Five stages of awareness in one ad account
Sorting the ads you already have is an hour's work, and it usually finds the same gap.
Every ad in your account is talking to somebody at a particular point in their thinking, whether or not that was decided on purpose. Most are talking to the same person.
That person already knows what your product is, already accepts they need something like it, and is choosing between you and a competitor. It is the easiest audience to write for, because you can simply say why you are better. Meanwhile the money is going out against a much wider group, most of whom have no idea what you are talking about.
The ladder below is Eugene Schwartz's, set out in his 1966 book on advertising and older than any of the platforms. It is a way of sorting who you are talking to rather than a law about how persuasion runs, and as a way of sorting it keeps being useful.
What are the five stages?
Five rungs, from somebody who does not know there is a problem to somebody with a card in their hand. Take a brand selling insoles for people on their feet all day, and run it up the ladder.
Unaware
They do not know they have a problem. The ache at the end of a shift is what work feels like, and it has never once occurred to them that it might be their shoes.
An ad here names the problem and does nothing else. Nobody tells you the ache is not the shift. It is the standing, and it is fixable. No product, no offer. It works or fails on whether the description is accurate enough to be recognised.
Problem aware
They know their feet hurt because they stand all day, and they have never looked for a solution because they assume there is not one.
This ad stays on the problem and adds the existence of an answer. Show what a full shift on a hard floor does, then say that people who do this for a living stopped putting up with it years ago. You are selling the category, not yourself.
Solution aware
They know insoles exist. They may have bought a pair from a chemist that did nothing. They do not know who you are.
Now the ad is about why this kind of insole differs from the one that disappointed them, which makes it the most technical of the five.
Product aware
They know you. They have been on the site, read a bit, and not bought.
This ad answers the specific reason they hesitated: the fit, the returns, whether it survives a wash. Reviews from people who obviously share the viewer's job do more here than anything a brand can say about itself.
Most aware
They are ready and something practical is in the way. Not persuasion, logistics.
The ad is the offer, the sizing, the delivery, the button. Short and plain, with no argument in it. Most accounts are good at this one and run it at everybody, which is the problem this post is about.
Which stage is your creative actually written for?
Almost always the middle two. Here is how to find out for certain.
Open your ads manager, list every creative you are running, and put one number beside each, from one to five. Force yourself to pick a single number. That number is a working read rather than a verdict; which rung an ad truly lands on is confirmed by who it reaches and what it does, not by where you filed it.
Then look at the shape of the list. Most small accounts produce a heap in the middle, one or two at the top, and nothing on the bottom rungs.
Why does a gap cost money?
Because the spend does not respect your creative plan.
You are paying to reach a broad audience, and that audience arrives spread across all five rungs. When every ad is written for stage four, the people on stages one and two see a message that assumes knowledge they do not have. They do not object. They have no idea what it is for, and they scroll.
Which is what makes an ad account feel expensive without feeling broken. Every individual ad is fine. Nobody wrote a bad one. The account is aiming most of its money at a small part of the room.
Can one ad cover more than one stage?
Usually not well, and trying is a common way this goes wrong.
An ad that opens by naming a problem and then pivots to a returns policy has spent its opening on stage one and its close on stage four. The unaware viewer leaves during the pivot, not having agreed there was a problem. The nearly ready viewer left before it, because the first line told them something they knew years ago.
So the working rule is one ad, one rung, held less because a person can only ever be addressed at one level than because it keeps the account legible: when something works, you know which rung it worked on. The ladder earns its place as a way to plan and read an account, not as a law about the order persuasion has to run in.
Sort what you already have
The exercise is an hour and it needs nothing but the list of ads and a notepad.
Number every creative one to five. Count how many sit on each rung and write down which rungs have nothing. Then, for each empty one, write a sentence describing what an ad for it would say, in the vocabulary of somebody standing there.
You now have a brief, and a better one than you would have written from scratch, because it came from a gap in your own account rather than an idea somebody had in a meeting. Treat the gap as the strongest hypothesis on the page, then let the ad you make for it, and what it does, confirm the read.
Which gap do you fill first?
The lowest empty rung your budget can actually reach. Talking to people who have not asked for anything gets expensive quickly, so most small accounts should start at stage two and work outwards once the middle is earning.
The decision underneath is a business one rather than a creative one: whether you are taking customers from a competitor, which is stages three and four, or bringing new people into the category, which is slower, harder, and the only way some products ever grow.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
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