Join Ice Advertisements: How to Make Cold Audiences Convert
Join ice advertisements are ads designed to bring cold or disengaged audiences into active contact with a brand, product, or community. The term “join ice” refers to breaking through audience inertia, the resistance that exists when someone has no prior relationship with what you’re selling. Done well, these ads move people from passive awareness into genuine consideration. Done badly, they burn budget reaching people who were never going to convert, while the team congratulates itself on impressions.
Most marketers underestimate how hard it is to shift a cold audience. Performance channels have trained an entire generation to optimise for intent signals, people who are already searching, already comparing, already close to a decision. Join ice advertising is a different discipline. It requires creative confidence, patience, and a clear understanding of what you’re actually asking someone to do.
Key Takeaways
- Join ice advertisements target cold or disengaged audiences, not people already in the market, which requires a fundamentally different creative and measurement approach.
- The biggest mistake is applying lower-funnel metrics to upper-funnel activity. Cold audience ads rarely convert immediately, and judging them on short-term ROAS will kill campaigns that are actually working.
- Creative friction is not always a failure signal. Ads that provoke, surprise, or challenge a cold audience often outperform safe, polished executions over a longer window.
- Audience definition matters more here than anywhere else in the funnel. Broad targeting without a clear profile of who you are trying to move wastes money at scale.
- The goal of a join ice ad is a single, specific action: get the person one step closer. Not close the sale, not explain the full product, just reduce the distance between them and the brand.
In This Article
If you are thinking about where join ice advertising fits within a broader commercial growth model, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider framework, from audience segmentation through to channel selection and growth measurement. This article focuses specifically on the cold audience advertising problem and how to approach it with more precision than most teams currently do.
Why Cold Audience Advertising Is Harder Than It Looks
Early in my career, I spent a disproportionate amount of time optimising for lower-funnel performance. Click-through rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. The metrics were clean, the feedback loops were fast, and the dashboards looked impressive. I thought I was being rigorous. What I was actually doing was capturing demand that already existed and attributing it to my campaigns.
The problem with performance marketing as a primary growth lever is that it fishes in a pond that someone else filled. If your brand has built awareness, if word of mouth is working, if your category is growing, then search and retargeting will look brilliant. The moment that underlying demand dries up, the performance numbers collapse and no one can explain why, because they were never measuring what was actually driving growth in the first place.
Join ice advertising forces a different question: can you create demand, not just capture it? That is a harder problem. It requires reaching people who have no existing relationship with your brand, no active need, and no particular reason to pay attention. The creative has to do more work. The message has to land faster. And the measurement has to be honest about the fact that you are playing a longer game.
There is a useful analogy here. Think about a clothes shop. Someone browsing the rails is mildly interested. Someone who picks something up and tries it on is significantly more likely to buy, not because the product changed, but because the physical engagement shifted their relationship to it. Join ice advertising is trying to manufacture that moment of engagement for a cold audience, getting them to pick something up, even metaphorically, before they have any reason to.
That is not impossible. But it requires understanding what actually moves people, rather than what looks good in a weekly performance report. The reason go-to-market feels harder now is partly because the easy demand capture channels are more competitive and more expensive, which means the brands that have invested in cold audience work are pulling ahead.
What Join Ice Advertisements Are Actually Trying to Do
There is a failure mode I see constantly: teams running cold audience campaigns with warm audience objectives. They target people who have never heard of the brand, show them a product ad with a discount code, and then wonder why the conversion rate is low. The issue is not the ad. The issue is the expectation. You cannot ask a cold audience to do what a warm audience does.
A join ice advertisement has one job: reduce the distance between a cold audience member and the brand. That is it. Not close the sale. Not explain the full product range. Not communicate every brand value. Just move the person one step closer, from unaware to aware, from aware to curious, from curious to engaged.
This sounds simple but it has significant implications for how you build and evaluate these campaigns. The creative brief changes. Instead of leading with product features or promotional offers, you are leading with something that earns attention first. A provocation. A point of view. A piece of content that is genuinely useful or genuinely interesting to the specific audience you are targeting.
