Launch creative for a cold audience that has never heard of you.
Creative built for viewers who do not know your category, your product or your name — with the ask sized to the decision you are actually asking them to make.
The curse of knowing your own product
Launch creative is made by people who have thought about the product daily for months. The resulting ad answers questions the viewer has not asked yet and skips the one they actually have, which is what is this.
A cold viewer needs the category before they can evaluate a differentiator — the feature is meaningless until they know what it is a feature of.
App and SaaS are different jobs
An install is low-consequence, individual and immediate. A SaaS purchase may involve a budget, other stakeholders and a migration. Creative that treats them identically is well-matched to one and mismatched to the other.
For apps, reduce friction to trying. For SaaS, supply the argument the viewer will have to repeat to somebody else — and size the ask to something a cold viewer can reasonably give.
Continuity with the destination
The ad is half the journey. A viewer landing on a store listing that looks unrelated to what they just watched bounces, and the loss gets blamed on the creative rather than on the discontinuity. We treat the ad and the first screen of the listing as one piece of communication.
Each with written acceptance criteria.
- Launch set: several pieces, each committing to one idea
- Placement-specific cuts
- Recommendations for store-listing continuity
- Testing structure so results attribute to a cause
- Two revision rounds