The videos were expensive to produce. Professional actors, high-end graphics, corporate music beds, everything about them screamed "premium brand." Each one cost thousands of pounds.
They all flopped.
Every single one. We put them on Meta, Instagram, TikTok — and they just sat there. Low click-through rates. Poor engagement. The comments we did get were people scrolling past or, worse, calling them out as ads.
Then we tried something different. We used an AI platform called ArcAds to How to create effective UGC: People walking down the street, selfie-style, talking to camera like they were sharing something with a mate. Rough around the edges. Clearly not TV-grade.
The AI videos crushed them.
We went on to spend £1.3 million on mis-sold car finance ads. Generated tens of thousands of cases. And the creative that drove it? Videos that cost about £100 and took three hours to make.
The £10,000 production would probably have worked on television. But that's not where we put it. This isn't about being deceptive. It's about matching the context. In a feed full of personal updates and casual videos, a corporate production sticks out, and not in a good way.
That's the first lesson of ads that work: the platform dictates the creative. What works in one place bombs in another.
Let me strip this back to first principles.
Your ad has one job. Get the click.
That's it. Not to educate. Not to explain your entire value proposition. Not to overcome every objection. Not to close the sale. The first five seconds must justify their attention. If you don't hook them immediately, they'll skip, and you've lost them.
Everything else happens downstream.
This single focus changes how you think about ad creative. You're not trying to compress your entire sales pitch into 125 characters. You're trying to create enough intrigue, enough resonance, enough "that's exactly what I'm dealing with" recognition that someone takes the next step.
The landing page does the heavy lifting. The form captures the details. Your sales team closes the deal. The ad just opens the door.
But here's the trap — and I learned this the expensive way.
We were running secured loans campaigns and tested a hook: "Instant eligibility check." I was confident it would work. People want instant results. A big competitor had been running something similar for months. The logic was sound.
And on the front end, it worked beautifully. Click-through rate went up. Cost per lead came down. The metrics looked great.
But ROAS collapsed.