“It’s ugly, but it’s working.”

I’m sitting in our weekly ad debrief, and I’m complaining. Our team is running a lead magnet ad I hate. It’s hideous, a piece of paper with a note scrawled with marker advertising our (in my opinion) incredibly valuable growth strategy resource.

“It looks cheap. I hate it.”

Adam, one of the smartest paid marketers I’ve worked with for 5 years, rolls his eyes at me.

“Do you want to run more expensive ads, just so you can look expensive?”

It takes me back to my fintech days. I was desperately trying to gain traction on college campuses, but for all of our partnerships with student groups, and advertising on campus— nothing was getting us app downloads. Or even, name recognition. We were everywhere but to students, we were still invisible.

So we did something different. We told our brand ambassadors:

Do anything to get our brand seen on campus. Nothing that feels like brand advertising. Go hard. Be weird.

They chalked campus. They printed their own janky posters. They wrote post-its with our Instagram handle written on them and stuck them over outlets in high-traffic study spots.  Students would have to bend down and move them to plug in their laptops. They postered bathroom stalls.

And it worked. Our campus ambassador program which relied heavily on guerilla marketing brought in the lowest-cost app downloads of any channel strategy and grew into a global program.

So, why do weird and ugly marketing tactics, when done well, work?

Let me ask you— how fast do you scroll on TikTok when you see that the video is an ad?

We’re tired of advertising, and we’re really good at ignoring it. The big glossy ad in their feed that cost you 10k to make? They didn’t even see it.

It’s not a new phenomenon, the term Banner Blindness was coined in 1998, and numerous eye-tracking studies have determined that 86% of users identify ads and ignore them.

But you can disrupt Banner Blindness with creativity.

The ugly scrawl on paper I was complaining about?

It doesn’t look like an ad, and it’s converting at a cost-per-lead of $1.99.

According to recent benchmark data, the average cost for each lead across all industries on Facebook is around $19.68, so this is pretty damn good.

I still hate that ad. It’s my mission to beat it with something more brand-aligned.

But in growth, more often than not, the ugly thing performs.

So let it be ugly.

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