Breaking down a high performing solar ad, frame by frame

▶ 0:00So the AC sub-main cable had to run under this driveway here. We had to dig up the gravel to create a trench. So the trench then does a right angle and it goes underneath these bushes. Then we backfilled it. Oh, how good is that? Come on, bravo editors, bravo. Happy Saturday. Today we're going to be reviewing one of the ads that we've produced recently for Kimble Solar.

▶ 0:20Now ads like this are responsible for booking up Kimble's two solar sales surveyors for an entire month. In fact, with Kimble Solar, we've had to decrease ad spend twice because the sheer volume and quality of leads is too high for both the office staff and the surveyors that are actually going out to speak to these leads.

▶ 0:40Not to mention the fact that these aren't bottom of the barrel lead. These aren't volume churners. These are leads that correspond with an average deal value of over £15,000 for Kimble Solar. Insane. Most of them are 16 plus panel systems with SIG energy batteries, Duracell batteries, Tesla batteries. And just really, really high quality inquiries. So without further ado, let's go through.

▶ 1:02I'm going to, I think there's tons that we can break down in this ad as to why it's performed so well for the business and how it represents them. And I'll go kind of frame by frame and even stop and do some kind of commentary at some point. So without further ado, let's jump right in. Kimble Solar, our witch renewables installer of the year 2025.

▶ 1:21So immediately we're leading with an authority frame. This is super important. Not many companies have this award, right? These guys are witch renewables installer of the year 2025. A lot of people go to witch to get a trusted trader and witch trusted traders are great, but that's just the trusted trader level. What about being the best one? Or it's so, you know, by witch's standards.

▶ 1:43And this award is rated on customer experience, customer excellence, like educating customers, and Kimble won it. And it's just absolutely fantastic. So with this ad, we've decided to completely lead with that as our hook into why someone should continue watching this video. And you can see, we don't waste any time. We don't introduce, you know, Chris or anything like that.

▶ 2:04We go straight in with Kimble Solar, our witch renewables installer of the year 2025. No fluff, straight in. And that's why I think this ad has such high retention because people are like, oh my, wow, okay, that's really impressive. I'm going to watch what this guy has to say. So right off the bat, straight in. And today I'm going to take you through one of our installations to show you what we're about.

▶ 2:26So this is something we'd like to do as well. We, within, as you can see there, within the first kind of 10 seconds, we're swapping to shots that have a lot of movement and versatility and variety. So you don't want it to look like there's just one type of shot that's being filmed. Because it can be quite boring to watch someone from the same angle just talk through an installation for five whole minutes, right?

▶ 2:48You want some variety, you want to mix it up a bit, you want some B-roll, you want some shots of the house instead of just the panels, etc. So we like to cut to a little bit of music with really quickly showing different B-roll shots of what someone can expect to see in the rest of the ad. And in particular you'll see that we showcase some of the editing as well at this point.

▶ 3:09Yeah, just to give a glimpse, and someone's like, oh, I haven't quite seen that before. For a solo ad, that's interesting. Why have they animated it like that? I wonder what he means. What is going on there? And this might all be subconscious, but it just increases the likelihood that someone hears what Chris has to say.

▶ 3:28Now behind me is the customer's house, and you can see it's an idyllic cottage look. There wasn't enough space on their roof. And again, this is the kind of calibre of customer that Kimball Solar are going after, right? They do really bespoke systems that are very, very high quality. So in these ads, we want to show customers of that nature.

▶ 3:49You know, we want to show a variety and make sure that there's some installations that are a bit more typical. But if we're going for that upper echelon of customer, then we need to show that they've done work of that type. Hence this beautiful property here. To fit enough solar panels, however, they had this enormous carport, and we were able to fit 18 solar panels, which really took care.

▶ 4:11So always super mindful, stuff like blurring number plates, blurring names on apps for system monitoring. Simple stuff like that, it goes a long way, just protecting privacy of the customer. Care of most of their energy consumption. But here we go. This is the inverter. It's a 10.5 kilowatt inverter, which means it can churn out a serious amount of energy.

▶ 4:30And then down here, we've got the battery. This is a 10.3 kilowatt hour battery. And again, that will also help to provide the home with plenty of power, particularly overnight. So good point there. We love to show the technicals. So a lot of solar and battery customers nowadays are very, very educated before they get to the point of making a purchase decision.

