Static Ads Ultimate Guide | The Easiest Ads to Scale FAST

0:00Most statics are either overdesigned or over researched. But the best brands are using them as a weapon to slash their CPA. They're testing new angles rapidly because of static ads and they're able to scale them quickly when they find a winner. And let me tell you the difference. It's systems. I'm Fraser. I'm co-founder here at Fraggle and we make ad creative for some of your favorite DTOC brands. Aloha, Leaf Shave, The Black Stuff, Chomps, just to name a couple. And from someone that has personally designed and researched and created static ads that have helped clients scale by millions of dollars over the past seven years of working in

0:38this industry, I can tell you I know how to do this. Today, we're going to cover everything from copywriting to design to research to show you how to make the perfect static ad. And the best part is I'm going to show you every single process with performance in mind because that is what matters. And if you want any type of ad creative for your DTOC brand, then make sure you check the link down in the description. Just visit fraggle.com and you can apply to work with us. Now, let's jump straight into it, shall we? So, the first part, any kind of ad creative, not necessarily just static ads, is deep research. You

1:09need a firm understanding of who the brand is selling to, what the product is, and why people even care about it. Because without that, then you're just kind of shooting in the dark. So, we're going to be using one of our clients as an example leaf shave. There's a couple of things that we can do to do our research, but the first thing I like to do is literally just to visit their website. It's often the best place to start and you get a good idea of what

1:30the brand does and the visual identity. So, just by first looks on their website, if we didn't know anything about them, we can tell they're very brand conscious. They're very eco-conscious. They have an incredibly good-looking product and their whole thing is about giving you your best shave. Now, obviously, we've been working with Leaf Shave for a number of months now, and so I have a much deeper understanding of the brand than the average person would do coming into this account. However, we can use what we

1:58have here to start to gather some ideas. So, we can see that they have a number of different use cases. They have body shaving, face shaving, head shaving, fuzz shaving, a load of different products for different areas of the body. So, perhaps that's one angle that we can do. But the best place to start with research in my opinion is by using AI to help us. Deep research is probably one of the best things that you can use AI for because researching anything takes a long time. And if you can get AI to cut some of that time out for you, then you can use that for another part

2:27of the process. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to head over to Chat GBT and I'm going to get ChatGBT to write me a deep research prompt for leaf shave. Now I actually already have a prompt that I use for this. You can feel free to copy this. I'll put it in the description for you. But essentially what we're saying here, I want you to write me a prompt for deep research that will help me find out more about the customers of my client's product. Think about every possibility or reason why someone would buy or wouldn't buy. Who should we be targeting? Their pain

2:54points, how do they feel after their purchase, etc. The client is called, and then we just need to put in the brand here, Leaf Shave, and their website is There we go. For context, we are a creative performance agency creating ads for shave. Okay. And now I'm asking it to deliver this in plain text. So what I'm doing here is I'm asking chat GPT to write a prompt for itself specifically for their deep research tool. Okay. So then I just click go and it's going to

3:22write me a prompt pretty quickly. Okay. So now all I need to do is copy this prompt into a brand new tab. Okay. Okay. So, we'll wait for this to write and then we'll literally just copy and paste it in and we'll make sure that we're using deep research. So, let's copy this. Let's go and open a new chat. Let's pop it in here. Let's make sure that we remove any of this information here. Um, we'll go to tools here. We'll go to deep research. And then we literally just click go. Now, this is going to take a little bit longer than the usual prompt. The reason for that is

3:52because it actually does deep research. It might ask some qualifying questions like this. Are you looking to insert primary on the US customers? So, I'm going to answer those. uh US to look at DTOC only. And I'm just going to let it go for it. And now it's going to take about 15 minutes or so to start to research. Now, just to save some time,

