What’s working inside ad accounts right now

Hey guys,

The other day I looked through 50 ad accounts to see what’s working right now.

Today I want to share with you some common themes in the ads that are performing.

So let’s dive in :)

But first, here's what I've found interesting this week:

• Taylor Holiday dropped a great explainer on the AI "Context Layer" and why context engineering is the biggest lever you can pull right now to get more out of AI

• Someone on X wrote a full breakdown on how to build Claude Skills

• This guy used my framework to build a Claude code process that spits out hundreds of statics ads with Nano Banana 2

Nichemaxxing

Conventional advertising advice would tell you to make an ad that’s relevant to as many people as possible.

Though recently I've been seeing persona-based advertising work in more and more accounts.

This is the idea of making an ad for one specific persona, and it's called ‘nichemaxxing’.

For example, I'm in a supplement ad account and their top-performing ad is an ad made specifically for the special forces.

With your prospects having hyper-personalized feeds, this is a way that you can stand out and make content still relevant to them.

And with the way meta is going in a post-Andromeda world, I am becoming more and more bullish on the idea of persona-based advertising (and therefore nichemaxxing) to make ads.

Ugly ads

I really feel like we're reaching the singularity between what's working on paid and organic. Increasingly, the things that are working on paid tend to be the things that are working on organic.

This is the case for making ugly ads.

A lot of people think they’re making ugly ads, but are actually just making traditional UGC (and then wonder why it doesn’t perform).

I recently sat down and spewed everything I know about making ugly ads the right way in this video here. Would highly recommend giving it a watch if you want to make more ugly ads this year.

Yappers

Yappers are the ad format that everyone's talking about right now. Whilst they might feel new, they’re actually one of the oldest formats of ugly ads.

A yapper ad is a creator who can get on camera and talk authentically without making it sound scripted.

The secret is to creating these is to find top tier creators and give them the freedom to express themselves on camera.

Great Creator + Loose Brief + Minimal Editing = Great Yapper Ad.

The more that AI content floods our feed, the more bullish I am on human created ads and therefore the yapper ads.

It's one of the only ways that you can signal trust and real human connection. I really think people crave that today and are going to crave that for as long as we are on social media.

This is one of my favorite yapper ads that I’ve seen recently:

AI animations

The best use case for AI content has never been realistic looking AI UGC, it's always been unrealistic visuals/animations with storytelling like this.

I’m seeing this new format work in multiple ad accounts right now.

The workflow for these ads is super simple:

→ Write a script in Claude or in Parker

→ Generate the first frame in ChatGPT/Nano Banana

→ Use Veo 3 to animate it

→ Clone the voice with elevenlabs and reproduce the audio

Curious to see how much longer these work for, given that everyone is starting to make them now.

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See you next week,

Alex