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Watch · 14 min

Which developer ad creatives actually work? Creative review session

Nimrod Kramer, Harry Cooper & Michael Shannack · daily.dev

TL;DR

daily.dev co-founder Nimrod Kramer, Harry Cooper, and Michael Shannack play a game: guessing which of two real ad creatives performed better, using campaigns from Sentry, Datadog, Edge Impulse, and Postmark. Along the way they unpack what actually resonates with developers, dev UI and product screenshots, dense technical detail, the occasional bit of humor, and why targeting can matter as much as the creative itself. The big lesson: creative testing is unpredictable, so test relentlessly.

Key takeaways

  • Dev UI and product screenshots outperform generic visuals, developers recognize and engage with them.
  • Dense, technical creative earns attention, the opposite of consumer social, where you have a fraction of a second.
  • Humor and dev memes can work, but unpredictably, test them.
  • Targeting can matter as much as the creative itself; the same creative wins or loses by audience.
  • Creative testing is genuinely unpredictable, the expected "banger" flops and the outlier wins.
  • A trick: ask an LLM for ad ideas, then make sure you never use them, to force truly unique creative.

Frequently asked questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Creatives that show dev UI or the actual product, carry real technical density, and speak directly to a technical audience tend to win. Generic, consumer-style visuals underperform because developers engage with detail and recognize real product surfaces.

Both. In the review, two near-identical creatives performed very differently, and the difference came down to targeting, the same creative can win or lose depending on the audience it reaches.

Test relentlessly and try different angles, because results are unpredictable, the creative you expect to win often loses. A useful trick is to ask an LLM for ad ideas and then avoid all of them, forcing genuinely unique creative.
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