4:12I've pulled up one that I did earlier. And this is what you should get out of it. It's going to be a huge document here which is telling you exactly why people buy Leaf Shave and why the product is so good. So what you can do, you can either copy and paste this into a Google doc if you want or you can literally you can just download the document yourself. So that is what I'm going to do. I'm going to download that as a PDF. Done. We now have a huge basis of research for our product. Now you can just leave it at that if you want or you

4:43can go and do some more manual research. I'm talking about looking at Reddit, Amazon reviews, at customer reviews. All this kind of stuff can really help you get a good picture of why the brand is successful and why people are buying. One of my favorite new tools is actually Reddit answers. So this is a free AIdriven tool in Reddit and you can basically ask it anything you want and it will comb through Reddit and it will find relevant stuff. So for example

5:07here, why do people like leaf shave? Okay, I'm just going to search that. It's going to look through Reddit and it's now going to come back and it's going to give me a couple of lines and then link to a subreddit where the post actually is. So, the pros of Leaf Shave, the multi-blade system, Leaf Shaves uses three blades, which many find attractive for a clo shave, the pivot head, pivoting head is a significant feature, making it easier. Now, where the real value comes in with Reddit answers is that you can go back to the original subreddit in the original post and you can start to have a look at it. So,

5:37sustainability, let's say, let's click on that and it's going to give us a breakdown. Was thinking about getting the Leaf Razor. Uh they go on to you know to basically ask what you know if they should buy it and then there is like a full comment here about why someone bought it. I bought the Leaf in 20120. I still love it. I'm so impressed by it. It gives you like real customer language of why people are buying this away from just reviews because if we mentioned in previous videos reviews are sometimes a little bit biased because they're either really good or they're really bad because people only leave

6:05reviews on the company's website when they really love the product or they really hate the product. And sometimes the brands remove the really bad ones. So you're kind of left with only positive things. But when you come to Reddit directly, you can really hear why people love or hate the product. And even if they hate it, that doesn't mean that you should just disregard this research. This is really great because it could be things that you could address within ads to help push potential dubious customers over the edge of purchasing. Before we go any further in the video, make sure that you hit subscribe and make sure you hit like

6:35and leave a comment. It really helps us gain some inspiration of what videos to make next and lets us know that we're doing the right thing. Back to the video. So, once we have a firm idea of the actual product and the brand, we've done our research there. Now, we should probably have a look at the niche in general. I find the best way to do this is by using any kind of like ad searching tool. I use foreplay, but there's a ton of other tools out there that do very similar things. So, within foreplay, I normally end up in the discovery feed. This is essentially just

7:02like a live feed of what everyone is saving on the platform. And you can filter it down. So I'm going to go here and I'm going to filter by niche. And for this, because we're using Leaf Shave, I'm going to see what fits. Probably health and wellness potentially. Tech. No, probably not. Let's go for health and wellness. Okay. So, what we can do here, we can just have a look through here. We can watch some videos. We can look at some statics. If we just want to look at statics, because obviously we're making some static ads here. We go to format and change that to statics. Now it's

7:29going to filter it all just by statics. Now we can also filter it by the longest running, the oldest, however you want it. You can change that. People like to use the longest running as a bit of an indicator for what is potentially the best performing. That isn't always the case cuz people just leave ads on regardless if they're only taking up a

7:48couple of pence a day or something. However, we're just going to have a look through and we're going to get an idea of what people are doing within the health and wellness niche. Now, I'm getting a lot of like supplements and stuff like that, not necessarily shaving ads. So, I'm going to niche this down a little bit further. I'm going to get rid of this tag and I'm literally just going to post in here shaving. Okay, and it's going to look for all keywords that have shaving in it. We can see now we're getting some more relevant ads coming through. So, hence shaving. This is one

8:13of their competitors, so it might be worth looking at them. Uh we've also got some hair removal stuff as well, just some uh light therapy stuff. So, we can see they're going quite hard on like the lot of headline style ads in here. We've got some us versus them. We've got some more like wink wink nudge nudge style ads here. A lot of female focus stuff on here as well. A lot of like text native content. So, this gives a good idea of what people are running and this might be able to guide us into what we should be making. But remember, if someone is looking for a new shaving product, the

