I mapped the full funnel of 3 brands that are printing

Hey, it's Simon.

Simon says: the funnel equation.

Here's what you're walking away with today:

Jess, 38, Sunday night, in bed with the lamp still on because she's "about to sleep" (she isn't). A black screen with a yellow warning triangle shows up in her feed, the kind Instagram puts over sensitive content. Except Instagram didn't put it there. A brand did.

She taps it, obviously, everyone taps it. She reads, she doesn't buy, she closes the app.

Wednesday, a whiteboard: two drawn faces, one puffy, one not, and four words under them: it's not fat, it's cortisol. She stops longer this time, because that's the sentence she's been waiting for someone to say about her body since February.

Saturday morning, coffee, kid at swim class: $186 crossed out, $29 next to it.

She buys.

And in the ad account, the sale shows up next to the $29 ad. The other two look like they did nothing.

We have around 20 clients running native ads right now, same format, same team building them, same month on the calendar, and half of them are crushing while the other half are not.

The difference isn't the native. It's everything around it.

The ones crushing figured out the funnel equation: they can take a cold viewer, someone who has never heard of the brand and wasn't shopping for anything, and walk them into a product story. The product story is your ability to take somebody from TOF to BOF and close.

(Quick glossary for the three of you who skipped marketing Twitter: TOF is top of funnel, people who don't know you exist; MOF is the middle, people who know you but aren't convinced; BOF is the bottom, people who are convinced and need a reason to buy today.)

Jess didn't buy from one ad. She bought from a story told in three chapters, across a week, by three different ads.

That's the funnel equation.

There are exactly two ways to break the funnel equation, and every account in the bad half is doing one of them.

All hook, no close. You run TOF ads only: natives, street interviews, the weird stuff that stops the scroll. The CTR looks amazing, the comments are on fire, and nobody buys. That's a conversion rate problem, and it's exactly where most natives die: brands treat them as awareness and leave them there (I wrote about this in the native ads edition).

All close, no crowd. You run BOF ads only: discount, price, reviews, last chance. They convert beautifully, until they don't, because you ran out of people who already wanted you. BOF doesn't create demand, it harvests it. Harvest long enough without planting and you're left with a very efficient ad and nobody to show it to. No traffic to work with.

So the answer isn't TOF or BOF. It's TOF, MOF and BOF running at the same time, in the same account, feeding each other.

Every brand in the good half runs all three.

Look at the TOF column on the board and you'll notice something weird: almost none of those ads look like ads. A text post on a flat orange background. A newspaper front page. An old Nokia with a text message on the screen. A body chart. A fake content warning.

That's not a coincidence, and it connects to something I posted on X this week:

The world broke into two big binaries: a tech dystopia on one side, and peasant cosplay on the other, the nostalgic regression to the past and its objects (wired headphones, paper books, writing by hand with a nice pen).

The TOF ads working right now pick one of the two exits. The Nokia and the newspaper are peasant cosplay: an object you'd almost forgotten, made so specific you have to stop and read it. The content warning is the tech dystopia: it looks like the platform itself is talking to you, a system message, not a brand.

TOF has one job, which is to get two seconds from a stranger. It's chapter one of the product story, and the middle (a clean product shot on a gradient with a benefit headline) doesn't stop anyone.

In the half that isn't crushing, MOF is usually the empty column. And it's the stage that turns a click into a reason.

Your TOF person is curious, not convinced. She knows something's off, but she doesn't know what it is, or why your product of all products would fix it. The MOF ads on the board answer that the same way every time: they rename her problem.

Each one takes a vague, slightly embarrassing feeling (I'm tired, I'm bloated, I'm soft) and gives it a cause. Once the problem has a cause, the product stops being a guess and becomes the obvious next step. Same mechanic as the cortisol sketch from the brainrot edition: the customer walks in pre-diagnosed, and the ad just confirms it.

This is chapter two of the product story. Skip it and you're asking someone to buy a solution to a problem you never named.

Mechanism, not discount.

BOF is the easy one, which is exactly why it gets abused.

$186 crossed out, $29 next to it. 50% off for life. Pooping once a week? with five stars and a price under it. An anniversary sale written by hand on a whiteboard.

Product in the middle, offer as the main character, done. No concept, no metaphor. The person seeing this already read chapters one and two; now she needs a number and a reason to do it today.

The mistake isn't making BOF ads. It's making only BOF ads and then wondering why they stopped working.

BOF closes the product story. It can't start it.

Here's the board: https://www.figma.com/design/YvkDbU5V4gHcHt2JELJ78a/Swipe-file---TOF-MOF-BOF?node-id=0-1&p=f&t=GSD6dBePp3pbkiCN-0 Three brands, two ads per stage, TOF, MOF and BOF side by side, so you can watch one story move from stranger to sale.

What to look for in each:

Before your next round of production, open your account and sort every live ad into three columns: TOF, MOF, BOF. Then look at which column is empty (it's usually the middle).

Then write the product story before you brief a single creative. One sentence per stage:

Here's one I'd run tomorrow. Grüns is running a lot of ads for people on GLP-1s right now, and the angles are all side effects: hair loss in the shower, can't go to the bathroom. Fine, but that's the symptom, not the story.

What's actually happening to these women is bigger. A few weeks into the shot, the food noise goes quiet (the voice in your head that never shuts up about what you ate, what you weigh today, the guilt), and some of them finally hear what was right in front of them the whole time: they're done with him.

So:

Three ads, one story. Get specific enough about your customer's life, not just her symptoms, and the funnel writes itself.

That's it for this one.

Reply and tell me: if you sorted your live ads into TOF, MOF and BOF right now, which column would be empty? I read everything, and the best answers become future editions.

Talk soon, Simon

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