The call to action changes too. “Buy now” is the wrong ask for a cold audience. “Find out more”, “watch this”, “join the conversation”, these are lower-commitment entry points that fit where the audience actually is in their relationship with your brand. Growth hacking frameworks sometimes talk about this in terms of activation steps, and while the language can get overblown, the underlying logic is sound. You need to design the right ask for the right moment. Growth hacking principles at their most useful are really just about matching the ask to the audience state.
One thing I learned running campaigns across more than 30 industries is that the step size matters enormously. Ask too much of a cold audience and you get nothing. Ask too little and you get engagement that never converts into anything commercial. The best join ice campaigns identify a specific, low-friction action that still has genuine commercial intent behind it. A quiz that helps someone understand which product is right for them. A short video that frames a problem the audience recognises. A community or group that gives someone a reason to stay connected to the brand.
How to Build Join Ice Advertisements That Work
There is no single formula, but there are principles that consistently separate campaigns that move cold audiences from campaigns that do not.
Start with a precise audience definition
Broad targeting is not the same as cold audience targeting. Broad targeting is lazy. Cold audience targeting is deliberate. You need to know exactly who you are trying to reach, what they care about, what they are currently doing instead of engaging with your brand, and what would have to be true for them to pay attention.
When I was at iProspect, growing the team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that changed as we scaled was how seriously we took audience definition upstream of any campaign build. Early on, like most agencies, we would accept a brief that said “adults 25-54 interested in finance” and build from there. As we got more rigorous, we pushed back on that. Who specifically? What are they reading? What problem are they trying to solve? What does their decision-making process look like? The answers to those questions changed the creative, the channel mix, and the measurement framework entirely.
Lead with something worth paying attention to
Cold audiences owe you nothing. They did not ask to see your ad. They have no existing goodwill toward your brand. The creative has to earn its way into their attention before it can do anything else.
This is where a lot of brand advertising goes wrong. It leads with brand identity rather than audience value. The logo is big, the tagline is prominent, and the actual reason someone should care is buried or absent entirely. Join ice advertising that works tends to invert this. It leads with something the audience finds useful, funny, surprising, or genuinely relevant, and lets the brand association follow from that.
I remember a Guinness brainstorm early in my career, one of those sessions where the brief was genuinely open and the room was trying to find an angle that would cut through for a brand that everyone knew but not everyone was drinking. What became clear in that session was that the most interesting ideas were not about Guinness at all, at least not on the surface. They were about something the target audience already cared about, and Guinness was the brand that understood that thing well enough to talk about it credibly. That is the structure of good join ice creative: start where the audience is, not where the brand wants them to be.
Design the right entry point
What happens after someone engages with a join ice ad matters as much as the ad itself. If the click goes to a generic homepage, you have wasted the engagement. If it goes to a landing page that demands too much commitment too fast, you lose people who were genuinely interested.
The entry point should match the temperature of the audience. Cold audiences need a warm room, not a sales floor. Content that continues the conversation from the ad. A community or email sequence that builds the relationship gradually. A tool or resource that delivers value before asking for anything in return. Successful growth examples across consumer and B2B categories consistently show that the brands winning cold audiences are the ones that have invested in what happens after the first click, not just in the ad itself.
Measure what you can actually influence
This is where most join ice campaigns get killed. Someone in a leadership meeting asks what the ROAS is on the cold audience campaign, and the honest answer, that it is lower than retargeting because you are talking to people who have never heard of you, sounds like a failure. So either the campaign gets cut, or the team starts gaming the measurement to make it look better than it is.
Neither outcome is useful. The right approach is to agree on what success looks like before the campaign runs, not after. For a cold audience campaign, that might be brand recall lift, audience growth, content engagement rates, or the rate at which cold audiences move into warmer segments over a defined period. These are not perfect metrics, but they are honest ones. And honest approximation beats false precision every time.
I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness, and one thing that stands out in the strongest entries is how clearly the teams defined what they were trying to achieve before they started. The measurement framework was built into the strategy, not bolted on at the end. That discipline is rare, and it is the difference between being able to defend a cold audience investment and having it cut at the first quarterly review.
