the SIMPLE genius of stacking ad formats (16 "god tier" formats that print)

In this video, I am going to be breaking down and showing you a handful of what I call god-tier ad formats. These are the formats that if you go and you look in Adstria, you look in any of the, the spy tools that are out there, all the biggest brands, all the top accounts are running these types of formats. And I don't know if this is the 80/20 of ads right now, or maybe even closer to the 90/10. If you master these ad formats, you can cover Pretty much everything. And if you're missing some of these formats, these could be the missing links in your ad accounts that will allow you to scale. So I'm gonna break those down and I'm gonna share a really cool file and actually show you some of these things on here. So stay tuned for that. By the way, if you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Iha and my business partner Mario Castelli and I are copywriters who've generated over $100 million each with our copy. Right now we have a community of, now we're at 460 creative strategists, marketers, and brand owners inside of Genesis. These are some of the brands who are Creative Cartel, one of our private masterminds work with. Here's a bunch of our top wins, which I need to go and update this because we're pretty bad at collecting our wins. But you can see the most up-to-date things down below. And we love helping people get wins with the exact same stuff that I'm about to share with you in this video. Now, before we go into what god-tier ad formats mean, you need to understand what an ad format means. And This is not to be pedantic, right? But to get the terminology right is really, really, really important because people use format in kind of a squishy way. I wanna make sure you're using it in a really crisp way, and then you'll be able to understand and appreciate all the formats that I'm gonna share with you. Okay? So inside of our world, Genesis and Exodus, which is our AI creative strategist copilot tool, we have a specific way of breaking down ads. So it's a little more complicated than this, but this is the simplified version and it's most of what you need to know. Which is there's the skeleton, which is the structure and the order of the words. So these are things like timeline ads, story ads, listicle ads, et cetera. Then there's what we call, uh, the conceits. Uh, and we use this acronym called CAST. So CAST stands for the conceit, the actor, the style, the terrain, and the setup. A conceit is basically what's going on. Is it 2 people talking to each other? Is it someone talking to the camera? Um, and what kind of media format is it pretending to be? Is it like a podcast? Is it like a sitcom? Is it like a microdrama or an infomercial? Right? Same thing goes is who are the actors, right? What kind of authority do they have? What do they look like, right? What kind of appeal do they have? Are they a monk? What style are we looking at, right? The actual pixels. Do they look like a '90s cartoon? Do they look like Pixar? Do they look like claymation or 8-bit, right? The terrain, which is the environment. And then there's the setup, which is covering things like a lot of the editing, captions, B-roll, things like that. Okay. Now the purpose is that basically you could define any ad. If you know these details, you could define the DNA of the ad, right? And it's because these things multiply together. So for example, you could have a podcast ad that is shaped like a timeline. Okay. Or you could have a UGC ad that's telling a story right now. Some of these start to crystallize where you have Pixar song ads, right? They look like Pixar, they have music, and they're happening to tell a a story, right? And that's basically a bunch of these elements that are converging. But it's important in your mind to break these apart because it allows you to detect patterns in your winners and identify gaps more clearly, as well as allow you to generate new ideas because you can kind of see into the matrix, right? By seeing the grammar that is made up in here. Now, again, when it comes to formats, we focus on those elements I said. And the reason this is important is because people use formats very loosely. You'll hear people talk about timeline ads, podcast ads, monk ads, Pixar song ads, Dr. Pickle ads, et cetera. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that it hides a little bit of the internal structure because a timeline ad is specifically referring to the structure. A podcast ad is referring to the conceit, right? What media it's pretending it to be. A monk ad is the actor. A Pixar song ad is a style times the conceit. A Dr. Pickle ad is an actor times the conceit, et cetera. You could see some of the examples on here. And the reason I harp on this is that better grammar gives you better ability to analyze and create new ads, which allows you to find new patterns and gaps. And because you can actually stack these elements together, which means you could do a timeline ad that's in a podcast delivered by a monk and it's in Pixar style while he's singing and he's a skeleton. Okay? You can combine all of these elements together. I'm not saying that you should. I'm also not saying that, uh, you shouldn't, but if you didn't understand the grammar, it might take you a little bit of time to even come up with this idea. But once you understand the grammar and the way things are broken down, playing around with these variables becomes like child's play basically. So all I'm saying is you want to get the grammar right because a format means whatever element that you're highlighting. Okay. Does that make sense? So a timeline ad is highlighting the structure. Podcast ad is highlighting the conceit. That's it. Okay. So I