8:47chances are they're getting targeted by all these brands anyway. So, the last thing we want to do is just make ads that look like our competitor's ads. So, what I suggest we do because we're going to be using this tool anyway is head over to Creative OS. I am one of the co-founders of this tool. Uh, and essentially it just gives you a lot of templates that you can then open in

9:04Figma or Canva and make static ads from. We're going to be using this later on to actually help us design some statics, but I'm also going to use it for a little bit of inspiration as well. So I can look through a lot of their templates that they have and I can get an idea like this this Harry's one that's kind of similar to what we see in the shaving people. That that could be a good one. This is a bit more highly branded. See what we're doing? We're just grabbing some inspiration of what we think could potentially work for the

9:28brand. You can take this even further. You can import reviews into chat GPT and you can get it to, you know, extract information that you can then further use. The research can go as far as you like. I would always suggest do as much research as you can do and load up like a Claude project or a Poppy AI project with as much research as you can do because as I always say the more context that you give these AI tools the better the outputs. Okay, so now we need to actually come up with some ideas for the static. So for this I think I'm going to

9:56use Poppy. Poppy is probably one of my go-to like AI tools currently. However, you can do a very similar thing within like Claude or ChatgBT or something like that. I just like the visual way that Poppy works. However, let's not forget that this is not a free tool. There is a link down below if you want to sign up for it. It's an affiliate link. However, Claude is free. So, if you want to use Claude, then you can do. But, we're just going to open a brand new board here and we're just going to start in Poppy. So, how Poppy works is we can just upload

10:25things to like a visual like mindmap style database. So, I'm just going to pop in here our deep research document. This is remember what we got from chat GBT before. And I'm just going to say research on the brand. Okay. So there we have our research on who's buying the Leaf products. Now I'm also going to grab this document here which is uh you know how to make great Facebook ads static ads. What we can also do is we can import YouTube videos into here. So I'm going to go import one of my own YouTube videos. So I'm going to get my master class for static ads. I'm going

10:57to copy this. I'm going to put it into uh Poppy here. I'm just going to paste it in here. So here now we've kind of filled it up with a bit of the information that we need, right? We've got a little guide on how to make good static ads. We've got a little video on how to make static ads. And now we also have the deep research for the brand as well. Now another thing that I could do here is we can import the website if we want. So if we go here, we can import the website URL. I'm giving this just

11:24some information here on what it is. We're kind of loading we're loading the database as much as we can do. Again, you can do this within cloud projects. uh you can just import everything just as like context documents. I like doing this because it's just a bit more visual and doing add creative is very visual. So why would we not use this? Now what I've also done here is I've just dragged these into a group here just so we can like just for ease basically but I'm going to put so one group here is going to be for the research another one is going to be for like how to make good

11:52static ads. So there our two things there. So, one thing you can do is if you have access to your reviews, then you want to input them into Poppy or Claude, wherever, cuz this will really help you understand what the customer is saying and why they love your product. Now, what we want to do is we want to now load all these into our chat. So, I'm actually using Claude for Sonnet inside Poppy. Uh, it's just a different kind of way of using projects, basically. So, I've just linked my research as well as uh my like how to into here. Now I'm going to full screen

12:24this. We're going to just work inside Poppy and start to build some ideas for our ads. So one thing I like to do before I do anything with AI and projects is I like to do just like a bit of a gut check just so I know that it understands what I'm talking about. So I'm literally just going to say I want you to use your project knowledge and tell me what you understand about leaf shave. I'm just going to send that and see whether it's actually digested the right information. Okay, cool. So we can

12:45see it's pulling up all the right stuff. So we definitely have all the information that we need. So, I think we can probably now start to ideulate and start to build some ideas for static ads. So, remember, we're using static ads to efficiently and cleanly communicate what our product does for the customer. That's the whole idea behind static ads. A lot of the time, static ads are at the bottom of the funnel. And so, these people are probably familiar with the brand already. They just need a little more encouragement to purchase. Guys, before we go any further, I want to give a big thank you to Omnisend for sponsoring

