How Flying Cheeseburgers Inspire Me

How many ads do you see in a single day? Would you believe 300? No? OK, 900? Well, what about 1,500 ads per day?

Yes, you really are seeing 1,500 ads per day... for starters. The average person gets 5,000 to 10,000 messages flashed in front of their eyeballs EVERY SINGLE DAY. Crazy town, right?

So if getting your product, service, or whatever you do, in front of the right people is hard enough, add to that the complexity of the sheer volume of messages you are fighting with. It's depressing.

I've written somewhere north of 100,000 ads over 40+ years, nine of them ran during the Super Bowl, and I can tell you this problem hasn't gotten easier, it's gotten worse. Combating it isn't as difficult as you might think, though. You need a few things.

The 4 Things You Need

1. A Scroll-Stopping Image Or Video 2. Compelling Copy 3. A Great Offer 4. Make The Conversion

Notice I snuck number 1 in there instead of making you wait for the reveal like I usually do? That's because it's the single most important step in getting the sale, opt-in, or conversion, and burying it at the bottom of a list is exactly the kind of thing that gets ignored in a 1,500-ads-a-day world. You don't get to step 2, 3, or 4 if nobody stops scrolling long enough to see them. I learned this the hard way running campaigns that had a killer headline and a strong offer, and still died in the feed because the visual up top gave nobody a reason to stop.

That's where a scroll-stopping image or video comes in. I prefer video for many reasons, but the most compelling one for me is they convert better than boring static images. Remember, you've got to stop the scroll if you want them to get to your headline. Speaking of which, if you want the deep dive on why the headline is the next domino that has to fall once the scroll stops, I've written about that too: your headline is doing most of the heavy lifting, and it has one job, get the next sentence read.

Here's why this matters more than people think. A thumb moving down a feed isn't reading. It isn't evaluating your offer. It's pattern-matching, at a glance, looking for a reason to keep moving. Your copy, your offer, your CTA — none of it exists yet as far as the scroller is concerned. It's invisible until something visual interrupts the pattern. That's the whole job of the image or video: not to sell, not to explain, just to make the thumb stop moving for one extra second. Everything else you worked so hard on only gets a chance to work after that happens.

Video has an edge here because it moves, and movement breaks pattern faster than a static image ever will. A still photo blends into the scroll. Motion doesn't. Your eye is wired to notice it whether you want to or not. That's not a copywriting trick, that's biology, and it's why I lean on video every chance I get.

In the video below, I walk through the exact moment this idea hit me, and how I turned somebody else's ad into inspiration for one of ours.

It started when I got served an ad from our video partner, Promo, in my own feed. The ad was nothing fancy: a simple stock clip of cheeseburgers flying across the screen. No pitch, no copy doing any heavy lifting, just motion that made my thumb stop cold. That's the whole lesson right there. So I sat down and rebuilt that same energy into an ad for Ad Zombies using Promo, starting from that same flying-cheeseburger stock footage. Watch the video to see the step-by-step process, start to finish.

Inspiration isn't always some grand epiphany. Sometimes it's just a cheeseburger flying across your screen at the right moment, reminding you that the scroll-stopper always comes first.