I attended the Epic Webinar Summit conference in Miami, and one of the speakers really caught my attention. His name is Hernan Vazquez – a guy who has spent more than $150 million on Facebook ads over the past 8 years and generated over $300 million in revenue.
And his main message? Stop trying to create perfect ads. Make more of them. And make them ugly.
It sounds absurd, but after his presentation, it made perfect sense. Here are the most important things I took away from his talk.
Why your ads stop working
Hernan began with something most people who have ever run ads on Facebook or Instagram are familiar with. You launch a campaign, and in the first week, a lead costs two dollars. You’re excited and start calculating your profits. In the second week, it’s five dollars – still okay. In the third week, twelve. In the fourth week, twenty-five. And suddenly, you’re looking for a job.
Hernan calls this the “Creative Fatigue Death Spiral” and says it kills a huge number of businesses. And the worst part is that most people look for the problem in the wrong place – they tweak the funnel, change the offer, rebuild the landing page. But the problem usually isn’t the offer or the funnel. The problem is that they keep running the same ads over and over again.
According to Hernan, every ad has a kind of invisible expiration date. Facebook automatically “stamps” it with an expiration date – you just don’t know exactly when it will expire. The only defense is to have more and more creatives ready to go.
The 80/19/1 rule
This number really struck me. Hernan says that out of every hundred ads you launch, approximately eighty do absolutely nothing – they just burn through your budget. Another nineteen or so perform reasonably well but last no more than a week or two. And then there is one single ad out of a hundred that becomes what he calls a “golden ad” – the one that drives your business over the long term.
His entire system is built around finding that one golden ad as quickly as possible. And the answer is simple: you have to launch a lot of them. A whole lot.
As an example, he mentioned one of his campaigns where they spent a million dollars in three weeks – and launched two thousand different ads to support it. Creative volume is key.
Targeting is dead – the ad itself does the targeting now
This was probably the most fundamental shift Hernan discussed. We all used to spend hours building sophisticated audiences on Facebook – lookalike audiences, interest groups, complex combinations. Hernan says that’s a thing of the past.
Meta launched a system called Andromeda, which essentially means that the algorithm is now smarter than any manual targeting. Detailed targeting is gradually disappearing, and Facebook itself is restricting it. The new approach is simple: use broad targeting and leave it to the algorithm. What determines who sees the ad is the content of the ad itself – the hook, the angle, the message. Creative is your new targeting.
What’s more, the more ad variations you have, the more different audience segments Andromeda will reach. Each ad variation can attract a different type of person at a different stage of the decision-making process.
Why “ugly” ads outperform professional videos
And now for the main point, which is why Hernan gave the entire talk its title. Based on data from dozens of accounts and hundreds of campaigns, he found that simple image ads outperform professional videos by two to three times, even for clients who are great on camera.
This applies to both low-ticket offers and webinars. Hernan calls it the “Ugly Ads Framework”. And they look exactly as the name suggests: as if someone made them in five minutes. Because that’s exactly how long they take to create.
6 elements of the perfect “ugly” ad
At the conference, Hernan showed the specific anatomy of an ad that works. It has six key elements:
Square format – because 80% of traffic comes from mobile devices, the ideal dimensions are 1200×1200 pixels.
Lots of text – the ad is essentially a mini landing page. It isn’t an image with a single word – it’s an image packed with information.
Benefit-driven headline – the formula “How to achieve X without Y” or “How to achieve X in Y minutes” works best. And importantly, this headline is the same as the one on the landing page the ad links to. Someone sees pizza, clicks on pizza, and gets pizza. No surprises.
Contrasting colors – green, yellow, black, red. No subtle brand palettes. Just something that jumps out of the feed.
Price directly on the image – for low-ticket offers, Hernan always includes the price. He doesn’t just want clicks – he wants people to know what to expect. For webinars, he uses “Free” or “Reserve Your Spot” instead of a price.
Product mockup – optional, but it helps. A visual representation of what the person will receive.
Volume beats perfection
Hernan’s entire philosophy can be summed up in one sentence: volume beats perfection. More creatives mean more data, and more data means finding winners faster.
Most advertisers launch three to five ads, wait, and hope. Hernan says that the top 1% of media buyers constantly launch new creatives at a regular cadence – they don’t wait for fatigue to set in; they stay ahead of it.
At the beginning of the talk, he asked the audience who had launched at least one new ad in the past 30 days. Most people raised their hands. Then he asked about 10 new ads per week. Then 50. Then 100. And only a few hands remained raised in the room.
His response was simple: we need to change this. And thanks to the AI tools available to us today, he says anyone can do it – without a design team, without video production, and without losing their mind.
What to take away from this
If you run ads on Facebook or Instagram and are struggling with rising costs, Hernan’s talk offers a refreshing perspective. You don’t need a perfect video. You don’t need a professional graphic designer. You need a system that allows you to launch large numbers of simple creatives, test them, and quickly identify the ones that work.
Key takeaways:
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Creative fatigue is the main reason your ads stop working – not a bad offer, not a bad funnel.
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Out of 100 ads, perhaps only one will work over the long term. That’s why you need to launch a lot of them.
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Targeting in the traditional sense is dead. Your ad is your targeting.
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Simple image ads outperform professional videos in most cases.
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Volume beats perfection. Launch new creatives regularly; don’t wait for fatigue to set in.
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Use AI to create variations quickly – you’ll save both time and money.
If Hernan’s approach caught your interest, he shares his AI prompts, templates, and complete presentation for free on his website, RapidScaleFramework.com/GO.
