Ad Trends

Creatives Fashion 2019: What’s Trending This Fall

Creative Trends

Some creatives burn out in a couple of days, and some keep bringing profit for months. It’s hard to predict the outcomes of new creative strategies, but we always can take a hint on what’s going in our competitors’ feeds to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Tonight on the runway, you’ll see the most successful creatives of 3 formats: Native Ads, Push Notifications, and Onclick. Each format has 5 top verticals that have taken the most of the traffic in August-September 2019. Let’s take a look at creative approaches and find out, which of them could boost your CTRs and revenues. Enjoy and learn 🙂

NATIVE ADS

Key points:

  • nutra offers take the leading position; there is an obvious emphasis on the male audience
  • most of the creatives feature celebrities like Donald Trump or Meghan Markle as click-bait
  • ad copies are generally teasing

Nutra

In this vertical, we observe two top creative strategies: scary and promising.

The first one is commonly used for offers like papilloma removal and skin treatments. A scary image of damaged skin combined with a threatening text, bring impressive results. The second strategy promises to bring fast relief from an illness, or instant desired effects like weight loss, full recovery from diabetes, and other chronic diseases. Please read about the legal aspects of Nutra offers.

PropellerAds - Creative trends - nutra

The most popular creatives lead to landing pages and pre-landers with stories of successful struggles against obesity, lack of muscle mass, erectile dysfunction, diabetes, papillomas, moles, rash, parasites (such offers are especially widespread in Thailand, Indonesia, and other Far Eastern countries).

Gaming

The major aim of creative for gaming is to evolve positive emotions or tension. The images usually portray beautiful half-dressed female characters, gameplay screenshots, or military machinery.

PropellerAds - creative trends - gaming

Ad copies highlight that these games are extremely addictive, make a player feel like a real man, provide the best graphics, and could be a replacement of the user’s real life.

Affiliate Insider: 3 Steps to Finding a Superb Gaming Offer

Finance

Stories about young people getting richer lying on the couch will never die. This vertical is all about storytelling: success stories of various kinds usually lead to landing pages with success stories articles about binary options, trading, or bitcoin platforms.

Propellerads_shocking-content_3

Try to test different images of wealthy, and (what’s more important!) regular-looking people holding money or driving a posh car. Add a nice description, which promises to open all secrets of getting rich, or tell a story based on contrast (was poor – now rich, wanna know how?), and that result won’t make you wait.

Gambling

Creative approaches here are success stories and lifehacking. Images with shocked or crying people and their stories of how they’ve become millionaires in one click are very popular.

The second position belongs to an approach that suggests revealing secrets of tricking the system and hitting the jackpot. Images for such ads are drawing attention to the technical side of gambling; that’s why it looks convincing and brings a lot of clicks.

Dating

In addition to the eternal debate about who is prettier – Russians or Asians, there is plenty of creatives offering to find a couple for those who are divorced or reached a certain age (35+ and older).

Try to use images that would look like profile pics on social networks, as if this person is real. Ad copy may be teasing, address the user directly, or suggest the user a variety of options.

? Watch the webinar on creative strategies for dating here

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS

Key points:

  • frequently-used “empty messages”
  • imitation of system and app messages is also a widely applied approach
  • a lot of creatives feature regular-looking female characters

Finance

Success stories about easy money, similar to what we’ve seen in native ads: how to get out of poverty, become the richest young mom in the world, buy a private jet at 23. In the pictures, use images of people bathing in money, or just stacks of cash.

Dating

This vertical is all about notifications imitation, empty messaging, and sexual pretexts. The icons mostly imitate famous apps and messengers or profile pictures of beautiful girls.

propellerads - creative trends - dating -push

Draw attention to the message with a sign of notification badge (a number in red circle) and combine it with a teasing image of a girl (or several girls). According to spy service info, gentlemen still prefer blondes…

Nutra

Before and after photos, simply drawn anatomic pictures with attention to the problem areas. Perhaps, it’s the last chance to catch the hype wave over the keto diet, so try to combine relevant offers with awesome creatives that show good results of the remedy’s work. It’s great to use numbers and additional offer values (-17 kilos in 3 weeks!, 50% off: today ONLY) to increase the CTR.

Betting

Most of the creatives have a big banner, but it’s not necessary in some cases. The texts are usually about bonuses and about how you can get rich on your passion for sports. The banners contain texts describing the bonuses or photos of world-famous athletes. Popular in Nigeria and Thailand.

? Watch the sports betting webinar here

Gambling

The combination of several approaches like a fake win (Hurray, you’ve won 1,000,000 bucks!!!) and simple marketing offers to win a big amount of money for free because you have free spins or a demo account with a big deposit on it. Images usually portray happy winners or stacks of cash.

ONCLICK

Key points:

  • GIFs and animated buttons take leading positions and catch the eye’s attention
  • the most popular offers mainly have something to do with the device itself (like utilities or software)

VPN and extensions

A prominent leader on onclick, with creatives of various levels of “scariness.” Sometimes they imitate a video/music player to induce the user to install the program to continue watching a movie or a video. Not a very new story, but it works.

Extensions for the browser – search for movies, trailers, music, and more. Bright green CTA in the shape of a button is also an old story in a new cover. Now it’s also animated, as well as the arrows, which additionally prompt the user to click.

Gambling and betting

propellerads - creative trends - gambling - onclick

Here we present the two verticals combined in one because the approach in arranging the objects on the banners is approximately the same; the only difference is the content in the images – athletes in betting, beautiful women or bright, memorable hand-drawn characters in gambling.

The main principle of click-baiting is free spins, demo accounts, and other bonuses offered. Also a lot of animated elements, mostly buttons.

Sweepstakes

propellerads- creative trends - sweepstakes - onclick

Several approaches – questionnaires, bright spinning wheels, an offer to test a new phone model. Compared to the previous experience of analyzing this vertical, there is nothing fundamentally new. But the schemes are working, and it’s great to know where to start if you’re just beginning.

Online Sweepstakes: Keeping Your Promotions Legal

Gaming

Animations and gifs on gaming creatives promoting bright mobile toys are so on right now. The “tile” format is a hot trend right now, where the dynamic image fits a lot of logos of different games, they blink and change, like a carousel. Add a big red animated button as CTA – and voila! The converting onclick banner is done.

Streaming

The popular TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” is often used for streaming promotion. It advertises a streaming application. This particular case shows that following the consumer’s will to watch new and the most popular content (movies or shows) may provide you new creative ideas.

How to Tame the Streaming & Video-on-Demand Verticals?

Attention: you’ll have to adjust your creatives to the trends since they change dramatically fast. Game of Thrones is already forgotten, which show will replace it? If you know the answer, use this sacred info when you launch your onclick campaigns 😉


Every ad format has its peculiarities, and it’s important to take them into account. If you’re just starting your career as an advertiser or an affiliate, it’s great to learn from those who have already succeeded in the business. And in case you’re already a sea wolf in the ocean of online ads, it’s never too late to learn something new or adjust your campaigns to the latest trends.

Hope this article was helpful, don’t’ forget to strike the like button if it was 🙂 Leave you comments and questions in the comment section below, and join our Telegram Chat!

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