1.
- A PUBLICATION OF THE WILL MARLOW AGENCY -
Facebook Ads for B2B Leaders
Mastering
Facebook Ads
Learn to Recognize and Write Great Facebooks Ads

2.
What Makes A Great Ad?
A Guide for B2B Marketers
Will Marlow Agency

3.
The Principles of Advertising
If you understand the fundamentals of ad writing,
it doesn’t matter where the ad appears.
My hero David Ogilvy, known as the father of modern advertising, wrote
extensively on what makes great ads, and his guidance is still valid today, even if it
is largely ignored, and we draw on his expertise heavily.
My other hero, the fictional Don Draper, said that you should bathe yourself in ads
if you want to be a great ad writer.
This eBook is meant to help marketers become better ad writers by
1. highlighting Facebook Ads that work well,
2. highlighting Facebook Ads that are terrible, and
3. helping you consider lots of ads at once.
This approach to teaching ad writing is premised on the belief that repetition
breeds excellence. That is, if you are studying painting, you are better off
spending six months paintings 100 portraits rather than six months trying to make
one portrait perfect. We want you to look through these ads that follow to be
able to make quick judgments on whether the ad is powerful.
My hero David Ogilvy, known as the father of modern advertising, wrote
extensively on what makes great ads, and his guidance is still valid today, even if it
is largely ignored, and we draw on his expertise heavily.
My other hero, the fictional Don Draper, said that you should bathe yourself in ads
if you want to be a great ad writer.

4.
And you should do so in the context of the following 9 questions, because as the
great Tony Robbins says, the quality of your results is determined by the quality of
your questions. You should think about the following questions as you are writing
your own ads, and you should start by thinking about these questions in the
context of the ads that follow.
Finally, I want to point out that advertising in the digital arena is an eco-system.
You are always competing for the attention of your audience, and you are not
always competing against your direct competitors.
It is critically important to understand that the following ads were drawn from
only twopeople. This means that approximately 200 ads were in the Facebook
Newsfeeds of two people. That is a lot of ads.
I have tried to group the ads in a sensible way: i.e., ads for the New York Times are
next to ads for the Wall Street Journal, and desktop ads are separated from
mobile ads. But even though the Wall Street Journal is directly competing with
the New York Times, it is also competing with Whirlpool, Dyson, the
Commonwealth of Virginia, and IBM, all of whom are buying ads to reach the
same people.
It helps to remember that your ads need to stand out not only against your
competitors, but against all other ads that are reaching the same individual.
What follows are the questions you should consider when looking at the ads. I
hope you find this exercise useful in becoming a more effective marketer.
1. Does the headline grab your attention? David Ogilvy said that when
someone sees your ad, the headline will be read 80% more frequently
than the lower body copy, and we believe that this is still true. If you
make your headline more effective, you are going to have far better
results than if you spend time dithering with the less-read subtext.
Should.
2. Does the headline evoke a compelling emotion? Selling is not an
entirely rational thing. If you are simply trying to state the facts, you
are unlikely to stand out.

5.
3. Does the image grab your attention? Since the beginning of
advertising, there has been a war between the art department and the
copy department over which is more important. My own position is that
you need to excel somewhere. You can’t make a great ad if you have
mediocre copy and mediocre art. But you can make a great ad if you
are excel only in one of the two areas
4. Does the image evoke a compelling emotion? Once your attention is
grabbed, you need to be compelled to do something. We believe that
the image should evoke an emotion of some type, just like the copy.
5. Does the ad hold your interest?
6. Does the ad appeal to your ego?
7. Does the ad appeal to your sense of greed? Or more nicely put, does it
appeal to your “expectation of gain?”
8. Does the ad appeal to your sense of fear? It is important to note that
“fear of loss” is significantly more motivational than anticipation of
gains. Some studies show that the fear of losing $50 is more
motivational than the expectation of gaining $500.
9. Does compel you to take an action, and is the action clear?
The same ad does not need to hit all of these points. You can have a great ad that
appeals to greed and not fear, for instance. But you can’t have a great ad that
misses all of these points. And now that you know them, I encourage you to
bathe yourself in the ads that follow and see how they measure up.
Don’t forget that even the bad ads were likely approved by more than one
professionally trained marketer, which should give you hope that there is plenty of
room for you to be a leader in this industry.
-Will Marlow

6.
Analysis: Strong ad: plays on “anticipation of gain” – get $300
toward accomplishing a goal. However, it should be noted that “fear
of loss” is generally more effective. People are more motivated by a
fear of losing $50 than by the possibility of gaining $500. Still, good
job to Google for providing a compelling incentive.

