Ugly, boring ads win with older technical buyers

Founders with developer tools or expensive niche products often tell Hector Serrano, who runs creator ads at Whisper, that they cannot make content for their brand. They think user-generated content means college kids making videos, and that it will never work for them.

Serrano argues they misunderstand what those videos are supposed to be. "The more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform," he says of ads aimed at that older, more technical crowd.

He means the messenger has to match the buyer, not the platform. Whisper sells to everyone from moms to lawyers, and Serrano says its creator group includes engineers, lawyers, sales representatives, agency owners, and an eight-figure online store founder in his 40s with kids who, as Serrano puts it, "loves Whisper so much that he just makes ads for us" and "just wants to be part of the community."

An 18-year-old who is not technical is a poor choice to sell a developer tool, Serrano says. For an expensive sleep product pitched by an 18-year-old, he asks, "why am I going to buy a $3,000 product from a kid?" The pitch lands when it comes from someone in the same line of work with the same daily headaches.

For those buyers, polished ads do worse. Serrano says some of Whisper's best performers are simply long, plain screen recordings of someone using the product, shot vertical for phones with a line of text across the top and running 30 seconds to more than a minute. He says of those winners, "you would look at them and you'd be like, holy cow, these are ugly. These are such bad ads."

He argues for testing widely because he says he cannot predict paid winners the way he can with organic posts. An ad that leaves him thinking "what the heck is this?" sometimes becomes the best performer, he says. His rule is to drop a strict quality bar and keep experimenting.