Hey, it's Simon.
Yesterday I broke down the Complete Static Ads 101 playbook on a whiteboard, in one take (watch it here): the three static formats working across our client accounts right now, which funnel stage each one owns, and what the spend split looks like on an ideal account.
work work work
Quick recap so today makes sense:
Native owns top of funnel. No text on the image, the caption does the work. On an ideal account, this is your biggest spender, think 100k/month.
Text-heavy owns middle of funnel. The story and the headline do the work. Around 50k.
Offer owns bottom of funnel. The product and the deal do the work. Around 25k.
Today is that playbook applied. One real ad per format, pulled from the Ad Library, broken down the way we do it internally. So you can actually use it with your team.
Let's go.
1. Native (TOF)
This first one is trying really hard not to look like an ad. And it succeeds.
Creative:
A pic that looks taken with an iPhone 4: a guy in his early twenties sitting on the steps of some public building, envelope in hand, bag at his feet, looking off to the side. Nothing says "ad" and nothing says what's being sold.
Here's what makes this one worth studying: the guy in the photo is not the customer. This is a blood sugar supplement. The target is a 50+ man with high sugar, and the women worrying about their husbands. The image shows a 23-year-old with an envelope.
The photo doesn't sell the buyer, it sells the story: you have no idea why he's sitting there until you read.
The image is a question mark. That's what earns the click.
Wall of Text (go to the link above to read the whole thing):
The caption is a full VSL inside a Facebook description. Almost 7000 words.
It opens with a clickbait-style story headline ("I took care of my 85-year-old neighbor for her inheritance, but she left me nothing — the next morning, her lawyer knocked..."), and then it's just story for thousands of words.
The product shows up late, after the letter, once you're already inside the story.
The sale is in the postscripts. Six of them: the link, the guarantee, the deal, the urgency. And the target gets called out by name in the fifth one: "For the women reading this..."
→ Steal this: your native image doesn't have to show your customer. It has to make them need the story. Then do the targeting in the caption.
2. Text-heavy (MOF)
Text-heavy is about the story and the headline. And the headline has to be what I call a sorted line: not the problem, but one person living inside the problem. "Trouble sleeping?" is a headline. "Sleeping with one leg out" is a sorted line, it's calling out one specific woman who's too warm at 3am.
Then four or five sentences about the issue, and the product.
I love to get inspo from Menerals, because these guys go with world-class copywriting, always.
A screenshot of the Notes app. The brand name and the result highlighted in yellow, which happens to be the brand color, so your eye lands on "Menerals" and "testosterone is up" before actually reading anything else.
Now the sorted line. It's not "I'm 38/41/46," it's the first two lines together: "I'm 46. My doctor wanted to put me on TRT." → One person, inside one problem, narrated in first person. Not "low testosterone?" (that's the problem), but instead: a 46-year-old whose doctor offered him TRT and something didn't sit right. The age is what does the sorting. A 46-year-old reading "I'm 46" stops.
Then the structure is the template, line by line:
sorted line,
three or four sentences inside the problem,
product
result.
And here's why I'm showing you three variants instead of one. What changes is the person and the problem he lives in:
38, three years and $400 a month on pre-workout, creatine, ashwagandha, still tired.
41, six months on GLP-1, lost the weight, lost the drive, his wife noticed first.
46, his doctor wanted to put him on TRT.
Three sorted lines, three different MOF audiences, one creative.
That's how you iterate text-heavy ads.
→ Steal this: write your sorted line in first person with an age and one situation. Then write it again for a different age and a different situation. Ship both.
3. Offer (BOF)
Menerals with another banger. Tier-1 offer ad: it's funny, it's comparative, and it looks affordable.
Look at what's on the table:
- a Costco hot dog,
- a gas station energy drink,
- a drive-thru coffee,
- "his pre-workout."
Every anchor is a purchase a guy makes on autopilot without thinking about the price. Then the product, highlighted in yellow, at the bottom of the list, cheapest line: $1/day. And the benefits in one breath: "Testosterone. Sleep. Focus. For less than a hot dog."
No discount, no BOGO, no countdown. The offer is the price itself, and the work is in the frame around it. This is what I mean when I say you have offer work to do at bottom of funnel: it's not always about what you take off the price, sometimes it's about what you put next to it.
→ Steal this: before you touch the discount, find the thing your customer already buys without thinking and put your price next to it (make it funny and precise enough).
That's the funnel
Three formats, three jobs.
Native gets the click from someone who wasn't shopping.
Text-heavy calls out one person inside the problem.
Offer converts the traffic the other two warmed up.
If your account only has one of these, you know what to make next.
That's it for this one.
Reply and tell me if you want more of these breakdowns. If enough of you say yes, I'll make it a recurring thing.
Talk soon, Simon
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