7.
Analysis: Unlike the previous page which showed a strong ad from
Google, this is a weak ad from Bing. At best, this is an “awareness”
ad – it is attempting to motivate via fear, but it fails because the fear
is completely ill-defined: anyone “at risk” of missing the 30% of
searchers who use Bing is already missing them, and has lived with
the consequences of this risk for a long time. Fear needs to be real
in order to be credible in an ad.
Grade: F.

8.
Analysis: This is slightly better than the previous Bing Ad – it plays on
the “anticipation of gain” with the $100 ad credit, and it gives a
meaningful size of opportunity by highlighting the 56M searchers in
their network – much better than the other ad that highlights “30%
of searchers” which is a meaningless number – 30% could be a lot or
a little depending on how you define it.
Grade: B

9.
Analysis: Another terrible ad – this is essentially an informational or
awareness play at best. We see these a lot: they come from
marketers who think that all a consumer needs is more information
about their product – then they’ll buy! Alas, this is not effective. This
ad gets an F.
Grade: F.

10.
Analysis: We are not fans of this ad – it is not an “F” because it uses
a proven “click-bait” headline to attract the target audience: people
interested in cloud trends. But we can’t give this ad above a “C” due
to the absence of a compelling reason for downloading the report. It
should have said something like, “The Top Ten Cloud Trends for
2017” that will change the way you do business” – playing on fear of
the unknown and relevance to their life.
Grade: C.

11.
Analysis: This is a strong ad – it may not play on greed or fear, but it
does intrigue people into seeing data visualizations that changed
history, which can play on a desire to change history if targeted at
the right group of people – those who are actively creating data
visualizations.
Grade: B

12.
Analysis: This is another bad ad. It mixes fear + gain, but it fails to
execute on either approach. The hero image orders the audience to
“delight their customers every time” without providing any real
information, and the description stokes fear by saying that
businesses are failing at marketing, but doesn’t finish the thought.
This ad should be rewritten as: “9/10 businesses are failing at digital
marketing. Read this ebook to avoid ending up like one of them.”
Grade: F-

13.
Analysis: This is an outstanding ad: everyone hates meetings, and
avoiding 25% of your meetings is a super tangible benefit. On top of
that, they get points for using humor in a B2B ad, which is rarely
done.
Grade: A+

14.
Analysis: This ad is another hohum B2B ad – where is the benefit?
Where is the gain? Where the fear of loss? The benefit (reaching
new audiences and re-engaging followers) is compelling if you
believe it, and if you’re already interested, but it would work better
if it said something like: “We found that making just one change can
lead to an average uptick of 124% in ROI on social media marketing.
Learn how.”
Grade: C+

15.
Analysis: This is a completely terrible ad – written by insiders, for
insiders. It asks the intriguing question: is there any difference among
the dozens of BI tools out there? Of course there is, but who cares? No
one, unless you phrase the question differently. Such as: “Picking the
right BI tool can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Good
thing we made a free BI comparison guide just for you.”
Grade: F

16.
Analysis: I want to give this ad an A+, because I love Salesforce.com
as a company, but I just can’t do it. This ad is too confusing: it talks
about mapping out marketing, then planning a customer journey,
and the benefit statement is muddled: “70% of top marketers say
customer journeys lead to revenue growth.” That’s a meaningless
statement: who are “top” marketers? WTF is a customer journey?
Why do I care what marketers “say”?
Grade: F

17.
Analysis: This is another bad ad, which is painful for me to say,
because I love salesforce.com as a company. This ad needs to be
more direct, as in: “Find out why 70% of marketers believe that
“customer journeys” are leading them to more revenue.”
Grade: F

18.
Analysis: This could be a great ad, but it’s not. Too unclear. Unless I
read the fine print, I won’t know that this is a landing page
benchmark report, and that lack of clarity makes it all less
compelling – the general “Conversion Benchmark Report” is simply
not specific enough to entice me. It should say: “You can finally find
out if your landing pages are performing better or worse than your
competitors.”
Grade: F

