The Easiest Way To Achieve Creative Diversity On Any Budget

All right, creative coin. Let's talk about one of the biggest myths in marketing. That creative diversity is only for brands with massive budgets. You've heard it before.

We'd love to test more ads, but we just don't have the resources. Yeah, Faser's heard that too. And he's here to call BS on it. He's a co-founder of Fraggle, a creative agency built on one simple belief.

You don't need big money to make better ads. You just need a smarter process. Today, he's going to break down his best tactics to achieve creative diversity on any budget. And he's going to show you how even lean teams can produce more variations, more insights, and ultimately more winners.

So get ready to take notes, drop some fire emojis in the chat, and give a massive Creative Con welcome to my good friend Fraser Cotrol. Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Fraser. If you have no idea who I am, uh I am one of the co-founders at Fraggle, which is an ad creative agency based here in the UK.

but I'm also one of the founders of Creative OS and I'm so excited to be here at the very first Creative Con. Uh we've been so pumped to bring this to you and I'm really excited to uh speak to you today. So, bit of history on myself. Uh I've been working in film making and marketing for well over 10 years at this point.

Uh, my agency is responsible for over 300 million in revenue for our clients and we make all types of ad creative from high production stuff in our studio all the way down to Loi, UGC and Statics. Okay, we've worked with some of the industry's biggest names. Kuru, Solar Wave, Meies, Aloha, Maxi Nutrition, GOI, True Earth, and many, many more. And today I'm here to speak to you about how you can achieve creative diversity on a budget.

Okay, creative diversity is possibly one of the most important things and it's something that's on everyone's mind all the time now. And I think a lot of people when they do think about it, they think about this is going to be something that's going to be quite expensive to achieve. I'm going to have to hire film crews. I'm going to have to, you know, all this nonsense, which just simply isn't true all the time.

So, I'm going to be giving you my take on creative diversity and how we manage to achieve it for our clients without spending tens of thousands every single month. Okay. So, what we're going to cover today, we're going to be talking about what creative diversity actually is. You probably already know, but I'm going to break it down for you so we're all on the same page.

I also want to, of course, talk about how to actually achieve creative diversity. Finally, we're going to go over some creative formats and frameworks to help you achieve that creative diversity and set you on the right path. All of these are going to be budget friendly ways that you tomorrow, if you want, can get yourself some creative diversity in your ad account. And also, of course, we can't do a presentation without speaking about AI, can we?

So, we're going to be going in on AI and how we can use it to help us achieve creative diversity. So, let's kick off with the first one. Some of you will probably know this. Hopefully, everyone knows what creative diversity is at this point.

But, let's break it down, shall we? So, customers are seeing thousands of ads every single day. Just think about how many you see and you are aware that you're seeing them, okay? They're seeing them all the time and so many of them look the same, particularly if they're, you know, in a certain category.

Let's think about people that are, you know, looking and buying a protein um brand, for example. But they're going to be getting targeted by so many different brands selling them the same product. And I'm pretty sure that if you speak to them, they won't really remember any particularly brand. They're just going to say, "Oh yeah, I got an ad for that protein brand the other day.

Oh yeah, I got an ad for that jewelry brand, whatever." Because most ads look the same. So they start to ignore them altogether because they see absolutely nothing that they can relate to. And it's a common theme. Speak to your partner.

speak to your friends about the ads that they actually remember. The chances are they won't remember many of them. So the fix for this is to make a variety of ad creative, different creative with different people and with different stories, different styles, different types, different frameworks. We need to make sure that we are covering all bases.

This is just a couple of examples of the types of ads that we make here at Fraggle because creative, I've always said this. I truly believe I was one of the first people to say this, but creative is your targeted and every single person in every demographic will relate to a different type of creative. Okay, some people like high production and polished ads. I am one of those people.

I like my ads to look like ads. I hate to say it. Um, however, some people would rather watch a UGC video made by someone just like them. That is why Tik Tok has become so popular.

