The psychology behind great hooks

Welcome back to another edition of Nice Ads. If you're new here, this is the weekly newsletter where I break down the creative strategy behind three ad creatives so that you can replicate their success.

This week we're gonna be covering:

• Using your customers as creators

• How to expose the truth behind your competitors

• A simple way to rapidly test messaging

Quick note if your brand is spending over 100K on Paid Media and you need some help with your art creative. I'd love to see how my agency Fraggell can help.

If you fill out this form, you’ll receive a free video ad when working with us.

The Black Stuff

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Your customers are your best advocates, so you must include them in your ad creative more often! Not only is it fantastic social proof, but it's also a great way to help your customers feel like part of the brand, not just a number on a Shopify dashboard.

This ad that we made for the Black Stuff is a great example. We worked with the founder to send an email to all the past customers asking them to record a short video answering a number of questions. In return, they'd get a couple of free products as a thank you.

Our edit team looked through all the clips and pieced together a couple of small mashup ads that have proved a real success in acquiring new customers at the bottom of the funnel.

If you choose to use this method yourself, just make sure that you give your customers some filming guidance to ensure that what you get back is actually usable; otherwise, it might be a waste of everyone's time.

Remember, your ads don't always need to be super complicated. Sometimes a simple customer mashup testimonial video like this can become an absolute winner..

If you want something like this for your own brand and give you and your team some time back, apply to work with us here and we’ll take care of all your creative strategy and production!

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Drink Nimbus

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Educational explainer ads like this are incredibly important when challenging the norm within your industry. They help set you apart and help people understand why you're the better alternative.

We make a lot of these odds for our client Leaf Shave because they're trying to achieve a similar thing in educating people on why picking them is a better choice.

But this ad from Drink Nimbus caught my eye because although it presents itself as a standard UGC ad, it's actually full of really interesting facts about their competitors. It clearly presents the benefits of why their powdered oat milk is better for me and the planet.

One thing in particular I really like about this ad is the hook. It sparks one of the core triggers you need in the first three seconds of any ad, which is curiosity. You want to open the loop within your hook, hoping that people will want to watch the entire video to close that loop.

This video was just proof that a great script can work no matter what the format.

TLDR:

• Curiosity is the key to any good hook

• Educational creative is the best top of the funnel content.

Looking for more?

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• Fraggell - Looking for ads that turn scrollers into customers? My performance ad creative agency has delivered high-convert ads to brands like ALOHA, Chomps, and Nailboo… It’s worth your time to apply today to see if you're a good fit.

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HeyShape

👉 Watch in full here

Text-heavy ads like this one from HeyShape have been performing well across all our clients recently. The idea is to place some platform-native copy over B-roll of people using or interacting with your product.

Incredibly simple to make and a fast way to test new offers and messaging.

I think it works because we're seeing more content like this natively on our feed with things like TikTok carousels. People can consume the content in any environment without having sound on and can quickly skim the content to gauge whether they're interested or not.

You can do what they've done in this example by using FOMO to get people excited about one of your limited-time offers. Or you can use clever copy that calls out your demographics problem and present you as a solution.

This can be as simple or as complicated as you like. The important thing is that you test different messaging and different visuals.

You could easily make 10 of these in the next hour.

TLDR:

• Simple ideas like this allow for rapid testing

• Make creative that blends into an organic feed

That’s all for this weeks’s Nice Ads. Thanks for reading, as always.

I posted a new YouTube video last week, breaking down an ad that made our client $170K - Watch it here.

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