Sprints With Evan: How To Create Ads That Gen Zers Can't Resist With Lauren Labeled

Evan Lee: that Gen Zs can't resist with the two amazing women that we see here on stage with us. We have Lauren Mabra and Lauren Ferry. So very excited to get into the meat and potatoes. But before we start to uncover all the ways that we can create these ads, I just wanted to say a couple words about Motion first.

So on our end, Motion is the home for creative strategy. And essentially what this means is that we all know that creative has become the most important lever for success in all of paid advertising.

But what we also know that there's two primary teams involved. There are our media buyers who are quite analytical and our creative teams who are exactly that, more creative. Both of these teams need to operate in tandem, but there's almost some natural friction that's created.

And at Motion, what we look to do is help bridge that gap with creative strategy.

And we're going to be talking all about the different stages in the creative strategy flywheel today. So both Laurens are going to bless us with exactly what to look at.

And the way that Motion empowers this workflow is that we focus on making it easy to analyze what's going on, visualize ultimately the performance, and then share this across the board.

If anybody's interested, I'm going to have a button pop up on the screen. It's also going to populate in the chat and you'd want to learn more about Motion. Please feel free, give it a click that I have right here.

So we can check it out. And then you can see it in the chat there too. Cool.

Couple housekeeping notes. Your questions, what you'll notice on the top right hand side of your screen is a chat button, a Q&A button, and a poll section. Throw those questions just into the Q&A so we're able to just help get to those closer to the end.

A recording is going to be made available after this bad boy, so you'll have what you need. And then we're always looking for feedback, whether it be on content, the overall production, and anything in between. So that's where we've got your backs.

Sweet. So that's enough out of me. Um, it's time to get to the to the main event here of how to create ads that Gen Zs can't resist.

And like I'd mentioned, we have Lauren Mabra, Lauren Ferry with us today, and they are the co-founders of Lauren Labeled.

A couple words on my end. I've known them for a little while now. I think it's longer than we all expect and they are absolutely incredible when it comes to everything creative. Now, what do I mean by that? What I really mean is we're in an age when people talk about how quickly your ads are going to fatigue and you need to swap them out. But the really awesome thing about these two is that they've made so many banger creatives for uh, honestly a number of different brands that are still live to this day. So that's a testament to true winners across the board. So everybody, please give them some give them some love. Please give them a follow all over the place. And welcome Lauren and Lauren to the show, please.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Oh, yeah.

Lauren Mabra: Thanks, Evan.

Lauren Ferry: Thank you.

Lauren Mabra: That was such a good intro. We're super excited to be here and I feel like this is just going to be so juicy.

Lauren Ferry: Yeah.

Lauren Mabra: I agree.

Lauren Ferry: I agree.

Evan Lee: And you know I'm your biggest fans. Like this is easy. This is the easiest for me more than anything.

Lauren Mabra: We're gonna say about you, so don't even worry.

Evan Lee: Stop this. Stop this, stop this, stop this.

Okay. So to get into how to create ads that Gen Zs can't resist, like at Motion, we focus a lot just on this overall flywheel more or less.

And I actually wanted to kick us off in our first bucket here being research. So these are usually the steps that help us build out personas that we wanted to dive into. And I'm going to throw this first one to Lauren F. What I'm curious about is where where the heck do you even get started with everything on the research side of things?

Lauren Ferry: Yeah, I I love this. So the the biggest thing for Lauren and I is like we really, really like to take a good amount of time to make sure we completely understand who the client is, who they're going for, and you know, the really, really specific things that go into targeting that specific um buyer demographic. So we typically take about two weeks to do our research when we start off with a client. Um, we'll spend about two weeks going into a lot of the things that we ask in our intake form. Um, when it comes to the intake form, the biggest things that we ask are like, what are the branding guidelines? Um, what problem are you trying to solve? Um, messaging that's working, messaging that you guys would like to test, messaging that isn't working. So all of that kind of goes into the intake form as well as like some little nuances that are specific to the brand. Um, a good example of like a nuance with um one of the clients that have come to us is they were a um face, like a skincare brand and they had this oil that you would like a a vitamin C oil. And so normally you see a lot on TikTok, people actually use the dropper to apply it on the face, but they specifically said in the intake form, we need to have it on the fingers and then it needs to be applied to the face. Another good example of a nuance that would be in an intake form would be we had this flower delivery service. And so the biggest thing for them was when you open up the box and the first shot, it has to be above and it has to be showing the full flowers and none of the stems. So there's a lot of little nuances that we try to get ahead of and get all that information from before we can even start into like our own research ourselves.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah, I wanted to can I just chime in there really quick?

