Welcome back to Nice Ads. I've put together another three creatives to break down, and this week we're going to be learning
Why you shouldn’t judge your ads before you run them.
An easy AI hack to get more out of your static ads.
Trend-led statics and how to make them.
Before we get into it, quick cheeky promo for my ad creative course: if you want to learn creative strategy and all the systems that I use at my agency to help scale many D2C brands, then click here to enrol.
Shay and Blue
There's a chance that the ad you hate goes on to perform best. And I wanted to take a moment here to chat about personal opinion and how that correlates to performance.
Having worked with over 200 brands, I can tell you with confidence that most of the time people's opinions are completely wrong. We've had brand owners throw out creative that we've made because it didn't match with what they believed would perform. We've had brand owners run only a piece of creative because we forced them to, and that creative goes on to be one of their top spenders.
Personal opinion gets in the way of so many potentially fantastic ads that, at this point, even I just have to trust the process. This ad for Shay and Blue is a perfect example of that.
When the creative strategist who wrote this and I reviewed it, we both kind of hated it. We thought the casting was off, and the message didn't hit correctly. We didn't share this with the brand, and so they ran the creative. Of course, it ends up being a high performer, so next time you judge a creative too fast, maybe it's worth loading it into the ad account and seeing what your customer actually thinks.
But this is what I think makes a good creative agency: one that can admit when they're wrong, take the L, and learn from it. I think that's one thing we do really well at Fraggell, and if you want a creative partner like that then apply to work with us here.
ALOHA
Something a little bit different this week. I wanted to show you a really impactful way that you can use AI video to enhance your existing assets. The Aloha video above is one of their better-performing creatives, so to squeeze more juice from it, I put it into Kling 3 Pro and asked it to simply animate the image, and this was the first result.
When we first started Fraggell, one of the main creative types that we made for a lot of brands was these animated statics. Our designers would create an image ad, then add some kind of animation to bring it to life. These used to perform so well for brands, particularly at the bottom of the funnel, but the work that went into them made it hard to scale. Now all we need to do is design the static and let AI do all the animation.
I'm really excited to test this on a couple of accounts: take the best-performing statics and animate them, and see what the results are.
I think instead of people focusing on making fake people with AI, we should be focusing on how we can do things like this.
TLDR:
AI doesn't have to be slop
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Peachy Men
Finally, I want to showcase a really unique way you can take advantage of current video trends and remake them into a static. You might have already seen that a popular video style is to use the iPhone's ability to film with the front and back camera at the same time to make reactionary content. This brand has taken that idea and made a results-based static.
In the top corner, you see the results looking like it was taken with his phone, but then you also see the product at the same time. This is really smart because a lot of the time you just use a split screen, and that feels quite manufactured. Although doing it this way feels organic and might fit into the feed a little easier, it makes that very clear sales static feel a little more natural
Remember, you can get inspiration for any type of ad from any type of media. Don't just consume social media content. Go and watch a film or read a book to try and get a creative kickstart.
TLDR:
Find a unique way to create something that's been done before
That's all for this week's Nice Ads. I appreciate you giving it a read. Be sure to share it with a friend or colleague.
If you have a spare 10 minutes and want to learn how to be a creative strategist, I just released a brand-new YouTube video that breaks down all the skills I think top creative strategists need in 2026.
Until next week, I'll see you soon
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