Ads need to be interesting.

At its core, people spend time on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok because the content that’s served there is interesting to them.

Ads on these platforms are native, meaning that the ad placements and organic content have the same look and feel. So when you advertise on these platforms, you’re not just competing with other advertisers, you’re also competing with all of the other content that exists on these platforms.

If we break down organic social content at its highest level, we have two overarching categories: Entertainment and Education. Edutainment content does a mix of both. And this content is also highly specific to each individual user. Social platforms know what you find interesting based on what you have found interesting in the past as signaled by watch time and engagement.

And this content that is regularly consumed organically should inspire the techniques that we use to power our paid ads.

Ads that entertain but don't educate are watchable but struggle to drive action or behavior change.

Ads that educate but don't entertain are valuable, but weaker at capturing or retaining attention.

Top performing ads balance both, at varying weights.

In this playbook we’re going to explore the concepts that power both sides of this equation.

Entertainment

**Attention-Getting Mechanisms

Attention-getting mechanisms are the recognizable formats, patterns, and triggers within organic social content that consistently capture audience attention. By borrowing these elements, whether it’s a trending sound, a familiar content style, or a cultural reference, you are aligning your ad with what people are already conditioned to watch. This shortcuts the hardest part of advertising: making people stop, pay attention, and stay engaged long enough to hear your message.

We’re capturing attention by aligning with what’s already getting it.

Red Bull mastered this by associating their brand with popular extreme sports content. Injury lawyer “Top Dog Law” taps into the viral accident videos. Dr. Squatch leans into humor and sexually suggestive jokes, and Rocket Money taps into sketch, man-on-the-street and podcast-style formats. All of these are deliberate choices that anchor brand messaging inside cultural attention streams that audiences are predisposed to notice.

Trendjacking is one of the most direct forms of this. It’s the practice of riding the wave of trending memes, sounds, or video structures. The best way to tap into trends is to create a TikTok or Instagram account and consume content as if you were your target persona. You’ll begin to see a curated feed of the trends that capture your target’s attention. Look at the FYP and Discover tabs.

Sometimes the mechanism isn’t about a specific trend, but about the format the message is delivered in. These are wrappers. A wrapper is a content format that the audience already enjoys, like a sketch, podcast clip, or man-on-the-street interview, that your messaging can be inserted into. This helps the viewer feel like they’re watching content instead of a traditional ad, which lowers the guard and makes them more receptive.

Attention-getting mechanisms borrow credibility from cultural context. They create a sense of relevance and familiarity that reduces the mental effort required to pay attention. Viewers don’t have to work to figure out why the content is worth their time, because they recognize the ad as a content type that they’ve enjoyed in the past.

Other examples include celebrities, attractive people, cute dog videos, mukbangs, ASMR, standup, get-ready-with-mes, & prank videos.

**Contrast

While attention-getting mechanisms work by blending your ad into the content people are already consuming, contrast works by making your ad stand out. Humans are hardwired to notice contrast. If you place a single blue circle on a blank white board, your eye will immediately lock onto the circle. It’s instinctive. We pay attention to pattern breakers.

One of the most effective ways to use contrast is by introducing elements that your audience is not used to seeing, like bizarre or exaggerated visuals. A few examples I’ve seen recently include a person pouring wine on their head, a dog driving a car, and a man in a suit swimming in a lake. A top performing ad of mine starts with a kid excitedly screaming with Super-Saiyen-style blue flames surrounding his body. Especially in the first few seconds, we need to capture attention, and contrast a foundation concept for how we do this.

AI generative video tools are helpful with contrast, because you can create visuals that your audience has never seen before quickly and cost-effectively.

A good reminder here is that your content should still look native to the platform. If it stands out because it looks like a polished ad dropped into a casual feed, that is the wrong kind of contrast because…well…people generally hate ads.