That is why some of the best ads in pretty much everyone's accounts are lowfi UGC because people actually want to see that content and created diversity is just that. Again, you can see two examples here on the screen, right? We have this like mashup ad that's mixing different formats and then we have a very highly produced video that we did for for one of our clients as well. So, you need to make sure that you fill your account with a diverse mix of ad creative styles, types, messaging, all of them to help you reach your current customers as well as new ones.

So many brands I speak to and they've never even maybe tried a VSSL. They've never tried a founder ad. And to me, that is absolutely bonkers because there is going to be people out there that would want to watch that content and you are truly missing out on those customers by not making the content they want to see. Think about a TV channel.

TV channels have game shows, they have dramas, they have documentaries, they have all these different types of media to bring different types of people in. Some people might only watch Discovery for the documentaries. Some people, you know, might only watch BBC 1 for the comedies. Okay, you are attracting different types of people that would usually not have even thought about shopping with you.

Okay, so now we've gone over that it might seem quite daunting. You're already trying to master static ads for example. The last thing you need to do is now try and master you know UGC or high production ads. How do you even do that?

Okay, it is a good question. Okay, and it's one that I get asked all the time. So to action this, the easiest way is to develop creative diversity to make sure that whenever you test new creative that you launch a range of different creative types. Okay, so we're looking at statics where, you know, we're a creative uh con.

I'm sure we all know what static ads are. Short forms, this is like sub 10sec type of material. UC, so that's, you know, basically it I mean it stands for userenerated content, but let's be honest, most of it is fake at this point. high production and VSSLs.

They're like the main styles, I'd say. Okay. And the main media types in which you might find ad creators. So, you need to make sure that you're making content that falls into multiple buckets.

Whenever you're launching a new test, if you're just launching static ads week after week after week, people are going to get bored and you're only targeting a small pool of your potential customers. But creative diversity is also more than that because it also means you're messaging. I time and time again. I speak with brands and they are making different types of content.

I'll give them that. Nice job. But they're using the same old problem solution and they haven't really tried anything else and they're wondering why their ads aren't, you know, are fatiguing and they're not working as well as they used to. And that's because they've not changed their messaging.

They've not tried something new to engage their customer. Okay? So you need to test new ways to present your product to the customer as well as new ways to tell your customer about your product. Okay, why don't we try a different problem?

Okay, engage a different type of customer. These are all ways to achieve creative diversity in your ad account. I really like to think about ad creative as the moat. It is the moat that protects your brand.

Your brand is the castle. Okay, the more diverse your ad creative, so the deeper your moat, the harder it will be to replicate your success. Think about your competitors. Have a look at their ads.

See the different types of ads that they are making. Okay? Don't just copy them. Instead, find new ways to say the same message.

All right? You want to deepen your moat. You want to deepen your ad creative moat because that is how you are going to achieve success. Okay?

Okay, we need to deepen your ad creative moat because it will stop people not only from copying you, but also it will make you completely unique. We're going to go through a couple of angles in a second which basically allow you to do just that. So, how do we do this on a budget? Let's talk about money.

Let's have an honest conversation about money. I normally find that brands need to spend about 10% of their ad spend on ad creative as a whole. Okay. So, I'm talking about, you know, your influencer seeding.

I'm talking about your graphic designs. I'm talking about your, you know, video agency. All of that combined need, you need to be spending at least 10% of your ad spend. For some brands, obviously, we're spending hundreds of thousands.

That's going to be a lot more money than a brand that's only spending 20,000. But that's okay because we all have different requirements for our content. So, we want formats that are affordable to create at any level, but still perform well. All right.

So, let's bear that in mind because I'm going to go through some of these formats for you now. And I want to think about I want you to think about how you can possibly make these formats yourself and what you can do when you finish watching this to go and create them. So, let's get our thinking caps on as we go through these and I'll give you some suggestions. So, of course, the first one is static ads.

So many ways to do this. This is just a couple that we've made here of different levels for our clients. So, why they work? Let's talk.

