The Brands Winning Right Now Have Ugly Ads

The best-performing ad in my portfolio right now was filmed on an iPhone in a bathroom. No lighting rig. No script. The founder is holding her product, talking directly to the camera, and the first three seconds are her saying "okay this is going to sound weird but hear me out." It's done $400K in attributed revenue this quarter. Their agency-produced hero video — the one that cost $15K to shoot — has done $22K.

This isn't an outlier anymore. This is the pattern.

I look at ad accounts across maybe a dozen brands between my own companies and portfolio investments, and the trend is so consistent it's almost boring to state: polished creative is losing to scrappy creative across the board. Not by a little. By multiples.

The market is telling you something and most brands aren't listening.

Here's what I think is actually happening. Consumers have developed an incredibly sophisticated filter for anything that looks like an ad. They scroll past polished product photography the same way they'd skip a commercial on cable TV. It's not that the creative is bad — it's that it's been categorized as advertising before the viewer has processed a single word. And once something is categorized as an ad, engagement drops off a cliff.

The lo-fi stuff bypasses that filter. It looks like content. It looks like what your friend would post. The brain processes it differently — it gets a few extra seconds of attention before the viewer decides whether to keep watching or scroll. And those extra seconds are everything in a feed-based environment where you're competing with thousands of posts for a sliver of someone's attention.

I had a founder tell me last week that he was embarrassed by his best-performing ad. He didn't want to use it in pitch decks or show it to investors because it "didn't represent the brand well." His brand was beautiful — clean design, premium positioning, thoughtful packaging that we'd spent months developing at Paking Duck. And his top ad looked like a random TikTok.

I told him the ad is the brand now. The packaging is the brand when they open the box. The product page is the brand when they're deciding. But the ad is how they find you, and if the thing that finds them needs to look like it wasn't trying too hard, then that's the game.

This doesn't mean production quality is dead. It means production quality has to be deployed in the right place. Your website should look premium. Your packaging should feel intentional. Your product photography for the product page should be crisp. But your top-of-funnel creative — the thing that has to stop a scroll and earn three seconds — that needs to feel human. Unscripted. Slightly messy.

The brands that are getting this right are running what I'd call a split production model. They invest in brand-level production for their owned channels — website, email, packaging, the customer experience post-purchase. Then they run a completely separate creative engine for paid acquisition that's optimized for attention, not brand consistency. Different teams, different briefs, different KPIs.

I'm seeing some brands take this further. They're sending product to 50 creators a month with zero creative direction. No brief, no talking points, no brand guidelines. Just "make whatever you want." Then they take the raw footage, run it as ads, and let Meta's algorithm sort out what works. The hit rate is maybe 5% — but the hits are massive because they're genuinely authentic in a way that no brand team could manufacture.

The uncomfortable truth for founders who've invested heavily in brand building is that the top of the funnel doesn't care about your brand guidelines. It cares about stopping the scroll. And the scroll doesn't stop for pretty. It stops for real.

One caveat. This works for DTC brands selling to consumers on social platforms. If you're in B2B, if you're selling luxury goods at ultra-premium price points, if your customer base is primarily over 55 — the calculus might be different. But for the vast majority of brands I work with and invest in, the scrappy creative playbook is outperforming the polished one by such a wide margin that it's no longer a debate. It's just a fact you either adapt to or lose money ignoring.