Hey, it's Simon.
Simon says: gossip, intimacy & cringe.
Here's what you're walking away with today: why podcast clips and street interviews are the two video formats printing money on Meta right now, the psychology that makes them work on your customers, and how to steal that psychology for your next brief.
Plus the one type of creative you should stop paying for in 2026.
The TL;DR for this one: those two formats run on the two oldest human instincts there are, gossip and intimacy. By the end, you'll know how to run both.
Quick context, because it explains everything that follows. Advertising works on real humans, so to be a great advertiser you have to read the world first. And the world right now looks like this: connecting with other people keeps getting harder:
too much screen time
too much fear of being judged
too comfortable staying inside ourselves
Human relationships are fucking complicated, man.
The goat
Let's watch your customer scroll
Emma, 22 years old, 11:40 on a Tuesday night. Red-light mask on, night skincare routine done, phone six inches from her face → Opens TikTok → A stranger is getting stopped on a SoHo sidewalk and asked how much money he makes. His answer is completely unhinged. Emma has never met this man and never will, and she watches the whole thing: she's happy she almost makes the same as him and she's like ten years younger.
She feels relieved. She feels good about herself. Then she watches three more.
Two swipes later, a podcast clip. A girl saying the thing Emma thought she was alone in thinking. Nobody's performing to camera, two women are talking to each other, and Emma is overhearing it.
This is not an entertainment story
My advantage here: I'm in 100+ Meta ad accounts from my clients, so I get to see what actually spends. On the accounts doing $1M+ a month, these are the two video formats that keep finishing on top: podcast clips and street interviews.
Both are just watching people talk. Here's what most brands are sleeping on, though: these are hyper TOF formats by nature, but the big accounts are way past that → Played right with a hard offer at the end, a Black Friday week when everyone's already half-shopping, the same clip closes the sale as a BOF ad.
And they're beating the "short film" branded videos that cost six figures to make. Why?
The street interview sells gossip
Gossip gets treated like a character flaw. It's actually the oldest information network humans have.
Before Meta ads existed, talking about people who weren't in the room was how you learned who to trust, what's acceptable, where you rank.
The street interview industrializes it: you judge a stranger at zero social cost, because you'll never see him again.
That feeling Emma got? Relieved, slightly ahead of a man she'll never meet, that's the product.
The podcast clip sells intimacy
Call Her Daddy built an empire on exactly what Emma just felt: another girl saying the out-loud version of your private thoughts. You're not being talked at. You're being let in.
Look at the mechanics and it's friendship, simulated piece by piece. Mics close enough to catch breath, pauses left in, someone admitting something.
Your brain measures closeness in time spent and things confessed, and a clip delivers both in forty seconds. It never checks whether the closeness runs one way.
Cringe makes both hit harder
When either format tips into cringe, the painfully awkward street answer, the podcast guest oversharing something nobody asked for, it pulls even harder.
You're not watching despite the discomfort. You're watching for it.
There's a reason. Secondhand embarrassment is your brain rehearsing the rules: watch someone break them, feel the burn, relearn where the line is. The discomfort is the content.
What actually died in 2026
The lazy conclusion here would be: polish is dead, lo-fi wins, fire your editor. That's not what I see in the accounts.
High-composition, beautifully crafted ads still crush. Some of the best performers I see are highly creative, exceptionally well executed, especially for static ads.
What died is the middle ground: the badly executed, the cheap for the sake of cheap.
What works today is creativity in the creative. And by creativity I mean reading the world: what different groups consume, what they love, what they hate, and why; then replicating that in ads.
Meta's feed is now just eavesdropping with a checkout button.
So, for your company: this is not a pick-one situation. The accounts spending $1M+ a month run both: street interviews and podcast clips, in the same account, at the same time. What they don't do is brief a video that borrows neither.
Make each creative commit: is it letting people in (intimacy), or letting them feel ahead of someone (gossip)? And if you're going polished, be exceptional: the middle is where ad budgets go to die in 2026.
That's it for this one.
Reply and tell me what you're seeing out there in your feed, in your ad account, in the world. I read everything, and the best answers become future editions.
Talk soon, Simon
Stop guessing what works on Meta. We already know: Book a call with me and my team!
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