Rippling sent someone to find a hot dog vendor in New York City. Shot a video on an iPhone. It is currently one of their best-performing ads. They also ran a Super Bowl spot. Both exist. One cost a lot more.
That is not a fluke. Devon Shaw, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, shared internal data from an analysis of thousands of pieces of creative: 60 to 70 percent of an ad's effectiveness comes down to the creative itself. Not the targeting. Not the bid strategy. The creative.
What that means practically: you can have the perfect audience, the right bid, the right placement, and if the creative is not working, you have thrown away 60 to 70 percent of what you paid for. And the thing that makes creative work is not production value. It is whether it connects.
Shaw was specific about what "connects" actually means. It means something emotive, something grounded in genuine expertise, something that feels like a real person talking to another real person rather than a brand talking at a target. The agency-produced, perfectly color-graded version can do that. But so can an iPhone video, and sometimes better.
The reason the iPhone video works is the same reason thought leadership ads are running at 2.2x the click-through rate of single image ads with the same objective. People can tell the difference between someone who actually knows something and a message that was engineered to perform. The authentic version wins, not always, but reliably enough that it should change how you think about creative investment.
A few things worth testing in your creative rotation: replace one of your produced image ads with a direct-to-camera video from a team member or founder, no script, one take, 60 seconds; take a LinkedIn post that performed well organically with your ICP and run it as a thought leadership ad without changing a word; use actual customer language from sales calls or testimonials as ad copy, verbatim, no polish.
The Smokeball case study is worth keeping in mind. Legal tech company, not exactly a glamorous category. They ran thought leadership ads paired with testimonials. 186 percent increase in ROAS. 8.7x increase in video completion rate. This was not because they had exceptional production. It was because they had authentic voices saying real things.
Most demand gen practitioners spend too much time on targeting and not enough time asking whether the thing they are targeting people with is actually worth stopping for. Fix the creative first.
