"Psychology isn't just a nice to have," says Sarah Levinger. 

"It's one of the most powerful cost-reduction tools in your arsenal. It's the difference between ads that scale, and ones that won't." 

Using psychology in Meta & TikTok ads in 2024

DTC brands love to copy popular ad formats like ‘TikTok made me buy it, three reasons why, and POV-style ads.’ 

But the more consumers see an ad format, the novelty can wane. 

How can creative strategists get their team to create more original ad ideas? 

Let’s start by identifying the problem—in DTC, all of our jobs are online. The entirety of our day is in computerized form. 

But there’s a lot of research to show that using your hands daily is one of the best ways to elicit better creativity from the brain. 

We think creative ideas come from abstraction, from talking in meetings or absorbing information like written briefs. 

Some of the best brands in the world—like Google, Apple, and Pixar—often start a lot of their creative workshops with the teams laying out a bunch of toys on the table and just having people work with their hands.

Or think of a creative DTC innovator like Barry Hott. He was one of the first people I ever saw use the physical sticky note in ads which has become a very prevalent format in UGC.  

It was a physical thing. He got the idea by using something physical in the environment that he was in. 

So creative teams need to understand that your physical environment heavily influences how creative you are. 

Applying novelty in your DTC ads

The psychology of novelty can be a huge driver of creative performance. 

Brands know they need to stand out and be different, but it is a mistake to take this too far. 

What research shows is that people do love novel things. But they want novelty that is also familiar. 

There was a study done on how songs get into the top billboard charts. With pop charts, you have thousands of songs in competition. And many of them feature similar elements. 

You might think—to break into the top charts, the song has to sound unique to stand out. 

What this study found was that the songs in the top 10 charts only have a 16% differentiation from the other songs in the industry that were produced that year. 

So if you produce a pop song and you make it to the top charts, you only have a 16% differentiation, that's not that big.

What this tells us is we don't want something drastically different from everything else. 

When it comes down to creating ads for brands, novelty doesn't have to be bizarre or outrageous or distasteful, it can just be changing the color of something.  

Or turning something upside down that is not normally upside down. Or using things in a way they aren’t typically used. 

But when you use novelty to catch attention, you need to stay within limits. If it is too abrasive, the brain will immediately reject it. 

 We don't want it to be rejected. We just want it to be interesting enough that people will stop. That's what novelty is supposed to do.

Novelty often comes from unexpected combinations of things. 

How DTC brands can use the psychology of novelty in their advertising 

The brain has trillions of associations. Everything you’ve ever come into contact with, the brain has recorded it.

 Because of all that information that is stored and to conserve energy in decision-making, the brain creates shortcuts. 

 Every time you interact with something—a phone, a car, a smell, a plant—it records it just in case the brain needs it for later. 

So for brands to get attention and stop the scroll, you need to get past the filtering that our brains are doing. 

For example, let’s say you’re a coffee brand. 

In the first few seconds of your ad, you show a coffee cup.

Within milliseconds, the brain helps us decide whether this is something that we should listen to or look at right now. 

For most brains, just seeing a coffee cup is not going to arrest attention. It’s going to tell you to keep scrolling. 

So you need to make the brain look twice. 

When it comes to creating interesting ads and hooks, a good method is to compare two brain associations that don’t normally relate to each other.

For example, you show deodorant being applied to a coffee cup.

This creates a strange moment for the brain to go “I’ve never categorized those two associations together. Why are these two associations together?” 

The brain will stop just so it can process this new information.

So it is a very good way to get people to stop the scroll. Just take two inanimate objects that don’t relate to each other and try to relate them to each other. 

Here’s how to use brain associations in your next ad concept session. 

1. Get a bunch of scraps of paper. 
2. Write down a bunch of random objects (coffee mug, paperclip, pumpkin, deodorant, tennis racket, candle etc). 
3. Pull two pieces of paper out of a cup. 
4. And then be like “Okay I have a tennis racket and a paper clip—how could I make these into an ad?” 

You’ll be amazed at the creativity that happens when you have two things that are not related.  