I have a good amount of acting and directing training, and a useful technique used in that world is called “opposite choices.” The idea is to first consider what a normal, expected choice would look like in a given moment, then deliberately do the opposite. An acting example would be screaming a line that on the surface looks like it should be whispered. Is drinking wine out of a wine a normal choice? Try the opposite choice of drinking it like you’re eating soup with a spoon and a bowl.

And contrast also extends to how an ad unfolds within itself. Great ads often keep viewers hooked by introducing contrast from clip to clip, changing shooting techniques (like tripod vs. selfie and wide angle vs. closeups), swapping locations, adjusting pacing, and doing different actions. Direct your creators to deliver clips that have a wide variety from clip to clip, and teach your editors how to focus on contrast in their editing. We’ll cover this in more detail in the Editing Playbook.

**Contradictions

Contradiction is another form of contrast, and more specifically opposite choices, but instead of contrasting two different clips or with the other content in your social feed, it creates tension within the same character, object, or scenario by combining qualities that are not normally seen together.”

Some of the most interesting people are walking contradictions. Kevin Hart is a small person who plays up an alpha male character. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a massive alpha male who is also a gentle, loving girl dad. Each one on their own is compelling because they flip expectations. They’re also a movie star duo, and when you put them together, they contrast with each other as inverted versions of a similar contradiction, and it makes for a super entertaining dynamic.

Applying Contradictions to Ad Creative

Contradictions surprise viewers by breaking expectations. You take something familiar and flip it on its head. A cute puppy suddenly shown with a visual of green, sludgy bad breath is far more memorable than just showing the bad breath on its own. A sweet grandma with a tattoo sleeve makes you pause and smile because it clashes with the stereotype you expect. A baby speaking with a deep adult voice creates a jarring and funny dissonance that captures attention.

Why Contradictions Work

Audiences are wired to notice things that don’t fit. When we see a contradiction, our brains automatically try to resolve the tension. That moment of “wait, what?” is exactly the opening you need to hook attention and keep people watching. By deliberately breaking expectations, contradictions create intrigue, humor, and surprise, which are three of strong drivers of entertainment in ad creative.

**Social Positioning

**Aspirational Elements

People are drawn to elements that reflect who we are, who we want to be, or who we absolutely do not want to be. It’s called social positioning. This is heavily influenced by the people that appear in ads, but also extends to the lifestyle that they exhibit and other elements.

Aspirational elements align with the dream scenario of who the audience aspires to be. This is where celebrities, influencers, charismatic personalities, and attractive people shine, because they already represent an elevated identity that people want to associate with. Think of the stylish couple in a sunlit kitchen, the athlete dripping sweat after a victorious workout, or the confident founder who has clips of him pitching his product on Shark Tank or Good Morning America. Aspirational ads are interesting because they show what the viewers are interested in achieving.

It also helps with building the perception of your product’s capabilities. If an avatar in your ad is a professional athlete selling workout equipment, “if the product works for her, it will definitely work for me” is a type of heuristic that can be unlocked through using an aspiration avatar.

**Associative Elements

Associative elements work when viewers see people or environments that match up with their own identity. These ads create instant recognition and validation, and also specifically to them. A skincare brand that uses creators with acne scars, or a pet brand that features real dog owners in everyday settings, makes the content feel more authentic and relatable. This closely relates to the “cocktail effect” that we cover in the Scaling Playbook and the “relatable” section in the Building Trust Playbook.

**Disassociative Elements

Disassociative elements show the audience what they want to avoid. They are often used as the “before” in a before-and-after transformation as a way to visualize the nightmare scenario that the audience fears and acts as a stick to drive action. Examples I’ve seen recently include an awkward guy fumbling through a date, a loud neighbor embarrassing himself, or a church attendee soaked in armpit sweat. Just like jesters entertained audiences in the past by representing the opposite of the ideal, modern disassociative elements engage audiences by showing flawed or exaggerated bad situations to be in.

**Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to entertain. People are naturally wired to pay attention to stories because they create tension, build anticipation, and offer resolution.

