If you are in growth marketing, you can appreciate how Noom uses food porn as visual hooks to capture attention in their ads. They help people lose weight and generated $400 million in revenue in 2020. They follow a successful creative testing framework for FB ads at scale.
There is a lot to deconstruct in their ads.
Concepts:
food image, quiz image, basic teal background image, 2.5d illustrated
Text hooks:
“This is how he quit stress eating”, “Have you tried the new Noom?”, “I can’t believe this quiz was actually right!”
Creative elements:
Simple black and white captions, voice-overs, phone UI with weight tracker decreasing
Transformational scripts:
“Before I went on Noom, I didn’t like how I looked. After Noom I lost 70 pounds.”, “People called me big guy.”, “I couldn’t see my feet.”
Visual sequences:
Size 40 jeans, before and after videos, healthy fruits and veggies, quiz flow, in-shape men and women
You MUST test each one of these elements iteratively.
Anyway, I don’t want to stray too far away from the main topic. Let me know if you want me to cover this in more detail in a future post though.
In this post, I want to show you how to use Stable Diffusion to create food-related visual hooks to use in the first few seconds of your ads.
Noom Examples
Example 1: UGC Hooks → Quiz signup flow 1
Example 2: Food porn → Quiz signup flow 1 + AI VO
Example 3: Food porn → Testimonial stack → Quiz signup flow 2 → Call to action End Card + VO
In both cases, the sequence after the visual hooks are proven to already work well. If you have a keen eye the first example has a realistic hand while the second example has an illustrated hand. Bet they isolated that variable too.
You can further break down the food porn into sweet vs. savory.
AI Food Porn
You can use Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. I used my bread and butter (no pun intended) Stable Diffusion for this. Here is one of the settings:
RAW photo, steaming hot coffee in a coffee mug, <lora:foodphoto:1> foodphoto, 8k uhd, dslr, soft lighting, high quality, film grain, Fujifilm XT3
Steps: 30, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 1165432884, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 81086e2b3f, Model: realisticVisionV20_v20, Denoising strength: 0.55, Version: v1.2.1, Hires upscale: 2, Hires upscaler: Latent
After some razzle dazzle in your editor of choice you might have something like this:
In this example, I strung together the images in a visual sequence. You can test different visual sequences (e.g. blue donut first, eggs first, etc). You can add an AI voiceover too.
Takeaways
Visual hook testing should be an important part of your creative strategy.
The ads don’t have to be pretty to convert.
Oftentimes, pretty gets in the way of growth.
Pro tip: you can re-use a winning visual hook in your visual sequence OR couple it with un-proven creative elements.
I’m hungry now! Are you a savory or sweets person?
Manson