want to make sure you understand what you mean when you talk about formats so you can speak intelligently and more importantly, you can get more winning ads. This is what we teach people to do. So these are the god tier ad formats. Now that you understand what a format means, so they are story ads, timeline ads, skeleton ads, product aware slash I would say like most aware ads. Okay, it's kind of in that spectrum. Micro drama ads, Pixar song ads, claymation ads, long form static ads, authority ads, personification ads, monster ads, facet demo ads. Pretty girl ads, gay ads, animal baby ads, listicle ads. That's it. If some of these names sound funny to you, they sound hilarious to me. Okay? Now I'm going to give you this artifact on here. You guys can easily swipe it. I know you guys are trying to always get this Google Doc, but this one is not shareable. But anything that's inside of here, including this, you can get access to by opting into my email list. And I send you a big doc that has literally everything I've ever done on this YouTube channel in one big doc. Okay. And we send a bunch of different emails every day and tell you about workshops and all kinds of great stuff. You want to be on that list. So this is God tier formats. And these are, if you go and look at ads that are performing right now, you're going to see most of these on here. Okay. So we're going to spend a little bit of time. I won't go through all of these, but I think it's important to pay attention to these. So these are story ads and you'll start to notice some of these are Pixar song ads, right? Some of these are microdramas. Some of these have, Um, animals and things like that. And there's specific story, um, structures that we're doing. And, and again, you know, even within story, within the structure of story right now, I think there's about 8 different subtypes that tend to work really well. A lot of them are like kind of revenge story, like cheating spouses. Other ones are around events. Like I got invited to this party that's coming up. Other ones are like interrogation scenes, like getting stuck at the DMV and stuff like that. Then you have really creative ones. Whoever's working with Coriderm, I mean, shout out to them. They got all kinds of crazy things in here. I don't know if you guys are able to hear the, the sound, but this is like future version coming back and telling her about the product, which is a super creative idea. It is actually exciting to me because it shows me that creativity with the storytelling actually does matter for people. But you guys can click around and start to look at some of the different structures in here. And there's a little bit of explanation based on some of the ways that we think about these things. Okay. Then you have timeline ads. Timeline ads are really simple. Timeline ads are, here's what would happen if blank. The, the variety in these are pretty basic, but basically it's third person hypothetical, right? Here's what would happen if blank persona did this. Here's what would happen if you did this. That would be second person. I, here's what happened when I did this. That would be more of a first person, right? Then you also have comparison ones where you have 2 people and you kind of talk about, You know, one guy did this, the other person did this. Here's what happened. Okay. Timeline ads are unbeatable. I mean, shout out to whoever discovered that timeline ads, people love to watch these and see them. They're amazing and they're one of the most unbeatable ad structures. So use them and use them in your story ads. When you're telling a story ad, put the timeline in there, right? So use this timeline feature as much as possible and you have a bunch of examples on here. The next one is skeleton, which literally just means you have a skeleton, right? Doing regular things and you see different versions on here. Okay? The more extreme the skeleton looks, I think the better things tend to do, right? I don't know what it is about skeletons. You know, when you study ad formats long enough, you start to realize that there's just certain elements and features that for whatever reason just captures humans' attention. Okay? This is the study of memetics, right? Which is kind comes from, and it's not memes, although it's related. It comes from Richard Dawkins studying like the transmission of ideas and things like that. And I think it's worthwhile if you wanna be a good creative strategist to at least know some of that terminology. But regardless, you'll see like for whatever reason, people like looking at skeletons. Okay. And as a creative strategist, what you can do is you can start asking yourself like, what is it? Like, why are people attracted to skeletons? Right? Or at least why does that get their attention? Is it something to do with mortality? Is it something to do with, it's just a recognizable symbol, right? What other sort of body compositions could be recognizable like that, right? What other sort of mortality symbols could I put inside of my ads that might have a similar effect? Okay. And these are things that you can start to test once you start to notice these patterns. Next one are product and most aware. A lot of these are, are pretty basic, but they get so much spend that it's worth doing. A lot of these are like, Probably the most popular format is this is too expensive. So here's a reason why I'm giving it to you. You have sort of like the ironic reversal, which is like, I'm returning this because it works too good, or don't buy this because of X. You have other ones where it's like, don't buy a scam, whatever. And you have the classic, you know, sorry, I lied to you, or sorry, I scammed you, or whatever it is, right? So those are a lot of offer-based