Mirella Crespi's creative diversity secret

Creative diversity means creating highly varied ads by mixing up concepts, formats, and messaging variations to reach different audience segments. Greater creative diversity makes you less dependent on any single creative approach and maximizes what you learn from creative tests.

The more creative concepts you test, the more audience segments you unlock. This compounds over time as new audiences reveal new creative opportunities to explore.

Mirella Crespi, founder of Creative Milkshake, has a proven framework for creative diversification. Her agency works with leading DTC brands like True Classic and Loop, plus global brands like Johnson & Johnson and Ben & Jerry's.

She walked us through her Creative Diversification Guide at a Motion event, and it's incredibly detailed. Let's break down how to apply it.

This Thumbstop edition dives into creative diversity – the key to unlocking creative volume, according to Mirella Crespi.

Creative diversity matters because it helps ensure the right ad shows up in the right persons feed.

Creative diversity is also a safety net. It spreads your budget out so that success isn’t dependent on any one idea.

Creative diversification guide

This is Mirella’s creative diversification guide, which you can use to remix your ads for more variety.

Use this as a template for exploring new ad concepts. Grab something from each pillar, mix-and-match to create an ad. For example:

• Message: Emotional trigger in the hook, product demo body

• Format: Short video, 9:16

• Execution: Sound-first, creator-led video

• Placement: Instagram story placement

The different options in these four pillars allow for a ton of different combinations. Try to find a combo you aren’t running right now and see how it performs!

Under-appreciated creative formats

One of Mirella’s key insights on creative diversity is that you should use different POVs. The different POVs are Brand, Customer, and Expert:

Let’s look at some underrated or underused examples for each point of view.

Brand POV: video sales letters

Video sales letters (VSLs) are not easy. They require great copywriting, strong execution, and a lot of polish. These tend to be much longer than the average Meta or TikTok ad.

When done right though, they are incredibly effective. They build brand awareness and authority while simultaneously driving sales.

We could do an entire Thumbstop on VSLs, but instead, let’s look at a stellar example from Pela:

I actually got this ad in my organic feed recently, and I watched the entire thing. It’s disarming in a good way. 

This ad walks the line of addressing the recent political turmoil without judgment. It speaks to Canadian customers without alienating American ones.

It educates you about some of their truly unique selling points and invites you to feel good about buying from them because of those USPs. 

Customer POV: street interviews

Mirella told us during her talk at the Creative Trends event that street interviews have performed very well across verticals.

This is a format that feels authentic and blends in with the organic feed. They’re also cheap, simple, and can be shot in batches. I’m surprised these aren’t more common.

Here’s an example from Glossier that stood out to me:

The key here is a soft sell. This doesn’t launch into an immediate list of value props – in fact none are explicitly stated.

The woman being interviewed just tells a story. I like the story, it’s simple but unexpected in this context. What I really like is how subtly this ad positions the product.

Travel feels glamorous. It often isn’t in reality, but the idea of jet-setting around the world and staying in fancy hotels is appealing to most of us.

This ad says to me, “you may not be able to travel the world, but you can smell like someone who does.”

Expert POV: native advertorials

If you work for a beauty or skincare brand, you’re probably familiar with these ads. They’re a staple of that industry.

I’m not sure why advertorials (ads that are tutorials) aren’t more common outside the beauty industry. These ads show you how a product works and help consumers understand how it fits into their life. There’s a lot of value in that.

I liked this ad from Away, for example:

If you click through to watch this one, you’ll notice that it’s whitelisted via the creator. This is a nice touch, it makes the ad feel slightly more genuine because it’s coming from a 3rd party instead of directly from the brand.

It’s a quick tutorial on how he’s packing for vacation that ends with a list of the Away products he used for it. Another really great soft sell.

Also, this ad sent me down a rabbit-hole of searches to understand the nesting method of packing. That kept me thinking about luggage for much longer than the 30s it took to watch the ad.

If Away had driven traffic from this ad to a landing page that further explained the nesting method, they would’ve earned a lot of attention from me.

Creative diversity compounds

Diversifying your ad creative helps you reach more audience segments. That compounds by enabling you to test more variety.

I’ll use our fake sunscreen brand as an example.

Let’s say our main demographic is women in their 20s who like our product because it doesn’t feel oily and dries quickly. There are only so many ways to convey this message to them.

Then one day, we make an ad that highlights the clean ingredients. It performs well, but the demographic data shows that it’s doing best among moms in their 30s. 

After some digging, we realize this audience segment wants sunscreen for their kids that doesn’t contain potentially harmful ingredients. Now we have a new audience to speak to, which gives us new creative directions to explore.

Creative diversity leads to audience segment variety, which enables more creative diversity.

Tying it all together 🧵

AI is going to make ad creation faster, cheaper, and more efficient. If you don’t expand your creative diversity, those advantages won’t matter.

Use Mirella’s creative diversification guide to explore new angles and reach new audience segments. Honestly, anything different from the typical ads you make could be worth testing.