Your Weekly Pencil - August 17, 2021

New signals

• Think like an artist—this is only one of the ways you can take better photos of your food, whether for Facebook or Instagram. Shopify release a Food Photography 101 Guide here.
• A new report from Facebook details what makes effective video content. They confirmed that Creative is the key driver, while executional elements (duration, flighting, targeting, etc.) are considered to be of less significance.
• This year, Instagram will celebrate diversity through the campaign "Who We Become is Yours to Make". To attract a wider range of users, the campaign features portraits of Instagram creators "in culturally and contextually relevant locations."
• Cheez-It is celebrating its centennial with the introduction of a new direct-to-consumer (DTC) site offering a variety of merchandise and exclusive products. The commerce play intends to help Cheez-It speed up new product introductions, following other large packaged foods marketers in investing more in DTC as consumers put a higher premium on convenience.
  
• As the advertising industry shifts, Facebook announces a New, Privacy-Focused Approach. PETs (Privacy-Enhancing Technologies) are being developed for ads that will protect personal information while still providing insights into campaign and ad performance.

‍

ABC = Attention + Benefit + CTA - DTC Facebook Ad best practice from Angela Caglia

• Because Angela Caglia is a DTC brand, its go-to-market strategy is heavily reliant on digital marketing, particularly Facebook Ads. We selected their ad as this week’s best not only because it was visually impressive, but also because it communicated strong ABC messaging
• ABC stands for attention, benefit, and CTA (call-to-action). For short-form video ads, this format is particularly effective because you want to maximize the limited amount of seconds to capture your audience's attention, and it allows you to do so. For more insights, read the full blog post linked above!
• if you don't have time to do it yourself, or if you’re lacking creative inspiration, we can help! Pencil’s newly updated platform is programmed to write with narrative generation where the “creative” AI will write down unlimited lines of copy for you, in the attention, benefit, CTA format.

‍

How to make your brand stand out - Pencil CEO Will Hanschell Shares His Insights

• Will Hanschell, CEO of Pencil talks about his stance on ads, creativity, automation, and all three combined!
• "People think that AI comes up with very boring, machine-sounding spammy stuff,  but it actually comes up with the weirdest stuff you can imagine."

‍

Something deeper

• The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one.