You’ve been told to follow a set of standard rules for years: always use high-quality art, keep your product polished, stay written, and follow the formats recommended by the forum.
If you’ve been on an ad account lately or browsing the feeds, you may have noticed something. Attention-grabbing ads don’t always follow those rules. They’re scrappier, less cool, and sometimes called “bad ads.” The beauty is that they come out on top.
Many brands break best practices on purpose to stand out. After all, best practices are a measure of what has worked best for everyone in the past six months, give or take. By the time the strategy becomes the recommended rule of the field, the edge has already been removed.
That’s why breaking good habits works – but only if you understand what’s behind it.
Why breaking best practices leads to better performing ads
Before getting into what should be changed, it helps to understand why the rules exist in the first place. Platforms like Meta and TikTok have two motives:
- They want you to spend money on advertising.
- They want users to stay engaged in their forums.
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 you feel familiar with eventually becomes invisible. If you follow the rules too closely, your ads blend into the background noise that users have trained to ignore.
High productivity ads show “this is an ad” almost instantly, causing a jump reflex before your hook lands. If your ad looks like something a friend might post, the brain’s defenses are down for just a moment, and that can be the difference between a scroll and a conversion.
That’s why many of today’s best-performing ads don’t look polished or on-brand in the conventional sense. Instead they disrupt the patterns. Consider:
- Grainy phone pictures.
- Notes app screenshots.
- Raw tested reactions or analytical videos.
- Some lo-fi formats work best for studio-grade art.
To take advantage of this, deliberately lower your production rate and experiment with formats such as point-of-view (POV) shots that are made for different people.
Dig deeper: TikTok ad art has a short shelf life. Here’s how to proceed
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Founder-led ads: The return of the human
Many brands have guidelines designed to make the company look flawless and invincible. They may not want to show a dirty, boarded-up office, an untrained founder, or anything that violates strict, corporate code. But others are throwing that playbook away and relying on founder-led ads that aren’t the polished version of the profile that was so common.
There is a catch.
A violation is only valid if it is true. If you fake it, the web will see it in seconds, and it won’t come the way you expect. We saw this play out in a series of videos where the CEO of McDonald’s appeared in a promotional booth to launch a new burger.
As highlighted in the Dineline video, the execution felt solid and organized. The CEO carefully lifted the burger, looked at the camera, called it “product,” and slowly took a bite from the edge. People online were quick to point out that it didn’t look like she really liked the food, so why should you?
Soon after, Burger King entered the conversation, and its president appeared in one of his kitchens holding a burger with a completely different voice. No hesitation, no pause for business – just a big, real bite.
The lesson is clear: One felt like a product presentation, while the other felt like a real moment.
If your leadership, your founder, and your team don’t seem genuinely excited about what you’re selling, your customers won’t be either. Breaking the law should give you the courage to be real, not just “unpolished” because of it.
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You’ve probably seen – and probably used – a video hook best practice like “show the product in the first two seconds and state the value proposition clearly.” Sound familiar?
Your ad starts with a screenshot of a negative comment. Let’s say you have a skincare ad that opens with a text bubble: “This probably smells like old socks, and does it work?” Your founder then spends the next 15-20 seconds smiling, showing that it’s unscripted, unpolished, while using the product.
Using the forum’s native comment bubble and opening with a conflict violates the rule of good brand association for your brand, but you will gain attention by tapping into the natural tendency of users to view a digital debate.
By the time viewers see your ad, they’ve already heard your key points and are likely on their way to trying the product. Effective advertising still relies on logic, but now requires an understanding of user behavior and how algorithms work.
The traitor’s safety net
Do not remove all your polished properties yet.
Breaking the rules is a strategy. When it fails, it is usually because the “80/20 rule” is ignored.
Shifting your entire budget to phone animations overnight is not a move. Keep a base of about 80%, and use the remaining 20% to test new, unusual ads. Standing out doesn’t mean generating bad publicity.
Try this in your next test campaign:
- Silent testing: Skip the trending sound and play a fully silent ad with big, bold captions. In a noisy feed, silence can disrupt patterns.
- Ghost UI: Create a static image that looks like a platform notification or a low battery warning, if applicable. It may annoy some viewers, but it can stop scrolling.
- The downfall of algorithmic trust: Turn off automatic optimization for one campaign and use broad targeting if you haven’t already. Let your creativity do the sorting. You may find the algorithm works better if you remove the manual guardrails.
Don’t follow the rules, understand them
Good habits are a starting point, not a strategy. If you’re going to go beyond it, do it in an orderly way.
Start with the law, understand why it exists, ask if it still works, and systematically examine the contrary. Compare polished and lo-fi, scripted and unscripted, brand voice and personal voice.
In a feed full of brands playing it safe, those who understand the rules – and how to deliberately break them – are the ones who get attention and conversion. Focus on learning faster than anyone else. Skip the guesswork.
Contributing writers are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are selected for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the supervision of editorial staff and contributions are assessed for quality and relevance to our students. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. The contributor has not been asked to speak directly or indirectly about Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