We all know kind of why static ads work, but they load instantly. Okay, we don't have to wait for buffer times or bad internet, whatever. And they often get a first impression and they're skimmable and you can, you know, you can look at them and consume them instantly. Okay?

No need to wait for the hook, no need to wait till the CTA, whatever. They are great, I'd say, for both cold traffic and retargeting. I'd normally say retargeting is kind of where they sit, but I have seen them perform incredibly well in cold traffic. This is usually just because of the way that Facebook pushes those.

So, that's normally where I find them. Okay. The biggest advantage of static ads is that you can test 10 different ideas in 10 minutes. Quite literally.

All right. If you get a, you know, for example, uh, you know, this ad here that we're looking at, right? Five things I do before 10:00 a.m., we can change that very, very easily. We can change the headline.

We can duplicate them in Canva. We can create a load of different ads that test different messaging very, very quickly. Okay? But they still drive incredible results.

I have seen static ads with 20 times rorowass, and that is not a joke. Okay? That is not a joke. And what we what we want to do here, okay, particularly is we want to test strong creative angles.

Okay, we want to test those strong creative angles. So how do we make them cheap? Okay, how do we make static ads cheap? Well, there's one way we can do that and that is with a free piece of software like Canva.

Canva is incredible. it is. We are so lucky to live in a time where Canva is actually available and you should get on it and you should start just messing about and making some ads. It it gets even easier when you start to use AI generated stuff as well.

We're going to talk about a bit about that in a little while when we go over um the how to use AI. Okay, you can use your product photography or even screenshots. You can see there's an example there of a Reddit screenshot ad. That is literally a screenshot from Reddit.

That is the ad. Okay, incredible, right? And that is how easy static ads can be and how quickly you can make them. But of course, we have Creative OS templates.

There's hundreds of them. There's thousands of templates in there which you can open in Canva on Figma and you can just plop in your copy. You can plop in your images and you can have some static ads. That is one of the easiest ways to make them for cheap.

And you can use your reviews, which is basically free copy to inspire your copy. One of the greatest uses of chat GBT is to import all of your copy and then say, you know, write me 10 Facebook ad copy headlines using these reviews. Done. You've got free copy there.

How incredible. Okay, so that's static ads. That is one easy way to implement creative diversity in your account. Okay, another one is video ads.

Okay, particularly founder ads. Let's talk about a couple of ad styles here. Okay, so founder ads. These are possibly some of my favorite ads to make because it really blends itself to storytelling which speaks deeply to me.

So these are fantastic for building authority and some credibility, okay, and authenticity because this is completely unique to you, okay? Nobody else has the same story as you. Nobody else has the same journey that you've been on. This is for you, okay?

And they're fantastic for midfunnel because you're basically saying, "All right, you're interested in our product now, but here's why we exist. This is this is why I made this product, okay? We're talking about our why here. Why we exist, why you should buy us.

Why we're better than everyone else. Okay? And they are so easy to make. They are so easy to make.

Right? This example here is uh is from one of our clients uh the black stuff. Okay? and he is talking about the journey that he went on to create these ads.

Okay. Uh this this product, sorry, apologies. He's he's talking about the journey that he went on. All the footage here is shot on his phone.

It's shot around his um you know around his warehouse. It's shot with his staff. It's shot you know even the speaking bits are shot on his on his phone or they're with voice notes. so easy to make and it also works brilliant as an ad.

Don't get me wrong, but I have seen these perform really well as organic posts. Some people have an incredible uh Tik Tok following whereby basically all they're doing is just founder ads over and over again. So, here's how we can actually make them cheap. If you're a founder watching this, I want you to grab your iPhone and I want you to tell people in a problem solution format why you made the product.

Normally you you know you you created this product because of this problem that you found and I want you to talk about that problem and the journey that you went on to make the brand. That's your ad. Okay, that is how easy they are to do. And then you can use stock footage and you can use B-roll that you have on your phone from when you were developing the brand to create the ad.