ones, and they kind of drift into like product comparison style ones. Microdrama are probably the most popular ad format right now. AI just reached an inflection point where it's really good at doing these microdramas. Coraderm and a lot of other skincare brands, I mean, all of these are Coraderm. Whoever's over there, editor or creative strategist, is crushing it. And I think this is probably one of the first ones that I saw at the DMV. And then they just extended this version all over into different formats and Super powerful. They look kind of like TV shows. They look ultra realistic. I think that this right here is, you know, if you're a creative strategist, run a bunch of these. We have people who are inside of our community who are running these and getting wins. They're just a novel format. People want to look at them and they're entertaining just on their own. And to me, the runway with these is huge. So what I mean by that is timeline ads, there's only so much innovation you can do. Most of the innovation I see in timeline ads is playing around with the hook. Right? Which typically means just saying things like, here's what the fuck would happen if blank-wise, whatever. Or, you know, putting words like coochie and puss and whatever, like words that kind of shock you and get your attention in the hook. That's the innovation that I see. But there's only so much innovation you could do on a timeline ad. When it comes to microdramas, the innovation is vast. The runway is huge. Like literally look at Netflix, right? As many stories, I mean, humans will consume so many stories and If you look at these, they're impressive in the sense that AI looks really good and they look like real TV. So you don't expect that for an ad. But if you were to watch them in terms of just a TV or movie, they would not be that impressive, which is actually great news because it means that there's a huge runway in terms of making these stories actually entertaining. And my hypothesis is you're gonna see a lot more of these and it's just gonna continue to get more creative. Okay? So pay attention to that. Pixar song ads, again, these are unbeatable. I'm actually doing a workshop, I think on Wednesday, to some of our community where we're gonna be breaking down these Suno Song ads. The Pixar style tends to work really well with them, although not exclusively, but in general, Pixar songs just, they work well. Some rules of thumb I've seen is like, make it sound like a song. Doesn't mean you want a chorus and a bridge, but make it rhyme. Pay attention to the music, make sure the editing is working with the music. And it comes down to storytelling. Okay. Claymation is also another style that just seems to be working well. People really like to see claymation. They're especially good when it comes to mechanism stuff. So this is an ad that's doing particularly well right now. And I think what's great about it is it so visually and viscerally represents the problem, the mechanism, the solution, and it does it in this claymation style, which just lends itself to it. It's very entertaining to watch. People like it. So, I think there's a lot that you can continue to play around just with that style. Then you have long-form statics. I mean, most of what we're doing are video formats, but this is the narrative. You know, Rosabella and then some of those other big brands are the masters of it. These long, long stories with 1,400 PSs, like PPPPPPS. It's like tons of PSs and tons of emotional stories and these kind of grainy different types of images, which are great. We have a lot of trainings inside of Genesis and we have an Exodus tool which is spectacular at coming up with these native images. Then there's authority-based ones. We actually just did a training today on authority-based ads. These are things like the monk that I mentioned, different types of doctors. There's actually a lot of creativity left to be done when it comes to authority. So like the Dr. Pickle ad, which is in here, So you can see this Dr. Pickle ad, and this is a type of authority. And you know what's kind of famous about this one is he looks like an animation guy, and he usually starts with a curse word, right? And so it's kind of like that contrast between here's this sort of animated doctor authority figure, and he just has this super kind of crass style to him. But as far as like a personality goes, like it's a pretty limited personality. I think there's so much more creativity that you can come up with in terms of Emphasizing the personality and the relatability and likability of some of these fictional characters. And a lot of people stop with just make him a monk or, you know, make him a doctor. And I don't blame it because this stuff works, right? But there's a lot of creativity to be found inside of here. Then there's personification. So this is just where you personify some kind of object. There's a lot of different ways that you can do personification. You can personify personify the problem itself. So kind of like what your mechanism of the problem would be. You can personify the culprit, like for instance, a cigarette in here. So this is sort of the thing that causes the mechanism of the problem, right? So yeah, whatever the culprit might be, you can have the victim, which is the concept, the process, the body part, the element that gets hurt, like your gut, or your brain, or, you know, in health it's usually like a body part. You can personify the solution, you can personify the product itself, you can personify the ingredients inside the product, and you can do these like ensemble casts where you have a problem and things like that, right? Where maybe you have like the victim and he's getting harassed by the problem, the villain, and then