Growth Newsletter #196

The Internet used to be extremely ugly:

• Flashing banner ads
• Under construction signs
• Horrible font and color choices.

To compete, stand out, and build trust, people started making websites look prettier, more trustworthy, and higher production value. 

With each new competitor and campaign, we all kept raising the quality bar.

The problem now? 

Everything is incredibly manicured and over-engineered.

YouTube is all $50k camera and lighting setups. Instagram photos are heavily edited and filtered. Some websites look like pieces of art.

How do you stand out now? By reverting back to the ugly days.

“Ugly ads” and low production value content is on the rise. We talked previously about Sam Sulek’s massive success on YouTube despite (because of?) ugly thumbnails, terrible titles, horrible lighting, and zero production value. 

When taken to an extreme, ugly ads stand out, make you double take, and make you share them.

But they can also masquerade as regular, organic content.

Here are some amazing “ugly,” yet effective, ads

Brand: Surreal

• Screenshot of interface on a billboard, lolwut?
• Hilariously bad graphic design
• Purposely lazy, fourth-wall breaking ad copy

Brand: Wandering Bear

• “In the wild” shot of the product in action
• Looks like your dad took a photo of his fridge and posted it

Brand: Nuts.com

• Excessive close-up with odd cropping
• A+ pun work
• Scribbled ad copy on a box and post-it

Brand: birddogs

• X vs. Y comparison making alternative look bad
• Instagram story aesthetic
• Emojis for familiarity and casualness

Brand: Harry’s

You can find the full video in this collection.

• Low budget phone video of their competitor in store
• Looks completely organic
• Makes you immediately curious

Ugly Ads work for a few reasons:

If they’re over-the-top hideous:

1. They look completely different than everything else in our feeds.
2. It's incomprehensible someone would make an ad that simple or ugly, so it's surprising and delightful.
   • Like when Surreal creates an entire billboard of a screenshot of a horrible, fourth-wall-breaking ad made in PowerPoint.

If they’re just low production value:

1. They look and feel like organic posts.
2. We crave authenticity, simplicity, and rawness.

Next steps

Next time you’re creating ads and content, try taking the opposite approach to what you’re used to. Specifically make an ad that looks low production value.

And shout out to the king of ugly ads, Barry Hott for making a lot of these. Follow him for inspiration.

To learn more:

• Check out a repository of Barry Hott’s ugly ads
• Check my carousel with 6 more examples of ugly ads and why they work—my top LinkedIn post of all time.