Channel Selection for Cold Audience Campaigns
Not every channel is equally suited to join ice advertising. Search is the wrong starting point because it depends on existing intent. People have to be searching for something before your ad appears. If they have no relationship with your brand or category, they are not searching.
Social platforms, particularly those with strong interest and behaviour-based targeting, are more natural environments for cold audience work. You can reach people based on what they care about rather than what they are actively searching for. Video formats tend to outperform static for cold audiences because they can tell a more complete story and build emotional connection faster. Audio, out of home, and connected TV all have roles depending on the category and the scale of the audience you are trying to reach.
The channel decision should follow the audience, not the other way around. Where does this specific cold audience spend time? What format fits the nature of the message you need to deliver? What is the cost of reaching them at the scale required? These are commercial questions as much as media questions, and the answer will be different for a consumer brand targeting 18-to-24-year-olds than for a B2B software company targeting procurement managers.
BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy makes the point that channel decisions are often made on habit rather than evidence. Teams use the channels they know, not necessarily the channels where their cold audiences are most reachable. That is worth examining honestly before committing budget.
The Relationship Between Join Ice Ads and Long-Term Growth
There is a commercial argument for cold audience advertising that goes beyond any individual campaign. Brands that consistently reach new audiences compound their growth in a way that brands focused purely on demand capture cannot. Every cold audience member you successfully move into awareness, and then into consideration, and then into purchase, becomes a potential advocate, a repeat buyer, a source of organic word of mouth. The economics of that compound over time in ways that retargeting a fixed pool of warm prospects never can.
The challenge is that this compounding effect is slow and hard to attribute cleanly. The person who saw your join ice ad in January and bought in June does not show up as a clean conversion in your performance dashboard. They look like organic traffic or a direct visit or a branded search. The performance channel gets the credit. The cold audience work that created the awareness goes unmeasured and underfunded.
This is a structural problem in how most marketing teams measure and allocate budget. BCG’s pricing and go-to-market research highlights how commercial decisions made on incomplete data consistently undervalue the activities that drive long-term growth. Join ice advertising is one of the most commonly undervalued. The brands that figure out how to fund it consistently, and measure it honestly, tend to be the ones that are still growing when the performance-only players have exhausted their existing demand pool.
The broader principles behind sustainable growth, including how cold audience work connects to category expansion, pricing power, and commercial transformation, are covered in depth across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. If you are building a growth model rather than just optimising a campaign, that is a useful place to continue.
Common Mistakes in Join Ice Campaigns
Most of the mistakes I see are not creative failures. They are strategic failures that show up in the creative.
Targeting too broadly is the most common. “Everyone” is not a cold audience. It is an excuse to avoid the harder work of defining who you are actually trying to reach. Broad targeting produces cheap impressions and poor engagement because the message cannot be specific enough to resonate with anyone in particular.
Asking for too much too soon is the second most common. A cold audience member who has never heard of your brand is not ready to book a demo, request a quote, or make a purchase. Campaigns that lead with high-commitment calls to action for cold audiences consistently underperform, and then get cut before the audience has had enough exposure to actually warm up.
Using warm audience creative for cold audiences is the third. Retargeting ads that reference products someone has browsed, or promotional ads built for people who already know the brand, do not work for people with no prior relationship. The creative has to be built specifically for the cold audience state, which means starting from scratch rather than repurposing existing assets.
Measuring on the wrong timeline is the fourth. Cold audience campaigns need longer measurement windows than warm audience campaigns. If you are evaluating a join ice campaign after two weeks using conversion metrics, you will almost certainly conclude it is not working, even if it is doing exactly what it should. Agree on the measurement approach before the campaign runs. Growth tools can help track audience movement across funnel stages over longer periods, but only if you have set up the tracking correctly from the start.
Finally, failing to build the post-click experience is a mistake that kills otherwise strong campaigns. An ad that earns attention from a cold audience is wasted if the landing experience does not continue the conversation. The entry point has to be designed for someone who knows nothing about you and needs a reason to stay.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
