@Simon__Rob
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We do static ads https://xitter.cf/t.co/cAjoB246wv : AG1, Jones Road, HexClad, Hollow Socks & 100 more. Book your call to get started 👇
Joined February 2018
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Q4 is when brands panic-ship
They hold on to the ad that performed 3 months ago and doesn't anymore, because they're not willing to let it go
So, as promised, we updated the playbook right before Q4 starts: what Q3 data from our accounts actually shows, and what to do about it in Q4 (besides hiring Statiq, wink wink)
free, unlocks on subscribe. Enjoy y'all
adswithsimon.com/p/swipe-fil…
Every ad format winning across 100+ Meta ad accounts right now, in one playbook
- updated every quarter as winners rotate.
- this isn't a youtube guru take on Meta ads. I'm in the accounts. It's just what the data shows.
- free, unlocks on subscribe.
adswithsimon.com/p/swipe-fil… cheers!
In 2026, your statics need one thing to win: storytelling
Everyone’s figured out it sells in video ads. What’s working better rn is storytelling built for exactly who’s watching you and how their consumer psychology works.
Statics need that too.
Some formats make it obvious, like a comic or a one-pager from a book. But a static can tell the whole story in a single frame.
We made these 2 top-performing ads for 2 clients:
- 1: Lens-free glasses and a pickleball, sitting on a poker table. “RISK” printed on the rail. Headline: “Don’t play against the odds.” The scene tells the story: playing without eye protection is gambling, and you’re the one betting your eyes.
- 2: Now the watch ad. Reject modernity/Embrace tradition is a meme format. It’s all over the internet with different stuff in it. We took it and used it to tell a story.
The story is a contrast in two beats. And it speaks very precisely to one customer. He’s not some teenager vaping. He’s a man with serious tastes, a man who believes in traditional male values and is nostalgic for a version of masculinity. He’s Don Draper from Mad Men.
That’s the same thing that’s working in video, done in a static: a story aimed at whoever’s looking.
October life update
- NY: one full week in
- Recorded some long-form YouTube with good friends. Gonna be super helpful for the community
- The trip also opened my eyes on a gap in our process as a company. Already started building the next phase of our workflow: chat-based, brands drop their ideas, we grab them and produce.
- Made some new friends too. NYC is just a very good city to get inspired and get shit done
- Heading to DC on Thursday for my first marathon. Haven’t run as much as I wanted but mentally I’m ready
Less go
Less goooo 🍝
Going to dinner tonight with
@maxwellcopy
@Simon__Rob
@lukethorburg
Having best friends your age that are building similar businesses is the greatest growth hack
Community is everything
Effort is the ultimate symbol of humanity.
Everything is optimized for ease, so friction became prestigious. People want things to be hard again: hard to make, hard to get, hard to go through. And they’re going back to doing them together.
Clearest example I’ve seen lately is a perfume made by an AI.
Index, a fragrance brand founded in 2025. At their pop-up you put on wired headphones and tell a machine full of tubes and beakers about a memory you’d relive if you could. It asks questions back, few mins later it pours that memory into a bottle.
Three things happening at once.
1. The tech dystopia, except the AI isn’t just a program, it’s a physical machine in the room with liquid running through tubes like veins.
2. A live event you have to show up to and say the memory out loud.
3. And the most invisible thing you own turned into something you can wear and carry w you.
The girl at the machine has a cross around her neck. Technology and God in the same frame. We’re (once again) in the searching for meaning era.
The brands that get this are building community through high-effort practices. Something people have to show up for, go through, and feel in their body. Together.
40 people at my agency and I still made our latest ad myself
an AI video of a dog hosting a podcast. last 14 days: 46% thumbstop, 59% hold rate
For reference, when a client ad hits 40% hook rate I call it a winner
We can be our own advertiser now and talk about what we do for ourselves. AI video ads for B2B, AI characters for ecom.
Whatever holds up goes into the video ad service we have launched.
Having a lot of fun with this lol. DM if you wanna know more
We're in 115+ Meta ad accounts spending close to $50M a month, so we for sure know what's working. Book a call with me before BFCM rush! bit.ly/4mXPCrw
Banger video just dropped
A full breakdown on the psychology behind static ads that actually convert.
If your statics look good but don’t sell, I can guarantee the reason is in this video
look up “adswithsimon” on YouTube to watch
Just had our Q4 townhall, the one we do right as Q3 closes. It always ends with a shoutout session where the team thanks each other, and it’s honestly awesome to see. proud of this team and of what we’re building
where we’re at going into Q4:
- ~10K statics a month for 150+ brands
- 40+ people across Argentina, the Philippines and a few more countries
- We have been working with a software engineer in-house. every client account syncs nightly into our own data, so we stopped guessing what works
- We just launched our video ads service and already signed 3 clients LFG
- A client told us recently what they value most is how fast the team moves and how well they use AI
Q4 is the biggest quarter of the year for every brand we work with
Let’s work
Simon Robert retweeted
Yo! looking for an ecom founder who wants their brand broken down live.