A story has a beginning, middle, and end, which keeps people leaning forward to find out what happens next. Instead of delivering information in isolation, you weave it into a narrative that makes the details easier to process and more emotionally impactful. Stories are how humans have shared knowledge for thousands of years. Our brains are built to follow them.

The most common story is called the Hero’s Journey. It’s a story about transformation. A character starts in an ordinary world, faces a challenge, changes because of it, and comes out the other side better than before.

1. The Setup (Ordinary World + Problem): We meet the hero in their normal life, but something is missing or wrong. There is a problem that needs to be solved.

2. The Challenge (Call to Adventure): The hero encounters a new challenge, obstacle, or opportunity that pushes them out of their comfort zone.

3. The Struggle (Conflict): The hero faces difficulties, experiments, or failures on the way to overcoming the challenge. This is where tension and drama build.

4. The Transformation (Resolution): The hero overcomes the obstacle, discovers the solution, and changes for the better. Their life looks different than it did in the beginning.

In ads, we position the product or service as the solution, or the turning point that leads to their transformation. This is commonly used in TOF ads that message symptoms and problems.

**Editing

Editing is where an ad either comes alive or falls flat. Even with strong ideas, poor editing can drain energy and make the content tough to watch and easy to scroll past. Editing choices can take ordinary footage and make it feel dramatic, funny, or emotionally charged. We’ll touch on this more in the Editing Playbook, but here are a few concepts that make your ads more entertaining.

**Sound Effects

Sound effects are one of the fastest and easiest ways to add punch to an ad. A “whoosh” when text appears, a “pop” when a product is revealed, or a “crash” when something goes wrong gives viewers extra sensory cues that keep attention active. Beyond generic effects, you can also use sonic branding. Sonic branding is a branded sound effect that becomes part of your identity. It both reinforces recognition and captures attention. Think of the Netflix “ta-dum” or the Intel “bong.” A consistent audio signature can make your ad instantly memorable.

**Music

Music drives mood. It sets the emotional tone for how the ad should be experienced. Horror movies are the perfect example. Take away the music and the visuals often look dull or even silly. Add music back in and suddenly the scene is filled with tension.

In ads, the right track can make a product demo exciting, make humor land harder, or give authority to a founder’s message. A common tactic is to time the music so that it drops at the three second mark (the end of your hook). This creates an early burst of energy right when the hook needs to land.

You can also use different music to align with the story arc of your ad. Sad or scary music can score the “before” nightmare scenario, and then transitions into uplifting or happy music for the “after” dream scenario of how the product or service drives transformation. Matching the rhythm of your cuts to the beat of the music creates a sense of flow that keeps people watching and makes the entire narrative feel more immersive. Contrast and contradictions are also interesting angles to test out when playing with music.

**Pacing and Variation

Editing also controls pacing, which is critical in short-form ads. Too slow and you lose attention. Too fast and the takeaways of your ad’s educational portion won’t land. A strong edit introduces variety, mixing fast cuts with slower pauses, wide shots alternating with close-ups, and dialogue broken up by quick reaction clips. Fast pacing often works well. With one of my clients we found that around 25 clips per minute correlated with good performance, but this depends on the audience and the framework you are running.

Education

**Features, Benefits, and Outcomes

Every product or service has features. Those features create benefits. And those benefits lead to outcomes.

People are not really shopping for features, or even for benefits. They are shopping for outcomes. They want solutions to their problems, improvements to their lives, or a path to becoming the person they want to be. Features and benefits represent the journey to that desired outcome, which is what potential customers actually care about. So when making TOF and MOF ads, we need to educate how features and benefits map to outcomes.

The Apple iPod Example

Let’s take an old school example: the Apple iPod.

• Features: 5GB storage, 10-hour battery life, 4.02 x 2.43 x 0.78 dimensions

• Benefits: 1,000 songs, continuous listening, fits in your pocket

• Outcomes: Running is more enjoyable, every moment of your day has a soundtrack

Now let’s put that into context.

• Feature: “Your iPod can store 5GB of music.” So what?

