The psychology of high-converting static ads

Hey, it’s Simon.

Simon says: the psychology of high-converting static ads.

Some of the best-performing static ads I’ve ever made looked like they should have failed. They looked like someone threw them together in five minutes, and they beat creatives my team spent hours producing.

For a long time I filed them under “exceptions.” Then we passed 50,000 ads for brands like AG1, HexClad, Jones Road, Glucose Goddess, Polymarket, Prose and PopSockets, and the exceptions kept showing up. They came from different brands and different categories, and they looked nothing alike, but they all ran on the same thing underneath.

It comes down to five psychological principles most brands overlook.

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

Look at this ad. It’s probably not what you’d expect from a brand spending serious money on Meta.

That’s the point. Your customer has scrolled past so many ads that their brain already has a pretty good model of what an ad in your category looks like: the same layouts, the same images, the same colors. Anything that fits that model gets ignored before they’ve read a word. Something that breaks it gets a second look.

Mail Order Mystery is a mystery game for kids that arrives in the mailbox. So we projected the kid’s world straight into the visual. We took the clues and objects that actually come in the game (the letter, the pirate flag, the box) and drew them like a kid would. Text-heavy ads are crushing on Meta right now, so we went text-heavy too, with a different color for every letter of the headline:

“The cure for summer boredom, explained like you’re five.”

The rest of the copy just explains the outcome and what shows up at your door: a real mystery in your kid’s mailbox all summer long, six envelopes over six weeks with their name on every letter, clues to crack, ciphers to decode, and a secret keepsake at the end. Then the CTA: tap if your kid’s ready to be the hero of their own summer adventure.

Here’s the trick: it looks like a kid ad, but the headline is talking to the parents, because parents are the ones buying. We made their decision easy and made the offer a no-brainer.

That ad spent $300,000 on Meta at a 2x ROAS. It looks like a 5-year-old drew it, and it’s one of the best-performing ads we’ve ever made.

Do this right now. Open the Meta Ad Library, set the country to the US, search “peptides,” filter by images, and scroll.

You’ll see the product in the middle, three benefits, a testimonial, a discount badge, and arrows pointing everywhere. One claim in the headline, different ones in the benefits, another one in the CTA. Brands do this because more claims feel more convincing. In practice, every extra claim is one more thing the scroller has to sort through, and if it’s hard to process, they don’t process it.

If you’re trying to be everywhere, you’re nowhere.

Now look at this one, for Sooth Natural. It’s one of the highest-performing ads we’ve ever made: a logo, a headline, supporting text and a spoon with the product on it. That’s it.

The headline runs on reverse psychology. Everyone expects a brand to say good things about its product, so we said the opposite:

“This stuff tastes nasty.”

Who says that? Nobody, which is exactly why it stops the scroll. It’s one of the best scroll-stopping headlines we’ve ever written at Statiq.

Then the supporting text explains it. Yeah, it’s not the best-tasting thing in the world, and that’s intentional. The flavors are natural, there are no added sweeteners, and that’s why it tastes a little flat. It’s not meant to be sipped like a smoothie; it’s meant to work, and a product that works can’t taste like sugar.

One message, start to finish. That ad spent close to $100,000 on Meta.

Some ads stop you because they look different. Others stop you because you need to understand what you’re looking at. YouTube thumbnails have done this forever: an image that raises a question your brain can’t leave unanswered.

This ad for Snoozy shows a woman’s back with a peach on it, under a headline that’s built to pique curiosity. The small text underneath names the product without ever showing it: “Try Snoozy Infused.” So… what is Snoozy? We mention the gummies and never show them.

That ad became one of the brand’s top performers.

But the curiosity isn’t random. Snoozy makes intimacy-enhancing gummies, so the woman’s back and the peach connect straight back to the product. The ad raises a question people are dying to answer, shows just enough to make them want the answer, and stays completely relevant to the people who’d actually buy.

The leash is the product. If the question your ad raises doesn’t lead back to what you sell, you’ve built a very nice thumbnail for nobody.

Most brands are great at explaining what their product does: what’s in it, how it works, the benefits list. But when someone decides to buy, they’re thinking about what having it would mean for their life.

Someone who wants to lose weight usually wants something underneath that: to feel attractive, confident, healthy. Desires like feeling safe, being accepted or feeling attractive are what actually move the purchase. Your job is to work out which one is in play, then write to that one.

This ad for Our Health is a good example. Every “drinking too much” ad out there right now is either a statistics ad or an ad that shames people. We went a completely different route: we put a very attractive woman on it.

When we looked at that market, what we found was shame. People who drink too much want progress. They want to change, but they can’t take the first step because they’re afraid of how others will look at them. They want to be accepted as who they are, and they also need help.

So the ad says: this woman could be the most attractive woman you’ve ever seen, and she drinks too much too. That makes the person scrolling feel included instead of judged. It goes straight to one of the deepest human desires there is: the desire to be accepted.

The ingredients list is the receipt. The desire is the purchase.

Two people see the exact same ad. One scrolls straight past. The other feels like the brand read their diary. The difference is almost always how clearly the creative reflects who it’s for.

People choose products that reflect who they are and who they want to become. The imagery, language and message signal who the product is for, and being specific is what lets the right customer recognize themselves.

Take this one, which we call “Rude Teenager.” It’s not for parents in general. It’s for a very specific kind of parent: the one who can’t take it anymore with their teenager. Look at how specific the copy gets:

That’s one very specific household. Then comes the solution: three nutrients that support teen mood. Not “support mood,” teen mood. It’s as if everyone else got kicked out of the conversation. The ad is irrelevant to most people and painfully relevant to the people it’s for.

And it’s running in vitamins, the most crowded category in health and wellness. Our move in a crowded category is to niche down to a single problem. 

None of this costs money. It just takes understanding the person on the other side of the screen better than the brand next to you does, and most brands never slow down long enough to do it.

Before your next static goes into production, run it through the five principles:

The question you can’t answer points to the weak spot in that ad.

If you’d rather watch me walk through these ads on screen, the full breakdown is on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsNqMk0Desk 

That’s it for this one.

Talk soon, Simon

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