I’m in NYC filming with @maxwellcopy this weekend. I take the ads, Max takes the emails, and we map how you get to your first $1M year.
Saturday morning in Midtown. DM me.
We’re falling in love with objects again. Like, hyperbolically, obsessively.
McDonald’s Australia took the cardboard tray you carry four drinks in and turned it into a leather bag.
At the same time, practices we’d abandoned are coming back as class markers: being outdoors, not looking at your phone, reading physical books, writing by hand with a beautiful pen.
Headphones are the cleanest example. Apple launches AirPods, every random brand launches a $20 copy, everybody has them. So the rich go back to the cable.
RosalĂa running through New York holding her phone, because she’s wearing old wired headphones.
Once everyone owns something, it stops saying anything about you.
Call it the object renaissance.
And it’s happening at the same time as its opposite. The world is splitting in two: everything hyper-technological, nothing you can touch, on one side, and the material, the tangible, on the other.
McDonald’s is both at once. You order on a touchscreen that glitches when you’re in a hurry with your kid, from the same brand that just fetishized a drink tray.
So for your ads, pick a side. Take something boring and make it gorgeous, or go full hyper-tech.
The middle is where ads go to die.
Yo! looking for an ecom founder who wants their brand broken down live.
I’m in NYC filming with @maxwellcopy this weekend. I take the ads, Max takes the emails, and we map how you get to your first $1M year.
Saturday morning in Midtown. DM me.
2026 has two exits: the tech dystopia or peasant cosplay
Everyone’s going to bookmark this for the copy. But what makes this work today is the timing: the world broke into two big binaries, a tech dystopia on one side and peasant cosplay on the other, a nostalgic regression to the past and its objects.
That’s why this ad works as an object. It’s beautiful in itself: the weight of the type, the structure of the layout, the brand stamp at the end. Plus a headline that would crush today.
It would probably work better in 2026 than back then, when this was just the traditional format.
GLP-1s are breaking up more couples than therapy
Women a few weeks into the shot are walking out of toxic shit they’d been justifying for years.
Here’s why. People on these meds talk about food noise: the voice in your head that never shuts up about what you ate, what you weigh today, the guilt.
The shot turns it off.
And when it goes quiet, you can finally hear what was right in front of you the whole time: you’re done with him.
Wellness brands like Grüns are running a ton of ads for GLP-1 users. Their angles: hair loss in the shower, can’t go to the bathroom. All side effects.
You need to dig deeper than that. What’s actually happening to these women?
Picture this hook: “Three weeks into my GLP-1, I realized my man barely fed me anything.”
She’s losing muscle. She needs protein. He’s bringing home french fries and a diet soda. That’s where Grüns comes in.
Get detailed enough about what your customer is actually going through and you’ll find the ad nobody else is running.
watched the full interview - dude is the first billionaire i hear say "cracked" live on screen.
Lessons from @elonmusk and Mark Zuckerberg and Napoleon:
“Elon has demonstrated that if you have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team, that's very flat, you can accomplish a lot very quickly.”
“Mark has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It just matters when you win, how big you win.”
“That concept enables Mark to operate without fear because he’s just very comfortable taking lots of risk.”
“Mark has this great quote that says: The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
“In the book The Mind of Napoleon, Napoleon repeats that hesitation is fatal. Napoleon says before you engage in a course of action you should deliberate thoroughly. He'd study from every angle to make sure he's making the right decision. But once he’s sure he’s on the right path, he goes all in. I feel there's an echo with the way Mark operates. Once Mark knows what he wants to do, he empties the clip.”
A newer, more aggressive ad with a lower CPA can work against you (and it has nothing to do with legal).
Ad angle cohorts behave differently. Angle A gets you a $50 CPA. Angle B gets you a $70 CPA and 3x the LTV.
More aggressive doesn’t necessarily mean a better business. That aggressive new brand might go bankrupt because the unit economics don’t work (churn/chargebacks).
One pattern i'm seeing (150+ Meta accounts) is the easier a customer is to acquire, the easier they leave.
Brand runs a new angle, rips a lower CPA, then 6 months later realizes that cohort behaves horrendously. Chargebacks, churn, returns.
Many such cases.
The biggest winner in DTC is usually the business that's willing to take on the most legal risk in their ads. It always plays out that way. Brand scales using relatively normal ads. Then a competitor pops up and starts running ads that are 10% more aggressive. The original brand sees CAC go up because there's a new competitor bidding with better ads. In order to cope with the increased CAC, the original brand has a few options. Option 1: one-up the competitor by running ads that are more aggressive, which creates a never ending spiral of out-lying and out-risking. Option 2: switch to MRR/focus on LTV. Option 3: do both. That's why the market is playing out the way it is right now. Creative strategists are in higher demand than ever. And eCom businesses are switching over to MRR en masse, desperate for retention experts who know how to build and optimise a retention program - because the edge is now in retention economics. And if you're a brand owner running subscriptions without understanding cohort analytics, zero day churn, split testing on your subscription cohorts and beating controls, not knowing what good/bad metrics look like; you are going to lose to the brands who do (ie the clients at Mailer Profit)