Today’s newsletter is a little different…

I’ve partnered with our friends at Motion to explore how smart brands use ugly ads to drive sales.

I’ve been super curious about this topic ever since reading about it in Motion’s newsletter, Thumbstop.

Pssssst: If you’re running ads on Meta, YouTube or TikTok—and want ROAs worth bragging about—you’ll love Thumbstop. It’s one of the “must-read” newsletters in my inbox each week.

Now I’m no expert on ugly ads, but Barry Hott is…

Motion hosted a private Ugly Ads Masterclass with Barry and he dropped straight-up fire 🔥🔥🔥

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Barry is so freaking smart.

James Mulvey at Motion took the top takeaways from Barry’s masterclass and shared them in a two-part series in the Thumbstop newsletter.

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Here’s part one (with a few bonus thoughts from me)…

“The whole point of making ugly ads is based in consumer psychology,” Barry explained to me.

“If you want your ad to be seen, you need to get past people’s subconscious visual ad blockers.”

Most people reading this newsletter work in design or marketing. That means your feed likely has more beautiful, highly produced images in it.

“But for millions and millions of people,” says Barry, “they spend most of their time consuming extremely low-quality images and video.”

What does Barry mean by “low-quality video”?

He’s talking about viral videos taken from doorbell cameras, shaky phones, or grainy clips stolen from TV and movies.

So when you use conventional design techniques—such as professional lighting, logo and packaging up front, and high-quality product shots—you increase the chance people are going to skip your ads.

“In contrast, an ugly ad is more similar to the type of content that they opened Facebook or TikTok for. The uglier you can make it the less likely it is going to be immediately visually perceived as an ad that they can skip.”

While Barry is the ugly ads champion, he is not anti-brand. The nuance here is that Barry is talking about the first visual subconscious response to an ad—once you’ve earned attention, you can transition into more traditional techniques.

For example, you can use branded polished end cards on ads. Or introduce more design and packaging as the ad progresses.

As he wrote on Twitter yesterday, “if a viewer has consumed your entire ad, you’ve earned their attention and the right to show them more of your branding.”

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​Ugly ads > your brand guidelines

If ugly ads are easy to create and they work, why isn’t every brand on Earth adopting Barry’s approach?

Just as consumers run their subconscious ad blockers, marketers have their own cognitive biases working beneath the surface.

Here are three blindspots marketers can easily miss:

3 Marketing Blindspots

1. Similarity Bias:

We make ads that look like other ads. Instead of making ads that look like the content our customers prefer to consume.

“You need to close Foreplay, stop looking at competitor ads, and spend more time absorbing the native content of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook,” says Barry.

“I spend a lot of time just consuming viral content with different Instagram accounts and trying to figure out why psychologically the content is resonating, was it the story, the emotion?”

2. Time Bias:

We assume that the longer we spend on something, the better the ad. We limit ourselves by saying: you can’t just shoot a video of the product! You need to set up lights, pick the right angles, and obsess over small aesthetic details.

“The history of the ad industry is based in TV and in print,” says Barry.

“Those are pretty mediums, so if you made a TV or print ad, it had to fit into the medium and look polished.”
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3. Status Bias:

Ugly Ads don’t win awards (yet). And people don’t gush on LinkedIn when you share a link to the badly lit video ad you made in your bathroom vs. the glossy studio shoot ad with a famous influencer, even if the latter flopped.

In larger organizations, there is another cognitive bias at play called the ambiguity effect.

As Lindsay Morgia explains, when faced with deciding between two possible outcomes—one with a known probability and one with an unknown probability—research shows that we tend to choose the option with the known probability.

Creating pretty, scripted, and wonderfully filmed ads is what most marketers do. So it seems like a rational choice.

Sending your boss an iPhone video you made at lunch with erratic editing, staring yourself as an untrained actor, and lo-fi text overlays takes creative courage.
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How to sell like Barry Hott 💰

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Make it imperfect:

Quick product shots, poor lighting, and unpolished delivery. These make your ad more like the average video you’d see on social channels. And make them feel more authentic and believable.

“Sometimes, I’ll even move lighting so it looks bad,” says Barry. “I was a professional photographer before I switched to advertising, so I understand lighting and cameras. But I choose to make things imperfect.”

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Stick to native tools:

“I don’t think you even need a designer for Facebook Ads,” says Barry.

“You should be using the native creation tools that the other consumers are using such as using the in-app design and caption tools. This helps you avoid over-designing things.”

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Focus on finding the big story:

All the time you save on pretty design can now be put into finding a persuasive hook and big story idea.

Start by capturing footage with the founder.

“I worked with Jeff Raider, the founder of Harry’s Razors, and helped him get the core story on video, talking about the customer frustration, the problem, and why he started the company.”

This led to the ad angle that “guys are getting ripped off by Gillette,” the core story that helped Harry’s explode with growth.

“It’s rare that I work with a founder who can’t speak compellingly about their product in a way that can either work as an ad or work as a piece of inspiration that another creator could turn into an ad,” says Barry.
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That’s it for Part 1 of our ugly ads series

In Part 2, I’ll go deep into Barry’s 5-step method for making ugly ads.

This is the exact approach Barry used to help brands like Harry’s and AG1 become household names.

How does it work? I’ll reveal all… in Part 2.

Talk soon,
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James @ Motion, your creative analytics platform