What High-Performing Ads Have in Common

TL;DR

High-performing ads win on three things: they grab attention with familiar-but-peculiar hooks, stick in long-term memory through distinct, structured stories (often with humor), and drive emotional engagement by tapping into relief, hope, desire, fear, and FOMO. This piece breaks down how to design hooks, visuals, CTAs, and tension so your ads feel impossible to scroll past and keep paying you over time.

Consumer neuroscience studies keep finding the same pattern: the ads that move markets score high on three dimensions.

1. Attention

2. Conversion to long-term memory

3. Emotional engagement

1. Attention: Familiarity + Peculiarity

In a feed, your ad has ~0.3 seconds to answer, “Is this worth not scrolling to the next dopamine hit?”

What captures attention best is familiar-but-unexpected:

Familiar

Peculiar

This is why a quick iPhone video in a messy kitchen often outperforms the polished studio shot, or a fake "Notes app" screenshot with a contrarian statement hooks harder than a glossy brand graphic.

2. Long-Term Memory: Peculiarity + Structure (and Often Humor)

The ads that keep paying you are the ones that are easiest for people to remember.

Memory is biased toward:

That’s why a single, sharp analogy like, "It’s like Duolingo for addiction" sticks, or a vivid testimonial line like, "My friends thought I’d had a facelift" outperforms a paragraph of benefits.

3. Emotional Engagement: Humor, Relief, Desire, Fear

People don’t convert because they processed your features spreadsheet.

They convert because your ad made them feel:

Humor shows up repeatedly in the research because it lowers defenses, increases sharing, and makes your brand feel human, not corporate.

And Meta’s job is to optimize delivery. Your job is to feed it creatives that trigger actual human responses along these three axes.

Hooks & Angles: The First Battle You Have to Win

What are they doing in the moment they come across my ad?

They’re probably on the couch, half-watching Netflix, half-scrolling Instagram. Or they’re between calls, flicking through LinkedIn. Or in bed, doomscrolling TikTok while their partner talks about the argument they overheard at the local grocery store.

Your ad is an interruption.

The hook has two jobs:

The angle has one job: frame your product as the most compelling way to solve a specific problem or desire.

Great ads pair a sticky hook with a sharp angle.

Here is a sample of hook types that we’ve found reliably work, plus the kind of angle they pair best with. If you want to see the full table you can view here for free.

Hook Types – Concrete Examples

When you’re feeding Meta, don’t test 50 copy variants of the same hook. Test 5–10 radically different hooks on the same core outcome.

Visuals: What Can Make or Break Your Ads

Make It Instantly Understandable

If someone can’t tell what this is about in 1 second, it’s too complex. You want one core idea per creative, one main visual subject, and one headline that actually says something.

Show, Don’t Tell

If your product solves a problem, show that problem being solved.

Mimic Native Content

Your ad shouldn’t scream "ad" at first glance.

The more it blends with what your prospect is already consuming, the cheaper the cost of attention becomes.

Keep It Clean & Uncluttered

Too many elements create visual noise. Your prospects will scroll on by. Remove decorative fluff that doesn’t help the message, use whitespace, and make one element clearly dominant.

Use Contrast to Stand Out

You’re not just fighting other brands. You’re fighting brain rot, babies, cats, memes, and friends’ selfies. Stand out with bold colors, strong shapes, and clear focal points. Avoid low contrast at all costs.

Common Interface Hijacking

Hijacking familiar interfaces is one of the easiest wins:

It works because the brain is already trained to stop and read these.

Visual Hierarchy

Decide exactly where you want the eyes to go:

Make that order visually obvious:

If everything is shouting, nothing is heard.

Credit: Clay

CTAs: Don’t Overthink Them

CTAs aren’t the star of the show, but they do nudge action.

Principles:

Sometimes the “CTA” lives in the creative itself (for example, a big "See inside the app" overlay) more than the button.

Tension: The Final Piece

How long can you hold tension without ruining it?

Think of your ad like a horror or mystery movie:

Most ads die because they over-explain way too early. As my boss likes to say, they pop the balloon.

Outcome vs. Mechanism – Where People Mess Up the Most

The core rule: In your ads, you dangle the outcome, not the mechanism.

I’ll never forget when I was first writing ads for our Growth Program. I wanted to be as direct and outcome-focused as possible.

