Find new buyers: crisis-moment ads

Your winners keep the account alive. They don't bring in someone who's never heard of you and wasn't looking. That person needs a reason to suddenly care.

What people say vs. why they buy. Ask people why they bought and they give you the sensible reason. What they actually bought was a way out of a feeling they couldn't stand any more: the guilt, the shame, the envy. That moment is the ad.

Where I find it. Inside your business, not on Reddit.

Ask every new customer why they bought. Then shut up and read. A "why did you buy?" survey I ran for a menopause brand got 659 answers. One of them: "Because your advert made me cry."
Call the carts that almost bought. To understand, not to sell.

Where your next winning ad comes from, ranked

S
Ask your buyers why they boughtGary Halbert gave his 20-year-old protégé a list of 100 buyers to call, and the answers uncovered a buying motive the existing ads had missed.
A
Call your abandoned cartsLana Sova works with a nine-figure ecom brand that calls within a minute and, she says, recovers $200K to $450K a week.
B
Copy your competitors' winnersI get why teams do it, and there's a place for it. But everyone's fishing in the same pond.
C
Throw 100 concepts at the wallI've seen plenty of accounts with a mountain of creative and hardly anything getting meaningful spend.
D
Scrape Reddit with AIThe person complaining on Reddit and the one who actually bought your product aren't necessarily the same person.

How it becomes an ad.

Open on the crisis. The worst moment, no backstory.
Go back and show how they got there.
The five-second turn. The moment the problem looks different: "I'm not broken. I'm run down."
Only then does the product show up.

Two insights, two ads. "She thinks it's her, and I let her" became a funny song he sings to her. "It's gonna stop us from having babies" became an overheard podcast call. → Example: Call-In · Example: Sorry Babe