Simon says: Why AI-Cheating Drama Ads now?
Something I keep hearing from the women around me when they talk about the guys they date: you can tell when a man grew up with sisters. You see it in the way he asks, he listens. They say men who don’t mansplain lol.
You can tell when he didn't, too.
Keep that in mind, because it explains the format eating Meta right now: the AI cheating drama.
Ad Library Link (ALL of them are great examples): https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=1397910779150318
The sister effect
Here's my read on who's writing these scripts: young guys (probably under 33). And they're writing women better than half the female-founded brands in the Ad Library.
That's the sister effect. A generation of men grew up talking with their sisters, and learned something their dads never did: what she's actually scared of, her drama fantasy, the 2am scenario she runs in her head detail by detail just to see if she'd survive it.
The ones without sisters learned something too. They have more female friends than their dads ever had (because you kind of need them now to understand the world you live in as a man), and probably a female therapist (two out of three psychologists are women). Tony Soprano inaugurated that with Dr Melfi lol.
So when a man writes her worst night, he's not guessing. He heard it firsthand.
The suspicion economy
Nobody's cheating more, by the way. The rate has barely moved in 30 years. What changed is how much we talk about it.
The parents of the guys writing these scripts, late boomers and Gen X, had long marriages with a rule nobody wrote down: if you suspected, you didn't say it. You played dumb. Following the Sopranos example, Carmela Soprano knew for years and chose to stay with him, and chose the life he gave her.
Today nobody looks away. Everyone is hyperconnected, so the proof is one screenshot away. And the relationship has become the most overanalyzed content category on the internet: TikTok breakdowns, Call Her Daddy, an Emma Chamberlain break-up YouTube video.
Women talk more now, to each other and to the men around them: friends, brothers, boyfriends. The fear gets rehearsed in the group chat first, and then it gets said out loud to a guy who's actually listening.
Cheating didn't grow. Its audience did.
We're thinking about ourselves too much
This became a meme because women kept sending it to each other. They sent it because it named something everyone was already doing: overthinking, all the time, in two directions at once. In = the body. Out = it's what he's doing, what he meant, why he took 40 minutes to reply. Every send was a joke and a confession at once.
That's exactly why these ads are printing. Resilia's woman doesn't suspect him first. “So I blamed my body.” She's watching him pull away and watching herself in the mirror, and both loops land on the same answer: it's my fault.
That's why the ending hits so hard. What she finally gets to say is: it was never me.
That's it for this one.
Q3 ends today. If you're walking into Q4 without enough creative to feed it, book a call with me and my team!
Talk soon, Simon