I wrote: "Learn to profitably acquire customers by figuring out which 1–2 channels to focus on."

But when our CEO was reviewing them, the feedback was that I popped the balloon. I gave away all the sauce: profitably acquire customers and the mechanism (we help you narrow in on 1–2 channels).

There’s no mystery left. The reader goes, "Oh, okay, yeah, I’ve heard that before. I could probably ask ChatGPT about that."

Here’s a better pattern that keeps the balloon inflated:

Now the ad promises the outcome (profitable customer acquisition), hints at the problem (wrong channels, wasted months), and doesn’t reveal how the system actually solves that.

The curiosity is still intact. The “reveal” is pushed downstream to the landing page, the VSL, or the email. Where it belongs.

Your Audience Should Be Asking Questions, Not Nodding

Good storytelling makes the reader ask questions they don’t know the answer to.

Bad storytelling fills the ad with statements they already understand:

Instead, you want lines that create new questions:

You’re not dumping your framework into the ad. You’re naming the existence of a different way, and then stopping.

Don’t Shrink Your Value to One Boring Tip

Another way to kill tension is to summarize a complex system into one generic line in the ad.

For example:

"We built a system that shows you exactly which channels fit your business model."

Two problems:

Stronger versions:

Still true. Way more tension. No mechanism revealed.

Where to Stop the Sentence

Learning the micro-skill of where to stop your copy is what really upgrades your skills.

Take this basic ecom story:

"You’ve probably tried three different ‘miracle’ moisturizers this year.

For most people, week 2 is where everything falls apart…"

Stop there.

If you keep going:

"…because the real problem is your skin barrier, so you need to use our 3-step routine with X, Y, and Z ingredients…"

You’ve just explained the trick. You made it sound like something they can go copy with whatever’s already in their cabinet. This kills the urge to click through and see what’s actually different about your product.

Same thing for B2B:

"Most teams think they have a traffic problem.

The ones who grow fast usually have a completely different bottleneck…"

Stop there. If you add:

"…because their real issue is lead-to-opportunity conversion, so we help them redesign their entire pipeline with our 7-step framework…"

You turned a sharp, tense statement into a LinkedIn carousel bullet. The mystery’s gone.

The ad’s job is not to teach your entire framework.

The ad’s job is to make "I need to see the rest of this" feel inevitable.

Example: Not Popping the Balloon

Top-performing ad example:

This ad doesn’t pop the balloon because it only reveals the outcome (your grandma can be an influencer), not the mechanism (how VideoGen makes that possible).

The reader is left asking:

If it popped the balloon, it would say something like:

"Even your grandma can be an influencer with VideoGen’s AI video generator that turns text into professional videos in minutes."

Now the mystery is gone. The reader goes, "Oh, it’s an AI video tool. Got it." No curiosity left.

How This Looks in Other Categories

Skincare / beauty (ecom)

Weak:

"Clear your acne in 30 days with our 2-step salicylic acid system."

You just told them the “system” is some ingredients they’ve seen in 50 other products.

Stronger:

"Why your skin always looks worse right after you ‘fix’ it."

or

"Most routines make you feel better for a week, then nuke your progress. Here’s how people avoid that."

Outcome = better skin.

Intrigue = "worse after you fix it", "avoid that".

No ingredients, no routine breakdown. That comes after the click.

Local service / gym / studio

Weak:

"Lose weight with our 6-week bootcamp."

Mechanism is right there: bootcamp, 6 weeks. Generic.

Stronger:

"Most people quit in week 3. We built our entire program around that wall."

"If you’ve fallen off every time you’ve tried, this is built for that moment."

Now the story is about why week 3 is the danger zone and what you do differently there. That’s the reveal later.

Courses / coaching

Weak:

"Learn to scale your agency using our 5-step client acquisition framework."

Sounds like every other "5-step" thing.

Stronger:

"Two ways agency owners try to grow: buy growth or wing it alone. There’s a third option nobody talks about."

The third option is the tension. You don’t explain it in the ad. The click “buys” that explanation.

The “Don’t Pop the Balloon” Checklist

When you look at your ad copy, ask:

If yes, you popped the balloon.

Quick Fixes

Your best-performing ads will usually feel, when you read them back, like they’re holding something back on purpose.