▶ 4:52So it's very important that we kind of speak to their language. If we just said solar saves you money, it doesn't actually really speak to all of the information they've been consuming from the internet, from YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. We need to speak in the language, but we also need to respect that there's going to be some colder audiences that are coming and watching these ads for the first time.

▶ 5:10So when Chris talks about things like 10.3 kilowatt hours, he is very, very good at this to the point where he says the technicals, but then explains what that actually means. And it also says it in layman's terms right after to make sure that we don't lose anyone by making it just too technical for anyone other than installers or very, very highly educated consumers to actually understand.

▶ 5:31No solar available. Now the EP11 is a particularly slim battery. You can see it does fit back quite neatly against the wall. It's pretty heavy, so the boys don't like to lift it too often, but it's all part of the job. So some light humor like that goes a really long way. Just to add a little bit of different pacing into the ad and some variety.

▶ 5:49So if you've got a bit of a personality and you want to bring that across on camera, then we'd love that. Definitely don't want to change how you speak or how you talk or the mannerisms that you have when you get on camera. Now this battery is scalable, which means we can add more at a later date. And that's what this customer wanted to do.

▶ 6:07As you can see, there's plenty of wall space available here for them to add more modules. We can do up to four, so that's 40 kilowatt hours of storage. So again, huge point there. Instead of just saying the Fox battery is a modular, Chris makes a point of telling the customer's story. Because that's really what someone wants to hear or is considering when they want a modular battery.

▶ 6:28They're not just looking for the fact that the name is modular. They're looking for the story. They're looking for the reasoning as to why would you add a battery later? Do I need to consider that? And Chris perfectly answers that. And then again, a nice little bit of humor here as well. We can see the state of charge of the battery here and it is full, which means lots of solar power.

▶ 6:47We also fitted a Zappi EV charger on this job. Zappi are solar-enabled chargers, so they can charge from surplus solar energy. We positioned it here so it was central between these two parking spaces. That way, both cars can share this one charger. Again, stuff like that. Just showcasing how you installed the system bespoke to the customer's needs.

▶ 7:07Because at the end of the day, for these higher value systems, that's the kind of thing that they're paying for. Someone to take the time to really understand their needs and maybe their future usage as well. To provide a system that's going to actually work for them long-term. So how does the solar energy get all the way into the house?

▶ 7:24Well, let's follow the cable routes. So from the solar panels on the roof, the power goes down through these DC cables. That's these black ones here that are grouped together and secured with metal cleats. Then it comes down the wall here in this conduit and into the inverter where there's a DC isolator. The inverter is the intelligent part of the system and that will then convert the DC energy into usable AC electricity.

▶ 7:48From the inverter, it comes out here and goes through an AC. Always love to use animations like that. It takes the editors quite some time and they're pretty experienced. We've got four editors that are super experienced as well as one that used to edit for us, who now does the creative reviewing process and briefing process.

▶ 8:04But it's absolutely worth it because it's that kind of detailed, more experienced editing style that actually provides value and actually illustrates things and draws focus to what the installer is talking about rather than just slapping some captions on and calling it a day. AC isolator to ensure that we can isolate the system if we need to work on it.

▶ 8:23From the AC isolator, then the energy runs down through this AC cable that is clipped here and it goes up into this new distribution board that we've fitted inside the carport. So you'll notice these shots, the audio that you're hearing was recorded in one take and then we've gone ahead after the take and thought, okay, what do we need to show to make this as visually engaging as possible and to actually illustrate the point and make sure it makes sense.

▶ 8:48And that's where we go afterwards with no audio and just get clips of stuff like cable runs up into that part there. So super important to basically do multiple takes. Now to feed this board or to get this board connected back to the house, we had to run in a large sub main cable. So the AC sub main cable had to run under this driveway here.

▶ 9:09We had to dig up the gravel to create a trench. So the trench then does a right angle and it goes underneath these bushes. Then we backfilled it. Oh, how good is that? Come on. Bravo, editors, bravo. Yeah, so three different angles with this shot. So Chris, fortunately, he's very slick on camera. I will say that. He's done YouTube for probably three, four years.

▶ 9:31So he used to be on camera. So this isn't particularly hard for him. But three, four takes of the same shot just to really illustrate what we're talking about here and add some flair to the ad, to be honest, which is, you know, obviously we love to go the extra mile for the clients. Put it, put the turf back down. And as you can see, it's absolutely lovely.