the ingredients come in as like a superhero team and you have a lot of playing around with that. Right? And again, once you understand these formats, like, think about what you can do. You could personify, you could have a really sick personality for like an authority figure, like a fun, cool doctor, and they could have a ton of personality and be narrating some kind of ensemble cast version of like this happening and this happening and telling this sort of interesting story. You could do it in a claymation style. You could fucking sing the whole ad if you wanted to, right? So there's ways to stack some of these elements. And in the ad environments I see, it's like, Maximalist. Like some of the stuff I look at, I'm like, how the fuck is anyone buying this? Or why is anyone watching these ads? Because they're ridiculous. So ridiculousness is working. So do more of that. Next you have monsters. Again, I think it's interesting to ask this, ask yourself why, right? Like you see this kind of monster figure, right? And here you see Dr. Pickle times the monster ad, right? Which proves my point. You have this sort of Red Skull looking character. You have this one. Mummies are also in here, Frankensteins and things like that, glass figures. So, just kind of weird creatures which I put in the category of monsters tend to work pretty well. Then you have facets. Now, facets is me cheating a little bit because facets is not a format. Facets is basically what we use to describe one element of a segment. So, when we break down a segment, we break it down in terms of outcome, demographic, and facet. It's a 3-dimensional model. If that's confusing, go watch my other videos where I break this stuff down or maybe it's the next video I'm gonna do. I don't know if I've done a video breaking it down. But what it allows you to do is it allows you to slice up your market according to these different dimensions. And one of these dimensions is what I call facets. So a facet is, it's not a demographic, like it's not someone's age, their race. It's not anything that's like a demographic piece of information. And it's also not the problem that they're trying to solve or the solution they're trying to get to. It's not someone suffering from knee pain or menopause or something like that. Typically a facet encompasses a lot of things, but the most important thing it encompasses are habits, traits, or identity things. So are they a cigarette smoker? Are they a vegan? Are they a vegetarian? Do they identify as keto or carnivore? Are they on GLP-1? Are they considering TRT? Did they just get off of TRT? And so what you can find is there's ways to slice your market to create a lot of specificity and a lot of good like native targeting for the algorithm. But it's still really big. Like think of how many people are on GLP-1, right? So these can also be conditions, right? So you could have an ad that's for sexual vitality and you could have an ad for sexual vitality for men and you could have an ad of sexual vitality for Black men and you could have an ad for sexual vitality for Black men who are cigarette smokers, which seems super, super narrow. But when you have accounts that are spending a lot of money, that's actually where you can get a lot of— alpha by doing that, right? So here's some examples of different types of facets, and you could look at those. And if you multiply these facets times all the stuff we're talking about, different structures like timelines and deliveries like song ads and styles like Pixar, you know, it's pretty hard to run out of ideas. And these things just work over and over and over again. Okay, the next ones are pretty girl ads. That's pretty much what it is. Okay, you can go and look at some of the different examples on here. Inside of our Creative Cartel, which is basically our invite-only little mastermind where a lot of people who are working with 8 and 9-figure brands, we joke all the time, just make the person have big tits. And it seems super crass and it's super funny that the data shows that that stuff works. So you can look at examples on there. Some of these are ridiculous, but you know, adjust them according to your, Brand. The next one that's a little bit interesting is the gay spokesperson. There's a lot of people inside of Genesis who have gotten big winners by simply having their spokesperson be gay, right? And it's it's interesting to ask yourself why, right? Is it because of the authority? Is it because it's an interesting like facet to the personality, or it's just interesting interesting to look at, right? Like what is it about it? Is it only specific to a demographic? Are there other sort of characteristics or things that you can do for the persona that would have an equal lift, right? That no one's discovered yet. So I think that's worth looking at and pretty interesting. Next are animals and babies. Cats, animals, babies. We love looking at cat videos. I mean, that's the oldest meme on the internet of all time. So you see ads that work with those things. The next one is listicle, which is the structure. So humans like lists. We like 5 warning signs, 4 things, tips. Typically it's like, these are the symptoms, these are the warning signs, here are some tips of what to avoid, here's the steps to follow XYZ. Okay? And that's it. There's 16. I mean, this thing is gold. Some of it may be common sense, some of it might not be, but if you pair this with a deep understanding of what a format means, I don't think there's any ad account that you can't create wins for. Okay, so this is a super great gift. I hope you enjoy it and let me know in the comments below what you think about this, what other kind of videos you want to see, and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.