Ugly Ads Perform Best, Marketer Says

Barry Hott is a longtime Facebook advertising consultant. He says first reactions to an ad largely determine its performance. He advises merchants to create ugly ads, those that people won’t skip over.

“I’m the Make Ugly Ads Guy,” he told me.

In our recent conversation, Hott addressed key Facebook ad metrics, budgeting, testing, and, yes, ugly creative. The entire audio of that discussion is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.

Eric Brandholz: Who are you?

Barry Hott: I’m a part owner of a performance marketing agency called Adcrate, where we do high-performance ad creative. I also do a lot of consulting through Hott Growth, my own firm. I am a longtime Facebook ad nerd. You might know me as the “Make Ugly Ads” guy.

Brandholz: What can change the performance of an ad?

Hott: I don’t care about cost-per-impression or click-through-rate benchmarks. I’m looking at targeting. Are you allowing the system to target existing customers or recent visitors? Depending on the answer, I’ll look at your data differently.

From a systematic media buying standpoint, it’s about empathizing with the AI, with the machine learning algorithm — understanding how and why it operates in the way it does, how and why it’s incentivized, and how and why it can cheat. The system wants you to spend more money, and it wants to take more credit for more sales.

You can also use third-party attribution tools to help with that. Most people should use one for an extended period to understand how performance tracks outside the platforms.

Brandholz: What’s your take on bid caps on Facebook?

Hott: I have a problem with bid caps on everything and rigid cost caps. That’s not to say I don’t use them. They’re tools to be used in certain ways.

Say an ad is not getting a great cost per purchase, but the system knows it to be getting an overall sales lift. If you set your bid too low or set a cost cap too low, then I fear that the individual ad, if placed in an ad set that has too low of a bid, will never get the chance to spend in a way that it can support the entire ad ecosystem.

I like to have a controlled testing environment where every new concept gets an ad set for organizational purposes and just for letting things battle it out.

Brandholz: What metrics are you looking to hit?

Hott: The first thing to do is look at the best ads in the same environment — targeting, attribution, and settings. Everything stays the same. I need to know my best ads can spend this much and get this cost per purchase. And anything in that range is helpful to me. Anything above that, cost-wise, is useless to me significantly. Below that is killer.

I’ll typically have a testing environment excluding all existing customers and some visitors. That could be one-day visitors up to 30 days. It depends on the account and the business. I want to test ads for cold audiences. As an advertiser and media buyer, I aim to make ads that make sense and work for the broadest, coldest audiences. Many people would say that’s stupid, but if it can work well for those people, it will also work well for my warmer audiences.

Brandholz: How much money do you spend until you give up?

Hott: It’s about getting enough useful data. And that depends on what you’re selling — a $100 item or $1,000. Depending on budgets and your return on ad spend, you’re going to have different tolerances. It’s all going to vary. I’m usually looking for about 20 decent signals at the ad set level — hopefully that’s 20 actual purchases. By that point, I’ll know.

I’ll look at an ad that gets shut down quickly by bids for not spending and hypothesize about it. Why did the ad fail? Can I adjust it? I’d rather spend more time obtaining more data to see if there’s another pocket or placement elsewhere. It’s going to lose money, and I’m okay with that. But I will spend the time analyzing it and learning from it from a creative perspective.

However, if you don’t have time to do that sort of analysis, use rigid bids and cost caps.

Brandholz: What sort of creative produces good results?

Hott: Again, I am the Make Ugly Ads guy. I tell people to focus on making stuff uglier because our brains, as marketers, make prettier stuff. What matters are relatability, relevance, and authenticity. You can do that in a non-ugly way. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you can.

That first reaction is often what matters more than anything. Make something immediately relatable that people will care about. Make something people won’t skip. What will make someone feel uncomfortable?

Brandholz: Where can people follow you?

Hott: Go to Adcrate.co or HottGrowth.com. I’m on X (@binghott) and LinkedIn.