13:14this portion of the video. All the ecom brands that I see scaling with serious numbers have one thing in common and that is they have a ton of automations running behind the scenes. This isn't optional anymore. Most brands have automations running. Sure. However, usually the segmentation is pretty weak and there's no real automation behind it. And what's even worse is most e-commerce brands don't even realize that they're losing 30 to 50% of the revenue that they could be making with email and SMS. And that is where

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14:24and see what real clean email and SMS can do for your business. Now back to the video. So Poppy is actually very good with just very simple prompts. You might need to write longer prompts in other tools. However, Poppy's very good at just simple prompts. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, "Look at all the information and give me some

14:44ideas for static ads to sell the leaf." What product should we do here? A couple of different products. I think we should do a female one. So, I think at this point when we start to ideate, it's probably a good idea to have a look at what product you actually want to make an add-on and what customer you want to target. You can have a look at your data for this or maybe you only have one product and one customer, whatever that is. For us, I think what we're going to do, we're going to pick females cuz I know from the research that that is a

15:09pretty big demographic for them. And the most popular razor for them is this threebladed one. So, you can see here is the triple blade razor. So, we're going to get the triple blade razor and it's going to be for females. So, we can import that into here. So, look at all the information. Give me some ideas for a static ad to sell the Leaf threeblade razor to women. Okay. So, it's just going to come up with some ideas and we're going to start brainstorming with the AI. So AI is just a fantastic assistant. That's how I see it and that's often how I use it. So if I'm

15:39brainstorming things, I'm dumping it into an AI like this as well as coming up with my own ideas. Or I'm even using AI to validate my own ideas. Maybe I've got a really good idea and I want to ask AI whether it is a good idea. So we've got a couple here that it's come up with. We got problem solution focused ad. Razor burn relief. Finally a razor that doesn't betray your skin. Plastic waste gill. I'm not plastic using their blade engraving. Uh money math ad. What if I told you this 84 razor will save you 500? That's good. I think there's a better way to say that. I do like the

16:08price anchoring idea because cartridges cost a lot of money over a long time. So perhaps there's something there. Daily cost breakdown ad. I like that idea. Testimonial ad potentially legs, underarms, bikini, one razor, you shave everywhere. I think what we're going to do, we're going to go for cuz I really like this idea like the cost-saving focused ads because that is one of their big selling points because you're buying this razor that will last forever. You never need to buy another one. You never need to buy cartridges again. All you need to buy is their little razors which cost absolutely nothing. I think this is a main reason why people, specifically

16:41women, might want to buy this razor. So now we're going to actually start to write the copy and start to build an ad. Okay, so to write the copy, the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to ask it for some more ideas. So, I really like the cost-saving focused ads, but give me some more options. Okay, so I'm just going to ask it for a couple more

17:00options based on the ideas that I liked. So, it's given us an absolute ton of ideas here. We've got say side by side check. We've got the cartridge addiction, uh, the $1,000 shave. You'll spend $1,000 plus on razors in your lifetime. Unless you make one smart decision today, the leaf costs $84. Everything else costs less forever. I like that one. So, I think what we're going to do, we're going to ask it for some I want to use price anchoring

17:28within this angle. Write me some ideas. So, we know that price anchoring is a very powerful tool. Okay. So, if we can use that, then why wouldn't we? Okay. Specifically when we're talking about cost comparison of something. So, it's writing us a load of ideas here. I can see some coming in. The Netflix logic, the gym membership reality. Uh there's a couple here. I think we're probably

17:48going towards the right direction now. So, you can see that we're coming up with ideas. We're feeding that to the AI and we're giving that some direction. That's the best way to do it. AI is never going to come up with something straight away. It's just not going to work. And if you are an expert on your product and add creative, then it's best that you guide the AI. So, I don't like the idea of like putting it towards like

