1. Waterdoctor

Why This Ad Works

The hook is simple but highly effective: 'The water feels like silk!'

What a statement.

What kind of product can make water feel like silk? Waterdoctor can.

The analogy to silk instantly grabs your attention and positions the product as premium.

Silk is luxury!

If you ever get the chance to shop at Hermès, check out their scarf section.

A single piece of fabric commands over a $500 price point.

The craftsmanship behind that scarf is priceless in today’s world. But you can purchase that craftsmanship for only $550. A steal!

If you can make your customer feel like your product was crafted by artisans, they’ll experience that same sense of luxury.

Let them indulge in a taste of opulence, even if it’s just for five minutes in their daily routine.

The rest of the ad is a perfect example of direct response.

After positioning the product as premium and establishing the desired customer outcome, it quickly reminds you of the 'before' state.

'Would you like to see what’s inside your aerator?' Boom.

2. Flamingo Estate

Why This Ad Works

What better way to show the quality of your product than by showing it in action?

Flamingo Estate’s bar of soap isn’t even a bar—it’s a brick. Something solid that screams quality.

The ad itself is simple—someone rubbing the soap brick to ‘activate’ it. But they also add supporting text and graphic overlays with quotes from their reviews.

3. Lucent Globe

Why This Ad Works

First of all, the hook is a great visual of how their product works. It also builds a “curiosity gap.”

They follow the hook with a common problem related to their competition. The rest of the ad takes a founder storytelling angle, which often performs well for CPG brands. It’s like a Shark Tank pitch in your face.

1. Mole Self-Grip Wrench

See above, and below.

Two very different messages, both effective.

2. Union Carbide

I honestly don’t even know what this ad is promoting… but I like its illustration—it’s a surrealist take on advertising. Feels like something Midjourney can make.

Fun fact: This address is now home to JPMorgan Chase’s Global HQ.

3. Master Charge

Mastercard before the rebrand.

What I like about this ad is it’s targeting back to school shoppers, implying that you need to buy a lot of school supplies, and building trust and credibility at the end.

“It’s honored where back-to-school shopping happens — from coast to coast.”

Fun fact: Master Charge, first known as Interbank Card Association (ICA), rebranded to what we all know as Mastercard in 1979.

Read more about their brand history (if you’re a business nerd like me) here: https://www.mastercard.com/brandcenter/en/brand-history

Tastefully Edited, Curated Motivational Videos

Inspo: Maximise

Maximise is an Instagram page that crafts incredibly well-edited videos, typically leaning into the motivational side of things.

Since Feb of this year, the account has gone from 179K followers to 813K. That’s a 354% Growth Rate.

Why should you care about this account?

There’s a macro-trend of motivation-core, grindset type content happening over the past couple of years.

Combine that with well-done, thoughtful editing like my friends in the Youtube New Wave (shoutout Creator Camp), and you have something like this.

In the next edition I’ll share an ad from a brand leaning into this style of editing.

On that note, this is a good reminder to ask you to subscribe if you aren’t already:

Tip 001: Look to the macro—Understand what the zeitgeist cares about.

My biggest unlock as a creative strategist is my ability to write ads that resonate across generations, from Boomers to Gen Z. The key is understanding the inner workings of the cultural machine.

My screen time is over 10 hours. I’m extremely online, for better or for worse. I even watch FB Reels some times.

I pay close attention to what people care about, and these insights become crucial when I analyze performance data, particularly audience segments (i.e., the demographics Meta is targeting with my ads).

This cultural understanding makes it easier to form new hypotheses about why certain creatives are performing well with specific segments.

For instance, I recently launched a batch of messaging tests for a brand and uncovered some fascinating insights.

We found that the same product converted well with two very different groups: 25-44 year old men and 45+ year old women, each responding to entirely different angles.

Without knowing these angles, it might be hard to see what these segments have in common.

The angles themselves didn’t share anything in common, except for the product.

It all came down to how we positioned it.

By understanding what each segment values, I can infer reasons why they purchased the product.

Of course, I could be wrong. The data is super early and the sample size is tiny. But at least we’re not shooting in the dark for our next batch.