• Benefit: “That means it can hold 1,000 songs.” So what?

• Outcome: “That means training for your marathon will actually be enjoyable because you will never run out of music.”

Outcomes allow you to tap into consumer psychology, aspirations, and emotions. Features explain what the product is. Benefits explain what the product does. Outcomes show what the product means for the consumer’s life.

“The iPod is not just a music player, it is your journey to losing 200 pounds.”
“Michael Jordan uses the iPod. The iPod is your journey to becoming a disciplined athlete.”

Outcomes are the promise. Features and benefits are the plan. They show how the promise will be fulfilled. That is why all three elements are important for building compelling ad creative.

Here’s what a standard script flow might look like:
Hook → Problem → Product Intro → Outcome → Features → Benefits → Offer → CTA

There are times when you can lean more on features or benefits, especially for lower-funnel audiences who already know the outcome they want. In these cases, simple “Feature Callout” or “Benefit Callout” ads can work very well. If someone already wants the outcome, you just need to convince them that your product has the right journey to get them there.

People buy outcomes because they are rooted in emotion, identity, and aspiration. They buy benefits and features because they need the logic of how the outcome will be delivered. Lot’s of winning ads balance all three. Start with the outcome to hook desire, then use features and benefits to build trust in the path forward.

**Mythbusting

People often hold assumptions about a category, product, or solution that are outdated, incomplete, or flat-out wrong.

When something challenges what we believe to be true, we are compelled to pay attention. It triggers a moment of cognitive dissonance where the brain thinks, “Wait, is that really right?” and pays attention in an effort to course correct.

Mythbusting also positions your brand as an authority showing that you know the category better than the average competitor and put effort into educating your customers. And when you back your claim with proof, you build trust and credibility as well.

The simplest way to structure a mythbusting ad is:

1. State the Myth: Call out the false belief clearly and confidently.

2. Bust the Myth: Show why it is wrong, with proof or demonstration.

3. Deliver the Truth: Replace the belief with a new perspective tied directly to your product.

Myths that are tied to sturdy beliefs or to identity are the hardest to shift. This is where belief reranking comes in. Instead of rejecting the belief outright, you affirm their sturdy belief but introduce a deeper truth that lowers the myth’s importance and elevates a new belief.

• Education piece: “High quality kibble is important, but it doesn’t impact their health unless high quality supplements are paired with it.”

• Bad Myth Bust: High quality kibble doesn’t matter. (counters a strong belief)

• Good Myth Bust: “Yes, quality food absolutely matters for your dog’s health, but what matters even more is gut health, because it controls digestion, immunity, and even skin and coat health.” (reranks the importance of supplements

By validating part of the old belief and reranking its importance, you protect the customer’s identity while guiding them toward a new perspective that adds on to their prior belief.

Mythbusting teaches the audience something new in a memorable way. It satisfies curiosity, reinforces your authority, and positions your product as the smarter choice. You’re breaking down false beliefs and reranking them with stronger truths.

**Problem Discovery

Audiences are used to hearing about the obvious problems in your category, but after a problem becomes too familiar it doesn’t grab attention or provide new education and won’t move them through the awareness stages. Problem discovery works by surprising the audience with a new problem, reframing their everyday experiences as signs of a deeper issue, and positing the product or service as the solve.

One of the clearest ways to uncover hidden problems is to link symptoms to their underlying cause. For example:

• Symptom: A dog scratches, licks its paws, or shakes its head.

• Problem: These are not just behavioral quirks. They are often signs of gut health issues.

Here you’re teaching your audience what their symptoms mean and re-evaluate what they thought was normal. This discovery moment can be powerful because it flips the way they see their own situation and motivates them to take action. It’s also smart to explain how not taking action leads to

**Solution Discovery

Solution discovery is about helping customers realize there is a better approach than what they are currently doing, or that there is a solution to the problem that they’ve discovered.

Failed solutions are often the bridge into solution discovery. For example: “You’ve tried switching to expensive kibble, but your dog still scratches.” This validation makes the audience feel understood, speaks to their past experience, calls out what doesn’t work and presents your product as the answer they have been missing.

