1. The pictorial analogy
Put your product’s promise inside an image of something everyone already understands. A removals firm’s van photographed as a snail’s shell — home travelling safely with you. A password manager drawn as a bank vault. The audience does the work of connecting the two, and ideas people complete for themselves stick far better than ideas they’re handed.
2. The extreme situation
Exaggerate the world around the product until the benefit becomes impossible to miss — while keeping the benefit itself true. Glue holding a man to a ceiling. A 4x4 parked somewhere no car could reach. Nobody believes the literal image, and that’s the point: the exaggeration is a spotlight, not a claim.
This is the template most people mean when they say an ad "went too far" — and the ethical line is precise. Dramatise a true strength as wildly as you like; never dramatise a strength you don’t have. The first is showmanship. The second is the kind of lie customers forgive least.
3. The consequence
Follow the benefit — or the cost of ignoring it — to its logical extreme. The security system so effective the burglars retire. The slow website whose owner watches customers walk, in real time, to the shop next door. Consequences make an abstract promise concrete by showing where it leads, and the negative version is the most honest form of urgency there is: not a fake countdown, but a true cost of doing nothing.
4. The competition
Put the product in a contest it has no business being in — against a bigger rival, a force of nature, or an object from a different category entirely. The family hatchback outmanoeuvring a sports car in a city street. The £30 tool doing what the £3,000 machine couldn’t. Borrowed arenas make small budgets look mighty, which is exactly why this template loves an underdog.
5. The interactive experiment
Make the audience do something that proves the claim. Hold the page up to the light. Scratch here. Try to read this line from two metres away — that’s your customer squinting at your competitor’s menu. Participation turns a claim into an experience, and people trust what they experienced over anything they were told.
6. The altered dimension
Bend one dimension of reality — time, space or scale — and watch the benefit surface. Send the product back in time: what would the 1900s have done with it? Multiply it: one drop becomes an ocean. Shrink the world around it: the whole office inside a laptop bag. Altering a single dimension is how you make the familiar startling without losing the thread.
What this means for your advertising
Two things. First: you don’t need to wait for lightning. A tight brief plus these six patterns will out-produce a week of "think outside the box" — that isn’t opinion, it’s what the experiments showed.
Second: notice what all six templates have in common. Each one dramatises a true benefit. None of them manufactures a false one. The research is a machine for making the truth arresting — which is the only kind of creativity that still works the second time a customer buys.
In shortTake a true benefit of your product and run it through all six templates before you brief anyone. A tight brief plus a pattern beats a week of open-ended brainstorming.
These templates are how we build ad creative for clients. More about marketing campaigns and advertising →