Evan Lee: Of course.

Lauren Mabra: Okay. I was I also wanted to say like, I feel like a lot of brands when we ask for branding guidelines, they throw us like their color palette. And it's like, it's way more than that because just like Lauren was saying, it's like in the way your product is used, like people can get that wrong. And also a lot of the brands that we work with, they are already, they already have a media budget, they're already spending on ads and they've already paid for the data. So we don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's like, show us your top performers, show us the ones that have flopped, show us your statics so we can use that same messaging within the video ads to, you know, use messaging that's already worked in a different medium. Um, so I just wanted to add that in there before we moved on.

Evan Lee: No, no, no. I I really love it because like you're getting to know, well, like Lauren F, you mentioned like getting to know these brands intimately at the end of the day through that process. And I know like people typically go through the intake form and the specific examples are super helpful. Lauren M, I'm going to throw one at you. So, of course we start with the intake form. I'm curious about where else are you looking to get this information and then where does that information actually live at the end of the day if you don't mind sharing?

Lauren Mabra: Yeah. Um, so let me go ahead and share my screen.

All good?

Evan Lee: We're live.

Lauren Mabra: Okay. So we are we ask for that intake form from the brand. That's pretty easy. Um, and then the bulk of that like onboarding phase is spent here building out the buyer persona and doing the market research that is so important to to the performance of your ads. And I think that a lot of people might look at this and maybe assume a lot of these things like, oh, I know this and kind of just brush over it. But really this this market research phase is the meat of of ads that live on seven plus months or ads that flop immediately, especially with Gen Z, you really have to get to know them. They're very savvy consumers. And so, um, I don't know if you've been on TikTok comments, but they'll be the first ones to call you out when you get something incorrect. So don't be scared, but you need to do your research with everyone, especially this demographic. Um, so in this buyer persona template, like this is where everything lives with our market research. And so we'll even go like be a little extra and go down to like naming the buyer persona. Um, we'll cover the the basic like demographic stuff of what's, you know, how old are they, what's their gender, where do they live? Is it rural? Is it urban? Like are they in a city? Um, and then more of the like touchy feely stuff of like, okay, what do they value in in relation to this brand? And so we actually, um, took a few examples. This was for a makeup brand that we've worked with. And so values and with this skincare brand that is like plant-based, botanicals, like very clean, like some of the values that their ideal person would look for is like, are they sustainably sourced? Are they cruelty-free? And the difference is is like you're targeting people who care about those things versus someone who goes to the drugstore, picks up the cheapest concealer or whatever, probably isn't your buyer demographic. Like that's not your ideal client. And so it's important to know those things. And then we go into favorite brands, which also gives us a really great place to research. Um, we we live on the TikTok feed. Like we just spend way too much time there and we also are successful with our jobs by spending time on there too. And so that is a huge resource for us when researching. So if you list out your customer's favorite brands, that will also give you a place to like, okay, let me go to Kosa's TikTok and the comment sections for competitors videos, related videos, um, even existing ads in in the brand's account, that is like a gold mine for what people care about, their misconceptions, their, you know, barriers to buying. And so that's where we get a ton of this research too. And then we go down to buying concerns, buying motivations, and as well as like pop culture interests. And then, um, we also do hashtag research and keywords, which kind of go hand in hand, but I think it's really important to understand the language that your your buyer speaks because you can call it out and the whole point of this is to get someone to stop and pay attention to you so that you can convert them.

Lauren Ferry: Right. Also another cool thing to add about like the hashtag research and the keywords is like when you put some of those hashtags into TikTok, you just get this massive for you page of all these different people who care about the same things. Like it's really, really cool to just be able to see this is really who I'm trying to target. Let's stalk them, let's see the comments, let's see what they care about and really like dive into like who they actually are.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So good.

Lauren Ferry: So we use a tool called Miro, which is basically like a whiteboard in a in a sense. And this is where we kind of get everything down on paper. And like I mentioned, every creative process is definitely not the same. So for some people, they might use, you know, a ton of different hooks and they might all put those in, you know, one Google Doc or whatever the case may be. This is what we found work after trying a lot of different things. And so I'll kind of start from like left to right. So here is where we keep a bank of sticky notes.

