Hey, it's Simon.
Simon says: A supplement guy who looks like he walked off Grey's Anatomy. A cowboy promising pregnancy by eye contact. A woman yapping for three minutes and showing the product for one second.
Three brands nobody's copying, and today I'm telling you what to steal from each.
Because if your swipe file is IM8, Liquid Death, Poppi and Grüns, you and every other founder have the same homework. That's the sameness I wrote about a few editions ago, and it costs money: a creative that looks like everyone else pays full price for every impression.
The one thing these three have in common: the creative is doing the targeting. Not the audience settings. You don't need Meta to find your audience when the creative already did.
Let's go.
Alevia: McDreamy in a hairnet
Two ads, same brand, and both are doing the targeting from the creative.
First one: a doctor, in a hairnet and gloves, holding the product inside what looks like the facility where it's made. Standard authority play, except for one detail: he's a man, he's attractive, and he looks like he walked out of Grey's Anatomy. That's not casting luck. That's the brand telling you who buys: women. The authority earns the trust, the face earns the stop.
Second one: pure BOF. Product, $29 crossed out, $17 as the new price, 65,000+ five-star reviews. It does what it has to do and nothing else, and that's a compliment. But look at the fontwork: that italic serif, that blush background. That's not a design choice, that's a generation and a gender. A specific woman reads this and it feels like it was made for her, because it was. Colors are straightforward, no tricks. The targeting is in the typography.
Menerals: pregnant by eye contact
This ad is a 10/10 and I want to break down why.
The copy. Absurd enough to stop you, specific enough to be a promise. Pregnancy by eye contact is the joke, "enough testosterone" is the product. The laugh gets the stop, the promise gets the click. And the font is easy to read, which sounds basic until you scroll through the fifty ads a day that still fail at it.
The visual. Cowboy, cigarette, horse, mountains. Their customer looks at this and doesn't go "that's me." He goes "that's who I wanna be." Nobody buying a testosterone supplement is already that guy, and that's the whole point. You could run this broad with zero targeting and Meta would still find him, because the image already filtered out everyone who doesn't want to be him (literally not one soul).
The archetype. What this brings to my mind: western movies, Once Upon a Time in the West vibes, the lone cowboy, the frame, the light. And the Joe Camel ads from the 80s: same archetype, same fantasy, same buyer. Whether they did it on purpose or not, these images have been selling to this exact guy for decades. Menerals just put a supplement in the frame.
Perfect match between target, copy and visual. Hyper TOF, and it doesn't need to be anything else.
BioRoot Labs: three minutes of yapping
Link to the Yapping Video: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=790102766708100
The thing I like most about this brand is their yapping videos. Three minutes, usually a woman over 40, sometimes a housewife, sometimes not, talking straight to camera about one VERY specific pain in her body. The ad description on Meta is practically empty, because everything is said in those three minutes.
And look at how the scene is set. A woman in her 50s, hoodie, no makeup, selfie mode (obviously). Two shots in the whole video: the first one inside her house, the second one outside, on her front steps.
Now the part I love: the product shows up for literally ONE second, around minute two. She's not trying it on camera, no unboxing, no "here's how I use it." It just appears the way a friend would flash it at you mid-conversation, "oh, this is the one I've been taking," and she keeps talking. By minute two you're so deep in her story that one second is all it needs. If it stayed on screen any longer you'd get those Truman Show ads: the character freezes, holds the product to camera, and the whole thing turns fake.
Everyone tells you the hook has to land in three seconds. BioRoot runs three minutes and it works, because the length IS the targeting. A woman with that exact pain will watch every second of it. Everyone else drops in the first five, and that's fine: they weren't going to buy anyway. What's left at the end of the video is the buyer, pre-sold, and the caption has nothing left to do.
Steal this for your next brief
Three brands, three formats, one rule: the creative picks the customer before Meta does. Before you touch a single audience setting, run your ad through this:
The visual: who looks at this and says "that's me," or "that's who I wanna be"? If the answer is "everyone," it's nobody.
The person: who trusts them, and who wants to look at them? Both matter, and they're not always the same answer.
The font and the colors: who reads this as "made for me"? Typography has a gender and an age. Pick one.
The length: who stays until the end? Sometimes the strongest targeting is making the ad long enough that the wrong people leave.
That's it for this one.
Reply and tell me which brand you're copying right now. Be honest. 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!