It looks awful, but it works.
Why? We’ve all grown tired of perfect.
The Internet used to be hideous.
To compete, people stood out and built trust with better design and higher production value. YouTubers went from recording blurry vlogs to spending upwards of 6 to 7 figures per video.
In just two years, carousels on LinkedIn have gone from lazily cut and cropped Twitter threads.
To these incredibly well-designed, professional, and on-brand works of art took the creators 10+ hours and an experienced designer to make.
When everything is now manicured and over-optimized, how do you stand out?
👉 By embracing the ugly.
Ugly Ads work for a few reasons:
1️⃣ It's completely different than everything else in our feeds.
2️⃣ It's incomprehensible someone would make an ad that simple or ugly, so it's surprising and delightful.
Like when Surreal creates a billboard of a screenshot of a horrible ad made in PowerPoint.
3️⃣ They look and feel like organic posts.
4️⃣ We crave authenticity, simplicity, and rawness.
Fitness YouTuber Sam Sulek has grown to over 3M YouTube subscribers with hideous thumbnails, terrible titles, and horrible lighting.
It’s just him working out in a horribly lit gym and talking to the camera while driving home at night in his car.
In short:
Resist the urge for perfection.
Make some ads and posts that are a bit ugly and weird.
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