✍🏽 Trust me and ignore the data

Smooche is a lip-plumping brand with big Gen Z vibes. In fact, when we first started working with them, they mentioned the brand is for teenage girls who want to try the latest beauty trends. Even looking at meta - overwhelmingly they were selling to younger women.

All the data, reviews, conversations pointed to focusing on young women. But a creative strategist on my team had an incredible insight. She talked to her aunt who shared a real fear “I don’t want granny lips when I get older”.

This is the real stuff winning ads are made from. Numbers can’t match the raw insights that come out of real conversations. Talking to people and understanding their fears, desires, pain points. That’s where the best ads come from. And in this era where Meta demands you find new audiences to continue scaling… you need these insights more than ever.

So we changed our approach. We started featuring older women (example). Started talking about “granny lips”. Pretty soon, we had winning ads on our hands. The data would have had us go in the other direction. Data dances when you tell it to. F*** the data.

✍🏽 If people don’t like it, tell them they do!

There’s a classic story about Blockbuster that echos in my head. Actually as I did a cursory google search while writing this… turns out it isn’t a true story at all! But anyways -

If you’re too young to remember, to watch a VCR tape you had to rewind it to start from the beginning. The story goes that Blockbuster asked customers to rewind after they watched, to make it easy on the next person. But no one ever did.

So the design thinking flip is well instead of asking people to do it after they watch, which they won’t - why don’t we just ask them to rewind before they watch! How simple and elegant of a solution.

I find the same is true of making high-converting ads. Smooche had an issue. Their lip plumper uses Cayenne pepper, so it burns. Many people bought the product and decided the burn is not worth the plumping effect. So we thought, well what if we tell them to expect the burn, even to love the burn? Because the burn means it’s working!