20 creative in an adset and let Facebook find the best creative for you in a cbo. Once set it is set and best not to change the creative just launch a new ad set with the new creative. You can change it but not ideal or how you should run Facebook ads with a proper account structure to maintain data transparency. Also with Facebook algo suspending and disabling ad accounts like crazy swapping creative after approved looks very fishy and can trigger negativr signals.

It's the actual content of the ads. The images, video and sound created by an ad agency.

the literal ad itself e.g. picture, words, video, whatever the user sees.

Replace it with "ad".

No, replace it with "the content of the ad, the words and pictures".

The ad is the medium, the creative is the message.

No, surely the creative is the actual image (say) that carries the message. The creative is the bit people perceive with their senses, not the interpretation of that.

One designs a message: "people who drink $cola are fun" and then the creative to convey that message - such as an image showing someone smiling, nestling the product in their hands.

It is words also. "It's the real thing...", "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief...", "xxxx is on your side..."

"Creative", as a noun, in this context is a very specific term from the world of advertising (where I worked for a decade), which means both the copy and the image/video etc.

It's a shorthand term (think DSL) a bit like "code" in the world of developers, etc..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com