Paid social ads that don’t look like ads

Here’s a pattern we keep seeing in our paid social accounts: the polished studio video with the perfect colour grade loses to a slightly shaky phone clip of a real person talking about the product. Not always, but often enough that we now brief for it on purpose.

Why scrappy wins

People don’t open Instagram or TikTok to watch ads. They open it to see what friends and creators are up to. Anything that looks like an ad gets recognised in a fraction of a second and scrolled past. Anything that looks like the rest of the feed earns a second look, and a second look is all you need to start telling a story.

There’s also trust. A real person with a real kitchen behind them feels more believable than a glossy set. The slight imperfection is the point: it signals that nobody spent a fortune to manipulate you.

How to brief it

“Make it feel authentic” isn’t a brief. These are the instructions we give creators and our own team:

• Open with a person or a problem in the first second, never a logo.
• Say the hook out loud and put it on screen as text, because most people watch with the sound off.
• Film vertically, on a phone, in a real place with natural light.
• Show the product being used, not just held up to the camera.
• Keep it under 30 seconds, and get to the point in the first five.
• Let the creator use their own words. Give them the key message, not a script.

Polished still has a place

This doesn’t mean throwing away brand campaigns. Polished films still do important work: they build the brand over time, and they perform well on YouTube, connected TV and in places where people expect higher production values.

The two work best together. The polished piece sets the tone; the scrappy versions do the selling in the feed. Many of our best campaigns use the same idea in both forms.

Test, don’t guess

The biggest lesson is humility. We’re regularly surprised by which version wins. So we never launch with one ad. We launch with five to ten variations – different hooks, different people, different openings – let the budget find the winners in the first week, and then make more like them.

That rhythm of making, testing and making again matters more than any single video. Production costs per ad go down, results go up, and you learn what your audience actually responds to, rather than what a meeting room thought it would.