And you’ll break beyond the standard ideas used by other brands.

How to create winning ads using novelty 

Here are some more ways you can apply Sarah’s concept of using novelty without jarring people. 

Playful reversal ads

Take a familiar concept or image associated with the product and present it in a reversed or inverted manner. The twist should be subtle enough to evoke curiosity without causing cognitive dissonance. 

In this viral video, a TikTok creator eats unusually large versions of ordinarily small candies. As I was watching the TikTok video on my computer, even my 5-year-old daughter looked over and asked: “What the heck is he doing, how do those giant candies fit into the bag?” Brain activated! 

Temporarily reversing your packaging colors—like Skittles famously did during a seasonal promotion below—can also playfully jolt attention. 

Sequential discount example

You can also apply these concepts to offers by telling a story that unfolds backward showing increasing discount offers at each stage. This will build excitement leading up to a grand reveal.

The entrepreneur Alex Hormozi hilariously did this during a live stream book launch to 200,00 fans. Alex is known for pricing his books low—so when revealed the price of his new book and an online course was $1,797—people were shocked as it seemed unlike him.

He then kept layering discounts until the price was zero, delighting his audience. He then introduced options for adding swag and physical collector copies which immediately sold out. 

Common mistakes DTC brands make in creative strategy research 

Something that brands often skip is accurately identifying emotions. Brands always want to figure out problems and solutions. 

It’s common to use qualitative interviews to understand the paths to purchase, asking questions like: Where did you come from? When did you purchase our product? What platform did you first discover our products? 

Those answers can be useful but often miss the root reason why people are buying your product.  

You need to answer questions like: 

• How did you feel before buying our product? 
• How did you feel after you bought it? 
• What were you struggling with? 
• How long were you struggling with that? 

It comes down to more of an empathetic viewpoint that brands forget about.

Research techniques for psychology-based ads 

“Social proof or authority proof—most marketers know and use those two mental heuristics in their ads,” says Sarah Levinger. 

“But there are hundreds and hundreds of other psychological principles that marketers don’t know about.”  

So how do you uncover these secrets of the mind? 

Let your creative strategy research guide the way. 

6 ways to find psychological insights to use in Facebook ads

Start with a defined research question—something you’re trying to understand for a brand—and then work backwards. 

Some products don’t need academic research. 

But for things like parenting products or health segments, you’ll need research to back up your claims, so here is my process for finding scientific research you can then use in your advertising. 

#1) Google Scholar 

Start here and filter by what has been researched in the past three to five years. 

Narrow things down by only looking at studies that have been peer-reviewed. 

Look for something proprietary that someone has researched to potentially use in a campaign. 

In addition to Sarah's techniques with Google Scholar, try the AI tool Elicit.

You enter a research question, it pulls scientific papers for you, and also summarizes findings. 

You can also upload PDFs and it will analyze them for you.

Use the filters and columns to sort by year, funding source, type of study, and even things like occupation—excellent for creating messaging aimed at specific segments of customers.   

#2) ChatGPT  

Use ChatGPT to think through problems and then tweak what it suggests. 

Some people say you need super specific, detailed prompts. But I've found the best results when I keep my prompts neutral. I just state what I'm trying to understand and let ChatGPT help me think through the problem. 

For example, let’s say I’m selling a children’s learning toy. I need to market to children and get them to want the toy first—but my ads also make that bridge to the adult decision-maker. 

I’ll use ChatGPT to outline the problem I’m trying to solve and get it to brainstorm different headlines or ad concepts. 

3) Customer reviews‍

Next, I’ll analyze or read a ton of customer reviews to understand the emotion behind purchases. 

I will also run an NLP (natural language processing) analysis of reviews and after-purchase text data. NLP reports are a linguistic analysis of what emotions are coming out of your customer base. 

In doing this, I usually categorize into nine different emotions and then identify a primary emotion that customers are currently solving by buying the brand.

You can then challenge your creative team to take that one emotional message—such as “people buy this to feel safe”—and then represent it in different ways. 

