The ultimate guide to using Sora for ad creative

Hey guys,

I spent 10+ hours last weekend playing around with Sora and trying to make ads with it.

Below are a collection of my thoughts and how you can use Sora to make ads for your own brand.

But first, here's what I've found interesting this week:

• This guy shared an interesting theory about how Meta throttles performance once it knows your margin profile (this reminded me of Jordan Mennard’s natural CAC tweet a few weeks ago)

• Arcads just dropped an "AI actorverse" with reusable faces and voices you can drop into any Sora prompt

• This guy literally built a system prompt that makes Sora 2 create mind-blowing videos.

And NOW for a new feature…

Here’s my favourite ad that I’ve seen this week:

I love this ad for so many reasons. It’s a perfect example of an ugly ad. And it’s exactly why you should be studying the organic feed for your ad inspiration. Good job Coursology!

I have a post on using TikTok shop creators for ad inspo here if you’re interested in reading more.

My initial thoughts on Sora…

Unrealistic visuals work very well

Some of the best outputs I’ve had so far have been unrealistic visuals.

Like a man doing continuous backflips in jeans to sell stretchy jeans. Make it obviously ridiculous and entertaining rather than trying to trick people.

People are way more forgiving of AI when it's fun.

I also love using pain point visuals. For example, shin splint cracks running up the shins (selling running shoes) or a person’s gut inflating like a balloon (selling bloat relief).

I try to come up with visceral ideas that make the invisible visible.

Certain formats work better than others

Podcasts and street interviews have given me surprisingly good outputs.

I’ve also seen a lot of hidden camera and doorcam hooks on the Sora feed, so I’ve been testing those out too.

Sean Cornwall is a great account to follow on Sora for inspo in our space.

I have experimented with generating talking head clips, but you run into the same authenticity issues that you get with other AI gen platforms, so it’s not the best use case in my opinion.

Sora is still hit and miss

Sora has higher highs than Veo, but it’s still hit and miss.

The video of the shirtless man doing backflips in our client’s jeans took me 8 attempts to get something usable. What I got in the end was GREAT, but it took 7 failed attempts to get there.

Generating video with the product is possible, but still a little unreliable

You can upload product images in your prompt, but these take quite a bit longer to generate and fail half the time.

It does seem to work (eventually) for most products which is pretty cool - as long as you don’t upload any images with people in them, as Sora doesn’t currently support this.

Here’s one I made for Heights…

Simple prompts generally work better

I generate most of my prompts with ChatGPT, and every time I try to get too specific, it ruins the video. Some of my best outputs have come from short prompts that let Sora get creative itself. This may be because certain visuals work better.

For less creative visuals, you might need a more structured prompt.

Sidenote - the video above was for an organic TikTok page. I’ve seen a lot of these blow up recently, especially for apps (see this example here).

Overall I’m seriously impressed with Sora.

I’d go as far as to say that I don’t see how anyone can look at the Sora feed and conclude that most ad creative won’t be made by AI within the next 12 months.

Ultimately, I think the biggest barrier to widespread adoption will be legislation, not the technology itself.

I’d be interested to know whether any of you guys have been testing Sora and what your thoughts are on it so far - let me know by responding to this email!

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See you next week,

Alex

P.S. If you're spending $100k+ monthly on paid social and want help implementing strategic creative systems like these, my team at Adcrate is accepting applications to work with us. Check out our case studies at adcrate.com.