03/06/2026
I wasn't looking for inspiration. I was looking for patterns.
And after going through that many ads, a few things became impossible to ignore.
The best ads don't try to be clever.
They try to be clear. The wit comes after the idea is solid. Most people have this backwards.
Emotion shows up before logic in every ad that converts.
Not sometimes. Every time. The feeling lands first. The justification follows. If your ad leads with specs, you've already lost them.
The headline does most of the work.
I kept going back to ads where the body copy almost didn't matter, because the headline had already done the job. One sentence. The rest was just detail.
Simple language outperforms sophisticated language consistently.
The ads written like a person talking to another person, those are the ones you remember.
The ones trying to sound like a brand are the ones you scroll past.
Restraint is a skill.
The ads that have stayed with me longest said less than I expected.
They trusted the reader. They didn't over-explain.