• How many different ways could you say “confidence” in an ad? 
• How many different ways could you say “fear?”
• How many different ways could you say “comfort"?

So instead of trying to take one angle like “Moms who run” or “Dads who grill” which can fatigue so quickly, especially with today’s algorithms, you’re opening up millions of ways to express emotions.

You will never run out of ideas for ads if you follow this course because you are taking an emotion and displaying it in many different ways. 

‍#4) Pinterest Trends, Google Trends, and Reddit 

I don’t think enough people use Pinterest Trends. It is great for finding early signals of trends just starting to take off and also shows you high-intent searches.  

I specifically look for things that are coming up that nobody else has noticed before. I then go and check that keyword in other platforms like TikTok to further validate. 

I’ll also use Google Trends, Answer the Public, and Reddit, to try to understand what’s happening in the culture around the product.

#5) Qualitative interviews 

I then try to interview a few customers. I always ask “Tell me a story” to customers as that delivers incredible insights. 

I also ask: What did you do? Why did you do it? Who were you with? This helps me to uncover how the purchase was made. 

#6) Reorient your messaging to the right problem

With the research complete, I then look at the positioning and make sure the messaging is aligned with what the customers are actually experiencing. 

The #1 mistake I see brands make is that they position to the wrong problem.

The research might reveal that consumers are looking for one thing but all the brand’s positioning and messaging are talking about a different problem. 

 So the research helps to align to the right problem.

ChatGPT prompts for ad copy

Try these ChatGPT prompts Sarah uses regularly to write psychology-based ad copy.

1) Acceptance prompt

Give me 10 ad headlines (4-7 words long) that persuades [product] customers that they'll feel accepted with [brand] product.

2) Esteem prompt

Give me 10 ad headlines (4-7 words long) that persuades [product] customers that they can increase their appeal with [brand] product.

3) Nurturance prompt

Give me 10 ad headlines (4-7 words long) that persuades [product] customers that they can nurture themselves (or their families) with [brand] product.

Source: Sarah’s original Tweet here.

Learning more about consumer psychology research 

If you want to go deeper into the broader science of consumer psychology research, start with the book Marketing to Mindstates by Will Leach. 

Will is an economist and works for big brands like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. 

It’s a very practical book. Will takes super complex theory and then shows you how to apply behavior psychology and behavior economics to impact sales. 

The podcast Nudge is also incredible. In this podcast, they talk about psychological things that all humans do, regardless of culture, so it is a broader look at human psychology. 

If you want a more specific look at how to apply these scientific principles into advertising, I suggest listening to the Behavioral Science for Brands podcast. 

This podcast is fantastic because they take use cases, showing how consumer psychology was used to build brands. 

In a recent episode, for example, they told the story of Hoover vs. Dyson and how Dyson used psychology to create their brand.

Creative strategy & consumer psychology 

The best creative strategists—like Dara Denney and Barry Hott—are all very curious people.

The reason why curiosity is so important is that people like Dara and Barry are working hard to get into the deepest details of each problem that they’re trying to solve. 

You will need to be adaptable as everything in this industry is always changing. 

Core skills like design, videography, copywriting, project management, and paid advertising are also important. 

Those skills are the obvious tasks that you need to be able to do in a creative strategist role—but curiosity and adaptability are the core traits. 

How to research emotions to target in ads 

Post-purchase surveys are quick and useful for understanding consumer feelings. 

For inspiration, go and look at how the brand True Classic runs its post-purchase surveys. 

I think True Classic is at the forefront of using emotion everywhere in its marketing. And it has paid off well for them.

In previous surveys, they’ve asked questions like "What did you feel before you purchased True Classic?" And then listed out things like “I felt self-conscious, I didn’t feel confident, I didn’t know how my clothes fit.” 

Asking questions like that will help your brand start moving towards an emotion-first marketing strategy. 

Using consumer psychology to create high-performing Facebook ads

It’s easy to get lost in research.

So start adding psychology to your ads with Sarah’s simple plan below.

Run an analysis.

Find an emotion to target.

Build some ads that express that emotion. Print money, repeat.