4ever Mints: A 4.5x ROAS, and Why the Plain Ad Beat the Expensive One

By Kevin Veitia

Client

4ever Mints, a tiny slow-dissolve breath mint invented by two doctors and sold online in the US

Channels

Facebook and Instagram (Meta Ads)

Timeframe

Roughly 2017 to 2019

Budget

Up to $1,000 a month in the first formal test cycle

Goal

Online sales

The challenge

4ever Mints makes a breath mint that doesn't behave like one. It's about the size of a dot, it sits against your gumline, and it dissolves over hours instead of minutes. Two doctors invented it, and the product is genuinely good. It came with two problems no ad can wish away.

Nobody knew what it was. A slow-dissolve mint isn't something people search for, so every buyer had to be found and then taught. And it looked expensive. At about $30 for 100 mints, each one cost several times more than a mint from the checkout counter. One person said exactly that under one of our ads: however long it lasts, 30 cents is a lot for a mint.

What we did

Narrowed the audience first

This was before iOS 14.5, when the audience was the biggest lever in a Facebook account, so the work followed the SUREFIRE order: settle who sees the ad, then test what they see. Early on we layered the targeting so people had to match every condition at once: US online shoppers who were interested in mints and also interested in hygiene. A narrow audience costs more per impression and wastes far less.

The first formal test cycle, in August 2018, ran one control ad against two audiences: people interested in dental hygiene and people interested in mint candy. Each got $250 for the week. The rules were set before launch: no verdict before 3,000 impressions, and any ad set that spent $100 without a sale was switched off. Whichever audience won would get creative written for it. For the dental hygiene crowd, that meant leaning on the science, what dentists thought of the mint, and the natural ingredients.

Wrote for the way people actually read an ad

Facebook has studied how people look at ads in the feed with eye tracking. The reading order we took from that work, and still write to, goes center, up, down, right. The eye lands on the image or video in the center first. Then it goes up to the primary text. Then the reader might tap "See more". Then down to the headline under the image, and right to the button.

"See more" is the step most copy ignores. Facebook cuts the primary text after a few lines, so most people only ever read those lines. Tapping "See more" is a choice: the reader is saying go on, I'm listening. That's a consent signal, and the copy should be built around it. The first lines have to work on their own and earn the tap. Everything after the cut is written for someone who asked for more, so it can go deeper: how the mint works, why it lasts, and what it really costs.

Answered the price objection in the ad

The comments told us the objection, so the next ads answered it. Thirty cents is a lot for a mint. It isn't a lot for hours of fresh breath. One 4ever Mint outlasts dozens of ordinary mints, so measured by the hour, it's the cheaper one. One idea we worked on drew that as a clock: a pie chart of three hours, with a thin sliver of a few minutes for an ordinary mint.

Let the plain ad win

The ad that won was the plainest one we had: the newly designed canister, alone on a white background. It wasn't made for advertising at all. It was a product photo for the online store.

Later, the brand's agency persuaded the owners to pay a Madison Avenue studio for a set of polished, magazine-quality ads for Facebook and Instagram. They cost a fortune, and they were far more beautiful than our product shot. They failed completely.

We call this the ugly school of advertising. In a feed, polish reads as advertising, and people scroll past advertising without ever deciding to. A plain image, blunt and a little out of place, breaks the rhythm of the scroll for a moment, and that moment is all an ad needs. Once you have someone's attention, you're halfway there. A beautiful ad nobody stops for is worth nothing.

It isn't about being ugly for its own sake. The canister shot won because it was clear: one product, nothing competing with it, instantly recognizable. It's the same reason the suit up front beat the beach scene for Mei L'ange. Plain beats pretty when plain is clearer.

Results

• About 4.5x ROAS on Facebook and Instagram
• A product photo made for the online store beat a costly agency shoot, and stayed the best performer
• A test design, with two audiences, a 3,000-impression minimum and a $100 kill rule, that set the baseline for every round after it

The 4.5x is Kevin's recollection of the account. The ad exports from those years aren't in our files any more, so we don't quote anything more precise than that.

What you can take from this

• Settle the audience before you test creative, at least on any platform that still lets the audience lead.
• Write for the order people read an ad: the image, the first lines, maybe "See more", then the headline and the button.
• Treat "See more" as consent. The first lines earn the tap; everything after it is for people who asked.
• When people object in the comments, answer the objection in your next ad.
• Test the plain asset before you pay for the polished one. Plain beats pretty when plain is clearer.

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