18:09a handbag or a luxury car or something. I don't think that quite works. Manicures, I don't think we're going the right path here. There was this one here, the salon shave at home, but I don't think anyone goes to the salon for like a daily shave, but I guess maybe they do. Laser hair removal alternative. Maybe we're not going down the right path. Let's have a look at something else. So, I'm actually going to go back to Creative OS here and I'm going to have a look through and I'm going to see if there's any which might inspire us in terms of what direction we could go with

18:37copy. Right. So, there's obviously like a lot of different stuff here that you can filter it by. So maybe we go something a comparison ad. Maybe maybe we look at a comparison ad. So I like the idea of doing a comparison ad between traditional razors and the new razor. So let's say we did something like this obvious example. Okay. So let's go back to Poppy and let's say I

18:58want to do a us versus them static ad. Could you help write it? I want to compare the leaf blade to a normal disposable razor. I want to target women and make the copy a little cheeky. Okay, I think I said let the company be a bit cheeky, but I think it'll get what we mean. So, it's given us a couple of like trusty us versus them here. So, it's given us, you know, left side what this is, right side what this is, but it's also sparked a really cool idea, the breakup letter. I like this idea of this like texton image which is kind of

19:34designed a bit like a letter and will address like all the concerns of why people don't like to use disposables. Okay, so let's do that. And I don't think we need to use a template for this. I think we can just do it inside Canva. So let's open up Canva here. Let's have a look. We're just going to create uh a new document. I'm just going to go social media here. Uh and we're going to do a 4x5 and let's have a look what we can pull together. So I'm going to go and grab this copy here. Dear plastic razors, it's not me, it's definitely you. Let's pop this into

20:03Canva here. So, we're just going to I'm just going to pop some text in for now, I think. Okay. Dear plastic razors, let's just do a bit of design. Now, this is the great thing about where we are in terms of technology right now is that I just used AI to help guide me towards an idea and copy for a static. And now I'm using a free tool. I'm using Canva to now design the static. And remember, if you don't have any design experience at all and you're not familiar, you can then use Creative OS and you can help that guide you towards an idea that you

20:32can use. Because remember, if we did go for the us versus them copy that it came up with here, we could very easily put that into one of the Creative OS ideas here and we could we could have an ad up in minutes. So, I've just been sat here thinking and I think this might make like the perfect like fake iMessage idea. So, what I've actually done is I've headed over to Creative OS and I've just had a look through their templates and I found a couple here that I think we can we can use. Now, we actually have two, I think. So, there's this one here,

21:00right? There's this. This is what I was originally thinking when I saw that like big block of text thing. So, I think we could use something like that or we could use a iMessage or we could use them both and test them with variations. Okay. So, what we're going to do, let's let's do this one first. So, I'm going

21:15to head over to my uh document here. Just going to copy this in here. So, I'm going to align all this here. We're going to make this a little bit bigger. I think we're going to change the font as well because I don't really like this font. Uh, let's have a look what else we have. Helvetica is always pretty solid

21:31one. Let's use that. Okay, there we go. I don't want any of that bold. I just want that bold. All right, I like that. Now, we're going to head over to Leaf. I'm going to grab their color. All right, so I'm going to grab this like light pink color here that they have. I'm going to make that the background color. All right, there we go. Okay, so now we're just going to have a look here. Dear cheap plastic razor, this isn't working anymore. You cost me $500 a year, clog after two strokes, and frankly, you're just not that good in bed. I mean, bathroom, I found someone,

21:59someone better. They're metal. They last forever, and they actually care about my legs. It's not me. It's definitely you. Every smart woman. I really like this. So, let's have a look now here. Back here, we're going to go PS. The leaf razor says hi. Okay, so we're going to add this bit in down here. I really like the way that's laid out. I think we need an image of the leaf razor. So, I'm just going to head here where I just grabbed an image of their product. And I'm just going to post that in here. And I think we can remove the background within here. Yes, we can. Let's see if it does

