Joe OviedoWhen a campaign isn’t doing what we expected, I want to fix everything that already bothered me. The video takes too long to get to the point. There’s a line on the page I never liked. Maybe we’re speaking to too broad an audience. If we’re making changes anyway, why not fix it all?
Sometimes that’s the right move. If the form won’t open, I fix it. I don’t need to leave it broken for the sake of a cleaner test. But if the page works and I don’t know why someone would care about the offer, changing everything can leave me in an odd spot: the campaign improves, and I still don’t know what we understood better about the person on the other side.
Two ads that seem to sell the same thing
Imagine we’re preparing ads for a weeknight cooking workshop. The people we want to reach leave work late, get home tired, and often end up ordering food. We have two ways to speak to them.
The first: “Prep five dinners on Sunday and forget about cooking on weeknights.” The second: “Get home and put dinner together in fifteen minutes with what you already have.” Both are about saving time. Read quickly, they might sound like two ways to sell the same thing.
But the first asks someone to give up part of Sunday. The second says they don’t have to organize their weekend to eat better on Tuesday. If someone dreads spending Sunday cooking, the first idea doesn’t solve their problem, however well the ad is shot. If what they hate is making one more decision at eight at night, they might happily cook on Sunday to avoid thinking about it again.
That distinction interests me more than which line sounds better. One promises to take work out of the week. The other helps when the week has already gotten away from you. If the workshop can’t deliver both, I want to know before filming, not after looking at the results.
What I’d leave alone
Suppose the workshop does teach both. I could make an ad for each idea. But if the first is a video of someone cooking at home and the second is a graphic with text, and each goes to a different page, I’m no longer comparing the two ideas alone. I’m comparing two entire ways of presenting the workshop. That can help me pick one to run, but not tell me which promise made the difference.
If I want to learn which situation people recognize, I’d keep the rest as similar as possible. Both ads could use the same format, run under comparable conditions, and send people to a page that explains both ways to use the workshop. One opens on Sunday. The other opens on Tuesday as someone gets home. The videos don’t need to be identical. Before I see the results, I need to know what question I’m asking with them.
I’d also decide what to look at. Imagine the fifteen-minute ad gets more clicks. More people wanted to know what it was about. That doesn’t tell me more wanted to sign up. If the workshop is on Saturday and the page doesn’t say so until the end, I might have caught the attention of people who want to cook faster but can’t set aside a morning to learn. That doesn’t make the ad bad. It makes me ask where the offer stopped fitting.
Not every test ends with a winner
If I can talk to a few people who signed up, I wouldn’t ask which ad they liked more. I’d ask what made them think the workshop would help and what they wanted to do differently the following week. Someone might tell me, “I can already cook quickly. I just don’t know what to keep in the fridge so I don’t end up ordering food.” The fifteen minutes got their attention, but the part they cared about came a step earlier.
One comment isn’t enough to conclude everyone wants the same thing. It does give me another question: are we teaching people to cook faster, or to keep what they need on hand to improvise dinner? If more people describe it that way, I might change the start of the workshop, not just the first line of the ad.
That’s why I find it useful to think in terms of one ad, one person, one idea. Not because every campaign should be minimal, but because I want to understand the decision I’m making. Here I don’t care about winning a debate over which video came out better. I want to know what would make Tuesday night easier for that person. If I understand that a little better at the end, I know what to try next and what to leave alone for now.
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