Think about Gym Shark, right? Ben Francis, their founder. incredible gentleman and he has built quite a massive following just from his personal brand and from his story of founding Gym Shark. There's a you know people are not only do they have great products but they also have a great story there.

You have someone to egg on. You have someone to you know someone to root for and I think that's so important and why founder ads in particular work so well. Another really cheap format is mashup ads. Okay, mashup pads work really really well, okay, for for for one reason and that reason is that they are super super fast to produce.

Okay, really really easy to produce. It gives your content a bit more life that potentially, you know, back in, you know, back when you were just doing like montage stuff didn't. And it lets you test multiple intros, multiple angles, super super cheap. Okay.

And also it is ideal for hook testing and messaging testing. Okay, the reason for this is because of how they're made. They're made mashup ads are made by your archive footage. So, you know, the clips that work really well for you in the past, the footage that worked really well for you in the past.

We're we're mashing all that together to create different ads. Okay? So, we can slap on a hook that's performed better in the past. We can build on messaging that has worked in the past.

All right. So, mashups are so great and so many brands need to be making them because they are free. I'm not kidding you. They are free.

No doubt you're sitting on a load of footage from UGC creators that you used in the past. Well, this is your opportunity to reuse all that content. Okay. So, you can use an AI voice over from like 11 Labs.

It's about five a month, I think. 11 Labs and and you can generate a load of great sounding voiceovers for it. You can build the scripts using chat GPT. It's completely free.

You can pull your B-roll from archive stuff or if you do have a bit of money to invest, great thing called Grid Bank where they have like stock UGC. And then of course you can grab your camera and grab your products and you can actually film your own product footage. Too too many too little brands actually do this. Too many little brands actually go ahead and film their own footage.

And that is exactly what you should be doing, okay? Because you can mix them all together and you can make these mashup ads. More brands need creative diversity coming from Mashupads. All right.

And there's so many different formats. This is just a few. VSSL format. Incredibly powerful.

Okay. This is like one of the best ways to scale health and wellness brands right now is with your VSSL ads. You're educating people on the problem. You're going hard on the problem and then you're giving your solution.

Okay? We're educating people with a VSSL ad. There's so many different ways here. So many different ways you can implement created diversity on a budget in your ad account today.

But let's talk a bit about AI, shall we? Because AI can be used to speed us up. It can be used to speed up our ad creation process dramatically. All right.

We use it all the time at Fraggle now because it's managed to cut, you know, our research time, for example, down by about, you know, half probably, I'd say, at this point. So, I've broken it down into like the main sections of where I think you can use AI to speed you up. The first one is the ideation and the research. These are possibly the places where I think people are using it, but aren't using it to its best, you know, level right now.

So picking the right tools is super important when it comes to ideation research and just any AI. There's so many different tools and so many of them basically do the exact same thing. So let's talk about them. So Chat GBT, obviously it's free.

Everyone uses it at this point, but you can also pay for it and you can get more use out of it. Same for Claude. Brilliant tool for creative writing. I do all of our creative AI writing in Claude.

It's free, but there is a paid version that opens up some different capabilities. Reddit answers. This is an absolute gold mine. This is basically Reddit's own version of Gigabrain if you've ever heard of that.

And the best part is Reddit answers is free. So you can ask any questions inside paid about your niche, about your product, and you will get answers directly from Reddit. Poppy AI. This is one of my favorite tools.

Uh it is paid, but it basically is just a different way of working with the knowledge base inside Claude. Okay, with Claude and Chat GPT, if you want things to have their own individual knowledge bases, you have to use projects and that is a paid feature. So, it might be worth looking at something like Poppy instead of paying just for Claude because you you just have a couple more features there like it can watch your videos, you know, all these different things. And I just find it really useful particularly for like ideiation and also script writing, which we'll talk about in a bit.

But you can use things like this to mine your comments, you know, for and mine your reviews for some for some for some gold nuggets. You can also use it for deep research and sorting data. Incredible for deep research. You know, put in your brand, get it to go across the internet and have a look and see what it can find.

