Welcome back to your favourite newsletter. I've got another three ad creatives that I'm going to break down for you this morning, so let's get started. Today we're going to be learning:
An easy, high-production creative style for your account
The secret to the soft sell
Why your ugly ads are terrible.
Just an FYI: If your brand is looking to scale in 2026 and lower your CPA by an average of 20%, then my agency would love to make some ad creative for you click here to see if you'd be a good fit.
Protein.com
This is an ad that we recently made for a protein company. A lot of their ads are UGC, which is one of the primary formats you see in the account. When we came on board, our main mission was to help diversify the creative, and this is one of the styles we launched: a one-person expert-style podcast ad.
This was really easy to film in our studio. We just set up a vibrant pink background to help stop the scroll by colour-blocking. After that, a simple podcast mic, a great actress who memorised the script that we'd given them, and this took about half an hour to film.
Ads like this are really great, just to add some diversity. In particular, the expert style works very well because, in health and wellness, customers often want to be educated so they feel safe consuming your product. If they feel like they're being told that it's safe by a trusted authority, they have a much higher chance of converting further down the funnel.
There's no need to complicate a creative like this with multiple cast members and fancy editing, because really, the only thing that matters is a great script.
If you're looking for something similar to this creative for your ad account, then apply to work with us here.
Aqualibra
This ad was saved by one of my team members last week, and I think it's a great example of a 2026 UGC creative. It looks so organic that you end up watching it just because you're interested if the creator matches yourself or someone that you aspire to be.
If you watch the full video, the product appears on screen a couple of times, but it's not until the end that she actually mentions it. I think that's often where people go wrong with this type of video: they won't show the product until the creator speaks about it. That means the switch from organic video to an ad feels jarring. In this video, we've seen the product multiple times, so we already recognise it by the time the creator actually speaks about it, making the transition a little smoother.
We'll definitely try this in similar ads in the coming months. And as I always say with this style of creative, it's the creator that makes it:
The way they film
The way they speak
The locations that they choose
Getting a good creator is worth its weight in gold every time!
TLDR:
Your organic UGC creatives need to sell more subtly than you might imagine
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TrustHero
Let's talk about ugly static ads. This is something that I think needs addressing, because I often see people do it very wrong.
A lot of designers and marketers think that an ugly ad is just a badly designed static, but it works because it's badly designed, right? Wrong. A great ugly ad is one that has a strategy behind the ugliness.
Let's take this example. The reason this works on a psychological level is that it closely resembles posting a Facebook status in the app. You can choose a background, you can choose the font, and so the average boomer might not even realise that this is an ad. Yes, it looks horrific, but on a deeper level, it is actually really smart.
And that's the secret behind an ugly ad that actually converts. It doesn't just look bad. It looks bad with intention. You can do it with videos or images, but the key is that you have a reason for it to look the way it does.
TLDR:
on t just make an ugly ad for the sake of it.
That's all for this week's nice ads. I appreciate you sticking around and reading this one.
I just released a new video on how you can use AI to create a unique ad creative style. You can give that watch on my YouTube channel here.
I'm very close to 20,000 subscribers, so when you hit the subscribe button, until next week, I'll see you soon
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