You’ve been told to follow a familiar set of rules for years: always use high-quality creative, keep your brand polished, stay scripted, and follow platform-recommended formats.
If you’ve been in ad accounts lately or browsing feeds, you may have noticed something. Attention-grabbing ads don’t always follow those rules. They’re scrappier, less polished, and sometimes even called “ugly ads.” The beauty is that they’re coming out on top.
More brands are breaking best practices on purpose to stand out. After all, best practices are an average of what worked best for everyone else in the last six months, give or take. By the time a tactic becomes a platform-recommended rule, the edge has already been sanded off.
That’s why breaking best practices works — but only if you understand what’s behind them.
Why breaking best practices leads to better-performing ads
Before getting into what to change, it helps to understand why the rules exist in the first place. Platforms like Meta and TikTok have a dual incentive:
- They want you to spend money on advertising.
- They want users to stay engaged on their platforms.
The best practices they promote are designed to create a frictionless experience, pushing ads to look and behave like ads.
The problem is that what feels familiar eventually becomes invisible. When you follow the rules too closely, your ads blend into the background noise users have trained themselves to ignore.
High-production ads signal “this is an ad” almost instantly, triggering a skip reflex before your hook lands. When your ad looks like something a friend might send, the brain’s defenses stay down just a bit longer, and that can be the difference between a scroll and a conversion.
That’s why many of the top-performing ads today don’t look polished or on-brand in the traditional sense. They interrupt patterns instead. Think:
- Grainy phone footage.
- Notes app screenshots.
- Green-screened reaction or commentary videos.
- Other lo-fi formats are outperforming studio-grade creative.
To apply this, intentionally lower your production value and experiment with formats like point-of-view (POV) shots tailored to different personas.
Dig deeper: TikTok ad creative has a shorter shelf life. Here’s how to keep up
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