22:29it correctly. Come on, AI. Don't fail me now. There we go. Lovely. Done. Now, I think potentially this needs maybe a bit of a CTA. So, we could put this here. So, let's just go back to Creative OS and let's have a look at what they've done here. So they haven't there's actually no kind of mention directly. There's no branding on it or anything. So I think I think what we have here might actually work. I really like this. I think this is a this is a really kind of smart idea. And this came from a mixture of our own creativity and like letting it kind of run wild. But

23:00then also it came from AI which was sparking the inspiration. You see how the two start to work together. Now at Fraggle when we make any ad whether it's video or static, we make variations. Variations are basically the same ad but with something changed. We're treating it like a science experiment. We're changing one thing at a time so that we can tie that back to the change it has in performance. So a good example of a video variation is changing the hook. A good idea of a static variation is maybe changing the headline. So if we look at this here that we've just made inside Canva, we can duplicate it here and we

23:30can make a variation. We can also use AI to help us with that. So let's say here I've gone with write me another version to AB test. Okay, so we're leaving this up to AI to do it. We can also think of some other variations for us to use. And it's thinking and it's going away and

23:47it's going to write us something new. You know what's really weird? The first thing it's come up with here is the breakup text, which was the variation I was talking about that we could make it into before, which is really funny. Uh but I think I want to keep this generic idea and I just want to change the headline. So, could we use the original but change the copy? Okay. So, I'm just asking it to change the copy. I don't want a completely new idea because at that point I feel like we're potentially changing too much which might lead us to

24:14not have the correct learnings. Okay. So, it's given us like a whole other version here. So, it said here, dear plastic razor, instead this is goodbye forever. There we go. So, for this we're just going to change all the copy. And if this one performs better than the other one, then we know that it was a

24:30copy problem and not a format problem. Okay. So, we just need to format it back to the same one. So, I think what we're going to do here, let's just remember. So, it's dear plastic razor. Bring this up here. This is a little bit longer this one. So, we might have to do a

24:45little bit of editing to make it fit. Uh, we've been together too long and I'm finally ready to the truth. You're expensive, unreliable, and frankly terrible at what you do. You promised me smooth legs, delivered razor burn. And you said you'd be affordable. Cost me hundreds. And don't even get me started on Okay, let's get rid of that line. Don't think we need that one. I find someone that actually cares about my skin and my wallet. They're built to last. They're gorgeous and they make me feel good about my choices. This is goodbye forever. Let's get rid of the

25:08PS. Let's do a sincerely. Boom. Now we have two ads of a very similar format, but different text, so we can test them against each other and see which one works. So, when we're looking at the results to garner whether this was a good static or not, we're looking at a few different things. So, obviously the CPA, which was the cheapest to purchase a sale. We're looking at the CTA, which one had the highest click-through rate. And we're also looking at the cost per click, which one cost us the least to get a click. Obviously, because this is a static, we don't have things like hook

25:37rate and hold rate. So, we're looking at the other results to help us understand why this ad was successful or not. So, now all you need to do is go and run that into your ad account and happy days. This is the exact system that we use here at Fraggle to generate statics for 7, 8, and 9 figure DTOC brands. We researched the brand. We gained some insights. We crafted a really sharp angle with the help of AI. We wrote some really great copy and we finally designed it for free inside Canva. Most brands are treating static ads as

26:07filler. We want to use them as a weapon. If you happen to run a DTC brand that's spending over 70k on ads every single month, I would absolutely love to speak to you. You can scan the QR code on the screen or you can head to the link down below and we can have a chat and a conversation and we'll see whether it's a good fit. And if you haven't already seen the video that I mentioned earlier on where I break down some of our best performing static ads, then you can do go and watch that one after this. But thanks very much for watching. Make sure

26:32that you hit the subscribe button and I'll see you in the next one. [Music]