So great, you know, AI has dramatically helped us here in order to achieve that creative diversity because with that research, we discover these new demographics and these new messaging that we can then add into our ads to achieve creative diversity. Okay. Now, script writing, everyone talks about script writing when it comes to AI because it is one of the things that a lot of people struggle with and it's a unique skill and AI is helping a lot of people get a jump on it. So the first thing you need to do when you're looking to use AI to script write is you need to train an AI on your brand.

That's when I was talking about projects. So cloud projects is great because it's like its own individual brain and you can import documents in there which help expand its knowledge that it can then pull from specifically. So if you you know for us we have one talk you know one trained one project for every single brand that we work with. So that we can jump in there and we basically start exactly from where we left off instead of it getting muggled between different different stuff, right?

Same thing you can do in Poppy, same thing you do in chat GBT. So you want to instead of just asking chat GBT, write me a UGC script about my product. You want to start with hooks. Okay, I think this is quite a unique way of doing it, but you want to ask the AI to build you five problem solutionbased hooks about your product to make a UGC video, for example.

Okay, your prompt doesn't matter so much. I think these AI tools have got quite advanced now where you don't really need to write this massive lengthy prompt. You just need to give it the right information and context. So, ask it to write those hooks, work with it to point it in the right direction.

If you like three and four that it's generated, but you don't like five, then less of five, more of three and four, work with it until you get some hooks that you're happy with. Once you've done that, you can then build out the full scripts using the best hooks. Okay? So, using hook five, build me out a UGC problem solution script for X product, make sure that you, you know, talk about the product benefits and how it helps people overcome the problem.

example of a prompt. You want to spend time doing this. You don't just want to give it all to AI. You want to take some time here to do it because your script is one of the most important things.

It is arguably the most important thing because once you find a winning script, you can use those other formats like mashups and VSSLs to then further recycle that script and make new versions of it. All right. So, really important to really nail down that script. But static ad creation, static creation is another and possibly the easiest way for us to let AI kind of run rogue.

Okay, so you can use AI images from chat GPT, Midjourney, whatever that looks like. Okay, whatever your favorite tool is, there's so many out there. Most of them do the same thing. Find one that you like and then you can make I would suggest anyway using scroll stopping visuals like a vitamin floating in space.

this kind of stuff that just isn't possible with normal photography. Use AI to get you there because that's the stuff you don't want to fake real life with AI because your customers will figure it out. They won't really they'll find that a bit scummy. They'll find the idea, you know, it won't really invest confidence in there.

So instead, go on the other side. Crazy ideas, scroll stopping visuals that just aren't possible and are so clearly AI that people they aren't mad about it. Okay. So once you've done that, you can then go into Creative OS.

You can find a template, open it up in Canva and Figma. You can use Claude or ChatgBT to write your copy just like when you were writing your scripts. And then you can just put it all together and you can make static ads over and over and over again. It is by far the easiest way to create ad creative with the help of AI right now and you should definitely be doing it.

Never just get chat GBT to generate the whole thing. I know there was like, you know, when ChatGpt brought out their new model, there was a big thing of like everyone just using chat GPT to do their uh do their ads. Don't do that. Take it in with a template, take it into Canva and do that work.

Add the copy. It just makes your life easier. Just use AI for those images. That's what I'd suggest.

So, that's everything. That's me done. And I want to thank you so much for joining me. Hopefully, you've learned something here that you can take away and you can um and you can build with.

If you have any more questions and you want to reach out and you want some help, please do feel free to follow me. Uh and you know, just message me somewhere on the internet, whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn or X. I'm very active on X and LinkedIn. Uh Instagram not so much, but give it a go.

If you want to check out Fraggle as well, you can do fraggle.com. Uh, but please enjoy the rest of the day. Got some great speakers lined up and I'm so uh so excited for what you're going to learn. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me rambling and I'll speak to you soon.

Bye-bye.