The Challenge

Our client, a dog food brand, struggled with high CPAs (2x+ their ideal) even after refreshing ad creatives & adding new SKUs.

Especially surprising since they had the most nutrient-dense product in the market.

This throttled new customer acquisition, which was bad news.

Each buyer lost had a very high LTV, as dog parents buy them food for a long time.

The Strategy

Ad volume wasn’t the problem. What the ads said and hence, whom they targeted was.

We needed a creative that checked three critical boxes:

✅ Big TAM: A large audience pool to scale profitably.

✅ Potent Pain Point: Strong enough to drive immediate action.

Indian ad library research wasn’t helpful as competitors lacked ads that ticked both boxes.

We only saw them to know which ad formats (image, video, etc.) work.

Instead, we did “bottom-up” research of consumer sentiments keeping market awareness of the final ad in mind.

Here’s the market awareness pyramid proposed by Eugene Schwartz. We talk about it in detail here.

In this niche, the awareness pyramid will look like

1. Unaware – My dog has stomach issues, I’ll ignore it as it’s not a big deal.
2. Problem Aware – My dog’s stomach issues are a bad sign, but I don’t know how bad it is.
3. Solution Aware – I know kibble causes my dog stomach issues that feeding meat & veggies will solve, but it’s expensive & time-consuming.
4. Product aware – I know some companies selling meat & veggies, which will solve my dog’s stomach issues.
5. Aware – I know this brand & I like them, but I’m waiting for a discount.

As you’ll notice, the lower we go in awareness, the higher the market share gets.

The client’s previous ads talked to more aware audiences with a smaller TAM.

We went after the “Problem Aware” audience, as they have a bigger TAM. But they had to be educated about:

1. How Kibble is made.
2. How its ingredients damage a dog’s health.
3. Authority figures prefer “real” with meat & veggies food over kibble.
4. How the latter’s ingredients improve a dog’s health.

The Research

We analysed Reddit, Forums & Amazon reviews where dog owners discuss their problems:

1. Reddit’s dog subreddits.
2. 300+ Dog owner forum posts. 
3. 3000+ Amazon reviews of kibble brands & competitors. Indian & US-based.

We used emotionally charged “painkiller problems” over “vitamin problems”.

The former urgently need immediate attention & latter are “nice to solve” problems.

We only targeted painpoints which repeat a lot, thereby ensuring their TAM is high. And discarded the rest.

Result: We found three most common pain points that kibble caused & our product directly solved. Can’t reveal any for obvious reasons.

Copywriting, Video Sourcing & Editing

Contrary to “best practices”, we went for a longer, story-driven direct response video ad (1min+).

It pointed out negatives of kibble (cause & effects of its bad ingredients), and explained why our product is better.

Without going into too much detail (for obvious reasons), the script followed this structure:

1. Hook
2. Introduce Problem
3. Tell how the status quo stopped helping
4. An authority figure says why the status quo doesn’t work
5. Introduce Product
6. Explain why it’s better
7. Mention reviews
8. Visually show the difference (ingredient pics, before/after, etc.)
9. Mention offer
10. CTA

Note: We treat each ad concept as an entity unto itself. The structure varies, but not by much.

We made 3 unique hooks of the ad concept, talking about 3 different symptoms.

If you want to learn more, check our creative testing strategy article.

Onto Video Sourcing – The client found a good influencer(with a gooder dog!) Our strict guidelines ensured the video didn’t need many retakes.

Onto Video Sourcing – Our video editing philosophy (which we followed here) is simple:

1. Keep clips under 3 seconds
2. Switch between influencer’s action shots, talking shots & stock footage
3. No graphic-heavy transitions. Overly edited videos raise the guard of viewers
4. Use native (TikTok-like) font
5. Make clips 20% faster
6. Colour-grade to make the video lively

The “Ad Running”

We ran the 3 ads of the ad concept in a CBO setup against the older winners.

The hypothesis was, if they have a large TAM, they’ll consume all the spend & if this ad works, It’ll have a lower CPA.

Note: In new accounts we test ads in CBO, in older accounts we do testing in ABO.

And soon enough, the new ads:

📉 Captured 90% of Campaign Spend

💸 Dropped CPA by 75%

⏰ Were Top Spender for 4 Months, even after 6 Million+ impressions.

The surge of customers further caused an exponential snowball in revenue.

The lessons learned from this ad birthed more winning ads later!

We ran multiple variations of the winning ad, yet none came close to the original. Which isn’t uncommon.

Key insight: Businesses are one great ad away from exponential growth. Great ads aren’t random – They must speak to a market segment based on market awareness. Most ads cave in to the temptation of catering to all segments & hence speak to no one and fail.

Here’s some of the ads we made for the client :