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Come Join My Creative Mastermind Challenge, And I'll Give You $1000 Bucks (39)

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So I've been reading a lot lately, having been on a couple longer flights, and one of the books I've been reading is one that cmdeal recommended, BOLD, by Peter Diamandis, and one of the things that jumped out to me is how one can use a well-timed Competitions to spur innovation in traditionally played out and tired industries.

I've met a fair share of affiliates in my career, and I would say at least 80% of them really just rip other people's stuff or "whatever's hot" and try to milk the scraps of the first mover's creatives. In my opinion, this is seriously a shame as I know so many seriously creative and talented people in this industry, and generally they are the people who are the most successful.

This is why I decided to run a competition/mastermind hybrid, that is private to JUST the people who actively participate in it.

I want to break the stereotype that all AM's are good at is ripping and running. I want to destroy the notion that the only utility angles are threatening you have a virus or that you need to upgrade your whatsapp.

So here is what I propose to anyone who is interested:

Tim Tetra's Creative Mastermind Challenge

Goal:
Have one of the creatives you submit outperform hundreds of other creatives from other people, and emerge victorious -- a new man (or woman)

Prize:
Honestly for me -- bragging rights for instantly becoming one of the top authorities on creatives by beating the top 1% of the top 1% people in the best forum for direct response marketing is arguably the most valuable prize, but I will also give $1000 of my own money as a donation to the winner of the best overall creative to raise the stakes of the game.

On top of all this, I will grant the winner of this contest lifetime free access to a pretty cool internal tool that our own media buying team has been using for some time to gain an edge over other FB marketers. It like a Google Finance stock ticker tape that lets you spot market inefficiencies of which device/country/age/gender combination is particularly cheap right now.

For example, have you wondered how expensive the CPM's are to market to 13 to 17 year old teenagers that are using Androids in the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, and Mozambique? Me neither, but if you're interested, you can easily find out:



I might eventually offer discounted membership for all participants if there’s enough interest and we decide to release it for the public. Anyway on to how the competition will be run!

Test Methodology:
This test will be run on FB using a test utility app for Android that the most common angles (antivirus, security, battery, speed) could theoretically all pass for. Check out the google play pages of Battery Saver, Clean Master, 360 Antivirus as an example of the type of app that will be run.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...nos.dxbs&hl=en
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...r.mguard&hl=en
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...security&hl=en

The test will be run in English, targeting everyone from US (one of the most sophisticated markets) who has an Android device, at all age ranges.

All sets of creatives submitted (Ad copy, headline, + image) will be scheduled to start at a predetermined time after entries are closed. They will be set with a budget of triple the market “value” of a US geo utility CPI offer ($1 CPI, so $3 Budget). Ads will run untouched for 2 days. At that point, the bottom 75% of all ads will be paused, the top 25% will have their budgets raised to $25 at the account reset time of the 3rd day, and will run non-stop from that 3rd day until the 7th day. If there is a tie at the end of the 7th day, I will let it run as many days as is necessary until there is a clear winner at the end of the day.

Here is a breakdown of the 3 items you need to submit for each creative in order to participate:



To judge ad performance, we will be using the metric "Mobile App Installs” to gauge performance. Since every ad is spending the same, the ads that generate the most installs at the end of the period was the most successful ad.

I will personally supervise this contest along with funding the accounts out of my own pocket for the purpose of this case study.

Rules:
Each STM member can submit up to 10 creative/ad copy combos for this competition — provided that:

• the creative is a custom creative (no just grabbing some image off google images with no modifications)
• there’s supporting ad copy for it
• it’s not overly deceptive/gory/uncompliant/threatening that would get the FB ad account banned and/or my test app de-indexed from the app store.

Only the people who participate in this study (people who submit legitimate custom creatives that actually get run) will get access to the results of the mastermind/case study. While I’m all for publicly sharing data, I want to give people an incentive to actually participate in this mastermind as well, because the more people who participate, the more likely we will have some really interesting data that comes about.

How to get involved:
Your mission, if you choose to accept it — is to go over to this link and put in your STM username, your first name, and email. I will be using this email to email participants the status of each day’s tests etc… along with a nice summary at the end and announcing the winner.

http://eepurl.com/byrALv

After you submit your email and confirm it, you’ll be sent to a page that will prompt you for your headline, ad copy, and image. Please make your image 1200x627 in size. I will likely be in contact to reject your submission if your creative is too misleading or gory or aggressive. Just use this rule of thumb: If this were my own app, would I use this creative? Is there some shred of truth to my angle?

