Why Do Ugly Ads Work for Technical Buyers?

Hector Serrano says a technical buyer should not be sold by an 18-year-old who is not technical. User-generated ads are not college kids with a camera. The user of a developer tool is often older, more serious, and not living on Instagram. For that person, the more boring and the uglier the ad, the better it performs. A screen recording of the product, a minute long or longer, can be a top ad and still look awful.

The same test applies to an expensive niche product. His example is a $3,000 sleep product. A buyer is not going to trust that pitch from a kid. People buy from someone who talks like them, works like them, and has the same problem. Creator ads can work at almost any company. They get harder as the price rises and the audience gets narrower, and the work becomes finding real users who want to talk about the product. He does not block an ad for looking rough. Some of the best ads he made a year earlier are a long vertical screen recording with a line of text at the top. They are also the ugliest.