19.
Analysis: I’m really getting sick of looking at terrible ads. As much as
I want to like it, the message in the ad below is muddled, and again,
no benefit statement. It also seems like they could go a humorous
angle with something like this, as in: “Does Your LinkedIn Profile
Have B.O.? Clean yourself up with our new LinkedIn Professional
Profile Kit.” I often tell clients: I’ll test any message, and I’d love to
test their boring ad below against a “B.O.” version.
Grade: D

20.
Analysis: I admit that I’m very biased here. First, I can’t believe that
the US Postal Service could produce a good ad (which they didn’t)
and I don’t care about millennial stereotypes regarding ROI, so I
have no incentive to click on the ad below. They should have been
direct: “Find out the shockingly high ROI of Direct mail [free
report].” And if I ran their ads, I would A/B test it against “You’ll be
shocked to learn the ROI of Direct mail in 2017 [Free Study].”
Grade: F

21.
Analysis: This is a reasonable ad: beautiful imagery of a conference
room that you could use, a good description of amenities, but still
lacking an incentive. Scheduling a tour? That’s an imposition, an
inconvenience. They could at least offer some benefit, as in:
“Schedule A Tour (The Freshly Brewed Coffee Will Be On Us)”.
Grade: F

22.
Analysis: This ad is also terrible – no benefit, no incentive, no reason
to click. Instead of the flat line “Commercial Real Estate Jobs” they
could at least say “The Most Rewarding Jobs In Commercial Real
Estate.”
Grade: F

23.
Analysis: Finally, a great ad from salesforce.com. I love their eye-
catching statistics, and even though they don’t have a tangible
benefit, they go better with an intangible: countless high-fives.
Grade: A+

24.
Analysis: This is all feature, and no benefit. They should say: “Still
using spreadsheets? After reading this, you’ll agree that you’ve been
flushing money down the toilet.”
Grade: F

25.
Analysis: This feels like the most common B2B ad. Nothing but
descriptive text. This one below is begging for FOMO, and should be
re-written as: “Why Everyone Is Taking BI To The Cloud.”
Grade: C

26.
Analysis: This is an OK ad. As a B2B marketer, it is intriguing to see
wonder what the 3 main challenges are, and I’m a big fan of the
“Complete Guide” incentives.
Grade: B+

27.
Analysis: This ad is identical to the one on the previous page – worth
seeing that their A/B test is purely on the visual, as everything else is
the same.
Grade: B+

28.
Analysis: I would change 2 things about this ad: make the “increase
sales” line hard hitting by adding a #, as in “Increase Sales 2x,” and
I’d eliminate a bunch of words elsewhere – lots of wasted verbage.
Grade: C

29.
Analysis: Finally, another good one. Huge benefit statement,
meaningfully focused. Also, they hit the “ease of use” angle well. It’s
a little odd that the imagery is so terrible.
Grade: A-

30.
Analysis: This is pretty good – there’s a clear statement of value
given the promise of quick information. Moz also projects
confidence in their ability to monetize traffic, given the lack of a CTA.
Grade: A-

31.
Analysis: This is better than the IBM desktop ad from above. It is
clearly written, and they hint at a benefit with “more conversions.” If
they pushed that benefit further I would bump them a letter grade.
Grade: B-

32.
Analysis: This is an example of an ad that could be great with the
right Facebook targeting: if you hit an audience with this problem, a
“Dummies” guide communicates a nice time-to-value incentive.
Grade: B

33.
Analysis: Who expected a good ad from Microsoft? Not me, so no
surprise here. Honestly, I have no idea what they are trying to sell
with this ad below.
Grade: F- - -

34.
Analysis: I have to give WordStream credit here: the benefit is as
clear as can be, as long as you know what a bid is, which is a
targeting issue.
Grade: A

35.
Analysis: This is a terrible ad, because they mix “Maximize Potential
Deductions” with “Save 60%” With “Stay Organized.” My advice to
whoever wrote this ad: pick a knife, then plunge it hilt-deep.
Grade: F

36.
Analysis: This is a pretty good one – it’s a real “free ice cream for
everyone” ad. This is one of those messages that sounds great, but
rarely drive sales. Still, hard to argue with trying it.

37.
Need more?
We do two things: run data-driven marketing
campaigns, and teach people how to run data-driven
marketing campaigns.
Email us for more.