Timelines:
I will open registration for all STM members from now until the 16th of September at 12:01 AM Eastern Standard Time. At that time, I will take down registration and only the people who successfully submitted creatives will be contacted further about the mastermind case study. I am hoping to end the case study on September 23rd, and I will post the winner and some examples of the creatives (if the mastermind group wants me to) to cap this thread off.

FAQ’s:
What’s the app that you’re going to test this out with?
The functionality of the app will be the same as the 3 utility apps I linked. (it obviously won’t be any of those 3). It will have EVERY feature from all 3 apps, and it won’t be as heavily saturated with users so we’ll get more data quickly. In your ad copy, if you must reference the app’s name, you can just use (name) as a placeholder.

Who owns the creatives that will get created as a result of this competition?
Everyone who participates will get access to every single image that was tested at the end. This is a mastermind. We’re trying to find out if we can unlock some really innovative new ideas that will be kept within this mastermind.

Good luck! And please post below if you have any questions/comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

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Sounds interesting. Will be signing up

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Holy shit. Not sure if you noticed but did tim just give away how to run an fb ad properly or what?

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we have tried to sign up, i think it shows this error

Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.

Please check the address and try again.

would our emails be recorded anyway?

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Haha my kind of case study! Sick idea mate!

I see this error after submit though:

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Awesome idea! I'm totally in - just adding this to my to-do list for the day...

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can we find out more about the app? how does the logo look like? what does the logo promote? speed? battery? av? whats the first thing it promises to do? what are the users that already downloaded it say its good for?

can the image be animated? or must it be static?

are you limiting the number of entries one person is allowed to submit? the last few times someone didn't set a limit, we pushed it to the limit and he did not quite like it.

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Sorry about that, I actually forgot to publish the quick webapp I wrote into production, that's why it was working for myself as a test but it wasn't for you guys. I just updated the link for any new registered people, and the people who already registered should receive an email within the next few minutes from me with the correct link to submit creatives!

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The logo is similar to antivirus/protection themed. The first promise in the play store description is antivirus themed as well. Users generally say the app works.

Image has to be static, that's a FB restriction.

That's a good idea, let's limit the amount of entries from one STM member to 10 entries.

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Wow... Although I wanted to be focussed on mobile (yeah, I know, it's kinda mobile), the temptation to compete against Mr. Green, caurmen and the other elite marketers is too mcuh... Will definitely sign up...

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Worried about your phone overheating? Don't call 911 just yet!



Stop the misery with this instant fix. Click here.

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Never promoted app installs so this ad above may be totally crap! If not too bad, maybe I'll enter the contest

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I would run this if you submitted it. You have nothing to lose by entering!

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Nice! I'll submit that one and a few others then

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Five angles submitted. Let the creative battle begin!

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Just a FYI... for people submitting images with text:

FB has a rule where they will reject an image in which there it's made up of 20% text or more. You can use this tool to make sure your image doesn't have more than 20% text:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay

You can look at this blog post for an idea of how they calculate the 20% rule:

http://www.jonloomer.com/2013/09/23/...ent-text-rule/

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Just 2 cents: Create dark post on your own page and check on mobile device if you can read text / see image

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I justed submitted mine

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Submitted 5 ads last night, going to try and submit 5 more today. I've little facebook experience and I'm not very good when it comes to being creative with angles and I also struggle when writing short ad copy, but this I think should be a good chance for some us to practice a bit and see if we can come up with anything decent. Thanks for starting this challenge man!

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You have a chance I think. The angle/images were definitely not the same as what everyone else is submitting. If nothing else, there's novelty in it.

Speaking of which -- I had to invalidate and reject a bunch of images that were submitted by someone who did not sign up through the email link above. I was unable to contact them, but in addition to this, they didn't bother to read the instructions and submitted some stock photos that you would find on istockphoto. I'm not going to run any of these.

Keep the submissions coming, we have 17 new applicants who have signed up -- competition is heating up so I'd recommend you really spend an hour or two and think of interesting angles that aren't just the lowest hanging fruit.

Some of the creatives I've received look straight out of a spy tool for mobile 320x50 ads in 2013. These are not going to work on FB. I will run them just to prove a point, but I'd highly recommend you go for some truly out of the box stuff. Your idea should either fail spectacularly and you rationalize "of course it did", or it should do spectacularly.

I'll give you guys a hint -- get out of your computer chair if you're not in the top 1% of photoshop skill level and play around with all the different perspective you can shoot creatives with even an iPhone camera. Put some actual thought and work into composing shots for creatives. There's a reason people use amateur pictures for adult dating -- they flat out perform WAY better than generic stock stuff that people have been beaten to death with.

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Creative Mastermind Challenge Update:

I'm happy to announce that after talking to IAmAtilla about the inclusion of targeting for this contest, as it is literally the heart of the strongest point of the platform, I've rolled out an update that will let you include targeting when you submit your creatives.

