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…

I'm washington dc pilled - this city screams power I fuckin love it. the air is heavy. People are at work. Buildings are clean, big and prosperous. I just want to be Sunday and rip the marathon lfg.

it's 2026 we have flying cars but Apple can't figure out how to make JPEG pictures instead of HEIC like why

My female friends say some cruel shit (women say some cruel shit), but one thing is true: aesthetically, men have two jobs. One, go to the gym. Two, don’t go bald. And it makes sense that it’s women saying it, because women are experts at catching details. Men don’t catch the details. Men are in the big picture. That’s exactly why hair products for women and hair products for men need completely different ads. Let’s start with women. I saw a video ad with this headline: “Stop treating your wavy hair like it’s curly.” 1. It’s a yapper ad, framing a woman with wavy hair telling her own experience. 2. She's talking woman to woman. 3. She didn’t say “stop treating your wavy hair like it’s straight.” She said like it’s curly. Wavy vs. curly is a really fine distinction. It’s a detail, and that detail only exists in the female gaze. So if you want to target women, be in the details. Now, let’s flip it. If you want to sell hair products to men, what’s a man’s biggest aesthetic fear? Going bald. So for the ads targeting guys who are losing their hair in their late 20-30s, here’s what works: 1. AI dramas. Either animated or with real-looking people, played like a sitcom or a soap opera. 2. And you don’t cast a CK model. You cast a normal, average guy who wants his wife to still see him. He doesn’t want to get scammed, he doesn’t want to drop a fortune on a hair transplant, and he wants to fix it from the comfort of his own home. 3. That cruel “two jobs” line matters, because that’s where his masculinity lives, his virility. His virility is in his hair. You hear “hair is everything” a lot, and it works for both genders. Women: be in the details. Men: go straight at the fear.

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.

being broke sucks

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 🍝

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.

Yooo what's the best video ads course out there? Research, ad formats etc

we been cookin with the email marketing king

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

New York City (2026)

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

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. Rosalía 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.