▶ 9:48You'd hardly know that we've been here. We love to do a neat job. And that's just one of the reasons why we were awarded which renewables installer of the year 2025. Then the AC cable comes around through the flower bed and up into the distribution board that's just on the other side of this wall. And that's where it effectively branches off and goes off and feeds the house.

▶ 10:08The power's a home from solar energy and not by taking energy from the electricity meter. So just before the call to action here, Chris actually did a much more extended section there, probably about three minutes by the electricity meter. And it's our job with the ad briefing process to take what might be a 10 minute clip and actually make it into a three minute ad.

▶ 10:28Because we want to make sure that the most important points are getting put across while keeping the ad relatively short to make sure that we get to a call to action. And stuff like that. So if you've got a property like this, you'd like to get your energy bills down, maybe even do a little bit for the planet. Then click the button below, enter some details and we'll give you a call as soon as we can.

▶ 10:48So again, really specific call to action there. The call to action is one of the few things that we will actually say, I'll say aloud when I'm directing. And the client will repeat back to camera. And normally it takes a couple of takes. Chris is one take Chris, but that's quite rare. So normally it's a couple of takes, but it has to be very specific.

▶ 11:08So I'll split it up into two parts. First part, we call out exactly who we want to take action. So you'll notice it. So if you've got a property like this, you'd like to get your energy bills down, maybe even do a little bit for the planet. So right there, it seems simple, but three core things happened. We called out exactly who we want to take action.

▶ 11:25People with properties like that one, which aren't too many people, but they are definitely around. We said two major pain points, which is bills doing their bit for the environment, especially in this setting, doing their bit for the environment is a huge one because of the kind of property that we're featuring. And then finally, right after this, Chris is going to say exactly what he wants the viewer to do.

▶ 11:47So it's not get in touch. It's not give us a call. It's a very specific sequence of exactly what's going to happen next. Then click the button below, enter some details, and we'll give you a call as soon as we can. And there you go. So very, very specific. And there's two reasons we do this. Firstly, it increases the likelihood someone actually does it.

▶ 12:07But when someone says to do something in a specific order like that, and then the person takes the first step, that happens as they were instructed and as they expected. They take the next step and then they take the next step and everything happens exactly as they were told. It massively increases the trust that they have in whatever's going to happen next.

▶ 12:26So if the whole concept is to get a quote, then they're going to be very, very confident that they're going to get a quote by going through the rest of the process. Because everything that Chris said would happen, happened. So super important to be really specific with your call to actions. And then finally, we'll also do just a little montage of different clips to kind of get people excited.

▶ 12:45And then a nice little logo animation. And we always use this kind of hold page at the end because we want to give someone the time to digest what they've just seen and to actually take the action that we want them to take. If we just cut straight away after the call to action and he just said, you know, click the button below, give us a few details and we'll give you a call as soon as you can.

▶ 13:07And then we just cut back like that. Then someone's just listened to that call to action, just been told what to do. And Meta or Facebook, Instagram are quite often just going to send them straight to the next video, straight to the next post. And while they think they can go back, they are very unlikely to because they're already seeing the next thing, which is most likely a dog in pajamas that is going to be really engaging.

▶ 13:30And then you've lost them, right? So you need to add a little bit of time just to let someone actually take the action that you want them to take. Cool. So that is essentially it. That is the entire ad. Again, that is one of their absolute best performers. And the reason I'm breaking this down is I want to show the kind of expertise that goes behind the scenes to create an ad like this, that the actual end product looks quite simple.

▶ 13:52Thanks so much for watching. If you made it this far, then there's something that grabbed you to this video and sticking around. Maybe it was just that you liked the ad itself. Maybe it was something to do with my breakdown. Hopefully, if it was to do with my breakdown and you're not another agency that's watched the whole way through to get insights and steal a few things, then you should definitely reach out because we can very easily deploy this for you.

▶ 14:16Book your sales team up for months at a time. Have you start on a relatively high ad spend and decrease your ad spend because you just can't cope with the demand. Completely flip the bottleneck in your business from demand to supply and create a great result like this for you. And hopefully, we'll be breaking down one of your ads in two or three months' time.

▶ 14:35So that's all. I will catch you in the next one where I'm probably going to do a couple of these ad breakdowns because I really enjoyed that, so I'm sure you'll see more of me soon. Cool. Cheers.