Lauren Mabra: Can you zoom in a little more?

Lauren Ferry: Yeah. What about now? Is this fine?

Lauren Mabra: Keep going. Keep going. More. Yeah.

Lauren Ferry: Okay.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah, I think that's good.

Evan Lee: Perfect.

Lauren Mabra: Okay.

Lauren Ferry: So here I have we have like this bank that's basically like these sticky notes. And what's so great about this is we can drag and drop these. We can always add more and they kind of just live within the actual client's Miro board. So you can see we've had listed out after all of our research, we'll kind of do a deep dive and we'll just go in and we'll make all these sticky notes that say pain points or like buyer objections. And then we'll do all the value props under the sun that we can think of as far as the brand goes. So this is one of the scrubs brand brands that we've been working with for over the last year and a half. And we just have all these different value propositions that you guys can see here. Um, we'll also add in like some call to actions that we can use. And then also variations, which I'll get into in just a second. So then, I'm going to have to zoom out just a little bit. But over here is basically like the skeleton of where we build our ad creatives. And so what we really, really like about this is you can just literally take the value props from over here, drag and drop and start building your script out. And so what's so cool is like this is just a huge creative space. And then as far as the hooks, you guys didn't see any hooks over in the bank and that's because one big thing about Lauren and I is we're constantly on TikTok. So when Lauren and I are spending time on TikTok, whether it's at night or during the day, any ads that we come across or any videos that are even organic that we come across and we're like, wow, that actually stopped me. It made me want to buy or the visual was just so engaging, even if it's something that we're not even interested in, we'll throw it in a slack channel. So I think that's something that really sets us apart from a lot of other people who like are constantly coming up with these ideas and these different scripts is ours are constantly fresh while also keeping our learnings like in our back pocket. So we'll take a hook from our um inspiration board in Slack or we'll take some sort of inspiration from our Slack channel. We'll create the hook out of it and then we'll pull the value props in where you can kind of get the whole entire flow of how the script is going to be.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah, and I I just wanted to add on like this is definitely just like the skeleton of the script. And I think it's really great because we can also dissect these skeletons too. Like if we wanted to swap out a value prop and do a new script that way, it's like, boom, one video turns to another video and you can easily make like in a second, three to four different like concepts just with all of your ideas on these sticky notes.

Lauren Ferry: Mhm. Mhm.

Evan Lee: The ownership mentality is incredible. Like you've been through the fire and you're like, okay, how do we just make this work for ourselves?

Lauren Mabra: Yeah. It it does. Um, yeah, Lauren, it's it's crazy to see like what where we've come from, like where we started and where we are now because this all started from me hitting up Lauren and being like, hey, like there's not really a place for companies to source owned media. Like it's like Billo, Fiverr or influencers which charge an arm and a leg. Like you wouldn't source owned media from influencers, you know, as that the only source. And so I was like, it was more of like a, let's just see. Like let's just try to sell a couple videos. Like we'll just see. And so we got on Twitter and next thing you know, people were like, we were booking sales before our website had launched, which I was like, okay, the demand is crazy here. And then people were hitting us up like, hey, are you two the only faces? Like we need other faces. We have a demographic that's like 50. And we're like, okay, well, I guess my mom can do it. Like, I don't know. And so, you know, like it was just out of demand. Like Lauren and I never sat down and were like, hey, let's build this agency. Like let's build this platform. Like it was just out of demand where it was like, okay, I guess we're going to go with it. And then next thing you know, like we have a whole team of creators. We have a whole internal team.

Lauren Ferry: 70, 72 creators later. Here we are.

Evan Lee: Let's go. I love it.

Lauren Mabra: Yeah. Thank you so much, Evan.

Lauren Ferry: Thank you for having us. This is awesome.

Lauren Mabra: This is awesome.

Evan Lee: This was super fun. Everyone whose questions we didn't get to, apologies. We're going to send the recording out and all that good stuff after. But everybody, enjoy the rest of your days and we're all going to chat really, really soon, okay?

Lauren Ferry: Thank you. Bye guys.

Lauren Mabra: Bye.

Evan Lee: Bye.