Five stages of awareness in one ad account

Every ad in your account is talking to somebody at a particular point in their thinking, whether or not that was decided on purpose. Most are talking to the same person.

That person already knows what your product is, already accepts they need something like it, and is choosing between you and a competitor. It is the easiest audience to write for, because you can simply say why you are better. Meanwhile the money is going out against a much wider group, most of whom have no idea what you are talking about.

The ladder below is Eugene Schwartz's, set out in his 1966 book on advertising and older than any of the platforms. It is a way of sorting who you are talking to rather than a law about how persuasion runs, and as a way of sorting it keeps being useful.

What are the five stages?

Five rungs, from somebody who does not know there is a problem to somebody with a card in their hand. Take a brand selling insoles for people on their feet all day, and run it up the ladder.

Unaware

They do not know they have a problem. The ache at the end of a shift is what work feels like, and it has never once occurred to them that it might be their shoes.

An ad here could help the viewer recognise the problem before introducing the product. Describe the situation accurately and avoid making a medical or performance promise the evidence does not support.

Problem aware

They know their feet hurt because they stand all day, and they have never looked for a solution because they assume there is not one.

This version introduces the category of possible solutions and explains what this product is intended to do. Use claims supported for the actual product, rather than inventing what other workers already know or do.

Solution aware

They know insoles exist. They may have bought a pair from a chemist that did nothing. They do not know who you are.

Now the ad is about why this kind of insole differs from the one that disappointed them, which makes it the most technical of the five.

Product aware

They know you. They have been on the site, read a bit, and not bought.

This ad answers the specific reason they hesitated: the fit, the returns, whether it survives a wash. Reviews from people who obviously share the viewer's job do more here than anything a brand can say about itself.

Most aware

They are ready and something practical is in the way. Not persuasion, logistics.

The ad is the offer, the sizing, the delivery, the button. Short and plain, with no argument in it. Most accounts we see are good at this one and run it at everybody, which is the problem this post is about.

Which stage is your creative written for?

Use the framework to examine your own mix before assuming there is a gap.

Open your ads manager, list every creative you are running, and put one number beside each, from one to five. Force yourself to pick a single number. That number is a working read rather than a verdict; which rung an ad lands on is confirmed by who it reaches and what it does, not by where you filed it.

Then look at the shape of the list. Most small accounts produce a heap in the middle, one or two at the top, and nothing on the bottom rungs.

Why does a gap cost money?

Because the spend does not respect your creative plan.

You are paying to reach a broad audience, and that audience arrives spread across all five rungs. When every ad is written for stage four, the people on stages one and two see a message that assumes knowledge they do not have. They do not object. They have no idea what it is for, and they scroll.

Which is what makes an ad account feel expensive without feeling broken. Every individual ad is fine. Nobody wrote a bad one. The account is aiming most of its money at a small part of the room.

Can one ad cover more than one stage?

It can. One ad may move from recognising a problem to considering a product. The framework helps you decide what knowledge to assume, rather than limiting every ad to one stage.

An ad moving from problem to product needs a coherent transition. Whether it is useful depends on the message, audience and context; the stage labels alone cannot predict who leaves.

So the working rule is one ad, one rung, held less because a person can only ever be addressed at one level than because it keeps the account legible: when something works, you know which rung it worked on. The ladder earns its place as a way to plan and read an account, not as a law about the order persuasion has to run in.

Sort what you already have

The exercise is an hour and it needs nothing but the list of ads and a notepad.

Number every creative one to five. Count how many sit on each rung and write down which rungs have nothing. Then, for each empty one, write a sentence describing what an ad for it would say, in the vocabulary of somebody standing there.

You now have a brief, and a better one than you would have written from scratch, because it came from a gap in your own account rather than an idea somebody had in a meeting. Treat the gap as the strongest hypothesis on the page, then let the ad you make for it, and what it does, confirm the read.

Which gap do you fill first?

Fill the gap that matters most to the business goal and the audience you can reach. A small account may begin with people already seeking a solution, but there is no requirement to populate every stage.

The decision is a business one rather than a creative one: whether you are taking customers from a competitor, which is stages three and four, or bringing new people into the category, which is slower, harder, and the only way some products ever grow.

Sources and evidence

What here is a named source and what is our own method.

Standards and platform facts. The ladder itself is not this studio's invention: Eugene M. Schwartz set out the five stages, unaware through most aware, in his 1966 book Breakthrough Advertising, and it has been a standard model in direct-response copywriting since. It is a way of sorting an audience by what they already know, not a measured law about how persuasion has to run, and Schwartz offered it as practitioner experience rather than as the product of controlled research.

Our method. Sorting an existing ad account against that ladder, scoring each creative by rung, and filling the lowest empty rung the budget can reach, is this studio's application of Schwartz's framework rather than something the book itself prescribes.

References.

• Eugene M. Schwartz (Prentice-Hall). Breakthrough Advertising. search.worldcat.org . Named origin of the five-stages (levels) of market-awareness framework (unaware to most aware); used to sort ad creative by what the audience already knows. A practitioner framework, not a controlled finding about how every audience responds.