This is not going to be a course on how to market on FB, but in essence, you can target basic demographic data like exact age, gender, marital status, employer they work at, etc.

On top of this, Facebook lets you target by interests, and this is where I think you will find things get interesting. There is one caveat though -- if you want to run an angle targeting something, you need to have access to either Audience Insights or Power Editor yourself to go and make sure that the interests you are trying to target can be targeted on Facebook. Let me give you a good example:

I tried to target people who liked Stackthatmoney on Facebook, but was unable to do so. Usually this is a combo of too few users or some other reason, but in the end it is what it is:



On the other hand, I was able to target people who "liked" a different affiliate marketing forum, arguably one much worse than STM:



Anyway, in this example, you could target Wickedfire users and use slang/terminology/memes/pictures exclusive to that whole group of people. You probably wouldn't have much scale, but it would be an interesting experiment.

Let me know if anyone has any questions, and if you want to re-submit your images with specific targeting, feel free to. Here is an example of some types of targeting and how you can submit them in the form:

18-24 year old females who like Twilight
55+ year old males who like Donald Trump
Anyone who works at Lockheed Martin (13-65+ male and females who are employed by Lockheed Martin)
18+ year old people who like the American Dental Association

Have fun!

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This should make coming up with angles much easier! I've submitted 6 ads, 5 of which I think are just trying to target as broad as they can without any specific interests or demographics, age groups and so on, and now that I've taken a second look at them they don't seem to be very appealing...to anyone. I would like to come up with entirely new ads, can you remove all of my submissions so far?

Cheers

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Awesome contest, Tim! Submitted my creatives, can't wait to see the results

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Well, I have just today learned how to make banners in photoshop and reguardless of the big dogs being involved, I would love the oppertunity just to have some of my creatives run.

Gotta be in it to win it right?

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Go ahead and submit new ones, I'll remove your old ones.

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I am looking forward to seeing the results!

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I submitted a photo with no info as i thought the upload photo button would just upload my photo under the add copy....my bad.

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To judge ad performance, we will be using the metric "Mobile App Installs” to gauge performance. Since every ad is spending the same, the ads that generate the most installs at the end of the period was the most successful ad.

would this requirement be revised when targeting is added in?

targeting could limit the number of mobile app installs, but increase $$$ profit

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Targeting is already added in.

By definition: if we are uniformly raising budgets at the same time for every ad, FB is going to spend through the budget in 24 hours. Whether this results in 100 mobile app installs or only 1 app install, the money will be spent. In this way, the CPI and total number of app installs is really the same thing, just total app installs is slightly more precise.

If you were to use my example and target wickedfire forum users with a crazy good angle, and even if you converted at 50%, Facebook would blow through the entire budget to make sure you reached every single one of those people who hop online. That means by the end of the competition, your angle was not even remotely scalable enough and you wouldn't win.

A word of advice to those who do not do FB marketing much: just like on Decisive or any other DSP's or mobile platforms... when you target different demographics or devices etc, you are going to pay a different price. Just like how RON traffic is always going to be way cheaper than specific types of traffic and how Wi-Fi traffic is always way cheaper than specific cellular carriers... targeting older people may result in higher CTR's, but your CPC's and CPI's will go up proportionately as well.

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8 creatives submitted! hopefully they'll get through!

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Please read the rules, all of your creatives have WAY too much text on them to ever get approved by FB.

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36 Hours Left Before The Mastermind Closes

Just a reminder to everyone to get your entries in soon. We have 29 people verified and registered for this case study so far. Only the people who successfully submit entries into the contest will receive access to the results. For those of you who have been putting off submitting creatives, check your email again for the link to submit them and get it done before Midnight EST tomorrow!

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Are you planning on posting the winning angle?

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I was going to originally, but the majority of people voted against me revealing any details of the result on STM, so i had to respect that. It's a shame too because it had a lot of interesting insights.

In the future, I'd recommend people to participate if they want to get the biggest benefit out of the actionable data.

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It was really worth it. Tim shared everything, I enjoyed it and learnt a lot.

Hope next time I'll have better results though

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^ Agreed, it was a great learning experience! Hope there's going to be another challenge at some point in the future.

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Please do another one of these!

I just started Affiliate marketing and I am eager to flex my copywriting muscles!

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Really great idea!

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I also got an error page when I tried to join ( see http://screencast.com/t/d7PmKLMZJ )

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Fair enough!
I would have submitted had I been here earlier. Making angles is my favorite part of FB ads and I tend to make them completely differently to the competition which is interesting because I always get low cpc's when I set them to "fb optimised cpc".

If you do it again and I am around I will participate

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