How you introduce a solution depends on your market’s level of sophistication. In a new market, where your product is naturally differentiated because competitors don’t have the same features, simply presenting the product may be enough. In a saturated market, where there is low differentiation and oversaturated messaging you should introduce new mechanisms, like a rebranding of product features to make them sound novel.

Lucky Strike’s “It’s Toasted” campaign is a classic example. All cigarettes were already toasted, but Lucky Strike reframed it as a proprietary mechanism that made their product seem special. A new mechanism works because it bypasses resistance, making the audience think there’s a new solution that they haven’t tried and haven’t heard of that renews new hope in solving their problem.

**Comprehension

Education in ads is only effective if the audience actually understands it. This relates to the fluency bias that we cover in the Psychology Playbook.

The more complex the idea, the more it needs to be translated into plain language. For example, instead of saying “supports gastrointestinal microbiota,” add on ”which helps your dog’s gut stay healthy.” It’s okay to use jargon like “gastrointestinal microbiota”, as this can inspire curiosity, but the outcome in particular needs to be easily understood and crystal clear. Metaphors and analogies are helpful here.

Complex concepts should also be balanced with simple, easy-to-grasp visuals. If you are explaining how bacteria impacts gut health, showing an animation of “good guys versus bad guys” battling in the stomach makes the idea click faster. Visuals reduce cognitive load, so the audience does not have to work as hard to process what you are teaching.

Comprehension also increases when you break ideas into clear steps. Instead of explaining a process in one long sentence, guide the audience step by step: “First, add one scoop to your dog’s food. Second, let them enjoy their meal. Third, watch their energy and coat improve in the coming weeks.” Step-based education feels digestible and makes the action you want them to take easier to follow.

It’s also helpful to conduct customer research to see how your audience is explaining your product, and bring that language into your copy as much as possible.

**Authority & Trust

Another way to make your educational content land is by pairing it with authority and trust. Credible voices or backed by proof makes the audience far more likely to believe and remember your educational pieces. Authority can come from experts, founders, media features, recognizable figures, and trust is reinforced with testimonials, data, and other forms of proof. We cover this in detail in the Building Trust Playbook, but remember that education paired with authority and trust will always be more persuasive than education on its own.

**Balancing Both Brands test and learn how much of its content should lean toward education versus entertainment. A new category or complex product might need more education to help the audience understand why it matters, while a low-consideration purchase or a brand that thrives on lifestyle cues may benefit from leaning more on entertainment.

Regardless, entertainment should be heaviest in the opening seconds of your ad. This is when the audience decides whether to keep watching or keep scrolling, and entertainment is typically the move here. Editors should put the bulk of their “fancy editing” work in the beginning of the video to capture and hold attention, and once attention is secured, education can be layered in while maintaining attention.

Going back to our concept of contrast, winning ads usually move fluidly between entertaining and educational moments. This means capturing clips that exist purely to entertain and clips that exist purely to educate or sell, and alternating between the two throughout your ad keep the audience engaged while still delivering the product story. Too much entertainment without education creates a watchable video that does not convert. Too much education without entertainment risks being ignored. Good ads often flow between both.

**Pulling It All Together

You can also tap into proven frameworks to make both entertainment and educational concepts easier to execute. Frameworks give you structure so you are not starting from scratch, and they help you organize your ideas in a way that feels natural to the audience.

Psychology is another amplifier. It makes everything more interesting because it taps into who we are at the root. Curiosity, authority, social proof, identity, and contrast are not just tactics, they are reflections of how people think and behave. When your ads align with these principles, they resonate on a deeper level.

The more you blend structure, creativity, and psychology, the more your ads move beyond information or entertainment and become something that people cannot help but notice, remember, and act on.

Interesting ads are the ones that stop people in their tracks and make them care. Entertainment captures attention, education builds belief, and the balance between the two creates ads that people actually watch and act on.