Loop Earplugs
Paid social ad design for Loop Earplugs, four testable variants a brief, across static and motion
Four versions, and the feed decided
Industry
FMCG
Services
Campaign, Social
Results
Revenue Growth
7.45x
Monthly Assest
500+
Completed at
Eleven Miles (now GAIN)
Loop Earplugs makes reusable earplugs that people are happy to be seen wearing, with separate products for sleep, focus, concerts and noise sensitivity. The Belgian hearing protection brand sells almost entirely direct, so there's no shop floor and nobody to pick a pair up and ask about. A social feed does that job instead, and an ad gets about a second of someone's attention to do it in.
In 2024, that second wasn't going well. The product was good, the reviews were good and the audience was there, so the gap sat squarely in the DTC ad creative, which is a frustrating place for a gap to sit when the rest of the business is working.
Media spend carries on at the same rate whether an ad works or not. So money kept going out while the creative underperformed, and nothing in the reporting said which part was at fault. The hook, the colour, the product shot and the layout all go down together.
Nothing was locked down
Loop set no fixed colours, no type rules and no layout system for the advertising. That's unusual for a brand of that size, and it turned out to be the most useful thing in the brief, because a design that can't change can't be tested against itself. So each brief came back as up to four finished variants rather than one recommendation, with every variant moving something: the message, the colour, the imagery, the structure, the layout.
The obvious route is to pick the strongest idea, make it as well as it can be made, and send it. But it gives you one result per brief and no way of knowing what carried it, so four running against each other in the same week were worth more than a single execution.
The people on the other end of it were millennials and late Gen Z, who scroll past more advertising in a day than anyone can reasonably be expected to look at. Putting the same brief in front of them four ways, in different formats, was the only way to find out which creative actually earned its place rather than which one the room liked best.
A serif, a shout and a Microsoft Paint window
Range was the point. Two variants that look alike can't separate themselves in a feed, so a set of four is only worth running if the four sit a long way apart, ideally far enough that a winner tells you something you can use in the next brief.
At the quiet end, a light serif in dark grey on white, the product in its open case underneath and nothing else in the frame. At the loud end, condensed capitals filling a saturated field with the earplugs repeated across it as a pattern, colourways paired against their backgrounds: lilac on yellow, green on coral. In between, photography of people asleep, where you have to look twice to find the product at all.
Then the Paint one, which had a harder job than it looks. Everything around the product had to look deliberately unmade, while the earplug itself remained a proper render, lit and accurate, because somebody has to want to buy it. Get that balance wrong and the ad reads as a mistake or as a brand laughing at its own customers, and neither sells anything.
Shooting fed all of it, since an earplug is small, glossy and translucent, it has to read at thumbnail size on a phone held at arm's length, and it still has to look like the thing that turns up in the post. Every set was built as static and motion ads so a variant could run wherever the media plan put it, across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Once the account hit full pace, asset production ran into over 500+ per month.
What the tests sent back
Purple backgrounds beat grey. That's the kind of finding you can't argue your way to in a studio, and once the data showed us that, it changed what went into the next set.
AI imagery came out of the briefs altogether, and poor performance was the stated reason for dropping it. Loop's audience could tell, and they kept scrolling, which is a useful thing to find out early and an expensive one to find out late.
The Paint ad is the other half of the same lesson. It only exists because the method allowed something that daft to be made and sent, and it only got noticed because it ran against other ads that didn’t stand out against it.
More work
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