Forget formats

This is what's actually important...

Apr 01, 2026

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Nearly every creative benchmarking report dishes out ‘top performing formats’ as something brands and creative strategists should be paying attention to. But is this conversation even worth having?

In my opinion, yes it is, but only with the right context. For anyone that’s getting into the weeds with AI at the moment, you’ll know how important context is and when it comes to creative strategy performance context is everything.

I read through Motion’s 2026 Creative Benchmarks report this week — 578,000+ ads, 6,000 advertisers, $1.29 billion in spend — and the thing that I was delighted to see was the fact there is no winning format.

The top visual styles for Health & Wellness brands are Stitch, Reaction video, and Unboxing. For Fashion & Apparel? Post-it, Quiz, and Stylised product shot. Almost zero overlap. The formats that produce the most winners in one vertical barely register in another.

And that’s the whole point.

When the same person buys a fibre supplement because they’re in daily discomfort they make decisions very differently compared to when they’re looking for a new jacket.

The probiotic buyer needs to trust that the product works — they need social proof, transformation, someone credible saying “this actually worked and I’m like you”. The jacket buyer already knows what a jacket does. They need to see it styled. They need to want to be the person wearing it.

Same platform. Same scroll speed. Same person. Completely different decision architecture.

This is why copying what works for another brand rarely transfers. You’re not copying a format, you’re importing someone else’s purchase psychology and hoping it maps onto yours. It probably won’t.

The real skill in creative strategy isn’t knowing what format is trending. It’s understanding the specific emotional and rational sequence your customer goes through before they buy, and then building ads that match that sequence.

P.S. I recently launched a private slack community for creative strategists, if you’d like to join us reply to this email and I’ll send over an invite

Ad breakdown:

Mother Root: a non-alc ginger drink uses native testimonial ads to provide social proof that their product is enjoyed by others. Taste is hard to convey through a screen and so proof from other like us is what we need. This is a relatively new category. Most people scrolling past this ad are probably not actively looking for a non-alcoholic spirit. The comment format makes the use case hyper-specific (chronic migraines, recovery days) without the brand having to claim anything. The brand stays beautiful and aspirational in the background while a real person does the convincing in the foreground. It’s a good structure for a product where the buyer’s main objection isn’t price — it’s “why would I buy this instead of just not drinking?” The comment answers a question the brand would sound defensive answering itself.

Thriva: blood-tracking subscription using an editorial article cutout styled to look like a broadsheet. The format choice here is the targeting. Thriva’s customer is likely to be a 45–60 year old professional who reads the FT, gets a health MOT once a year, and trusts institutions over influencers. By borrowing the visual language of a newspaper feature — serif type, highlighted pull quote, the clinical-but-warm photography — Thriva is signalling “this is for serious people” before the copy even lands. For this audience, a UGC talking head might feel too ‘native’ and a polished brand film could feel like pharma advertising. The broadsheet format sits in the exact gap between those two: credible, grown-up, and editorially neutral. The highlighted line (”It’s about the quality of those years”) mimics the way you’d mark up a real article that struck a chord. It makes the viewer feel like they’re discovering a recommendation, not being sold to. The format matches the buyer, not the product category.

Jones Road: a founder-to-camera video of Bobbi Brown giving a skincare tip. Jones Road has something almost no other DTC beauty brand has: a founder whose face is the credibility. Bobbi Brown built one of the most recognised makeup brands in history. The casual, in-the-car delivery isn’t just a production choice, it’s a trust signal. She doesn’t need a studio, a script, or a before-and-after. The format matches the buying psychology perfectly: Jones Road’s customer is buying her taste, her judgement. The more unfiltered the format, the more it feels like insider access rather than advertising. A polished brand film would actually undermine the thing that makes this work.

How to use this idea for your product

The goal here is to stop picking formats from a menu and start diagnosing what your customer actually needs to see before they’ll buy. There’s a huge amount of work that goes into figuring this out for each of your personas and products but here’s a 5-step process to help you get started.

By the end, your format choices should feel obvious.

🪩 Question 1: What is the buyer risking?

Every purchase has a risk profile. A £10 supplement risks a tenner. A £3,000 mattress risks three thousand pounds and the prospect of sleeping badly for years. The higher the perceived risk, the more your ad needs to do the work of de-risking before the click.

High risk (expensive, hard to return, health-related, identity-adjacent): Your ads need proof. Testimonials, before-and-afters, clinical data, founder credibility, long-form demos. The Motion data backs this up — Health & Wellness winners skew heavily toward social proof formats like Unboxing, Celebrity, and Founder content. These aren’t trending formats. They’re trust mechanisms.

Low risk (cheap, repurchasable, impulse-friendly): Your ads need desire, not proof. Speed, aesthetic, trend-jacking, product-as-hero. You’re not overcoming objections — you’re creating a moment of want. Fashion & Apparel’s top performers (Stylised product shot, Post-it, Meme) all prioritise vibe over argument.

Map your product honestly. A lot of brands overestimate how much their customer already trusts them.

🪩 Question 2: What stage of the awareness funnel is your audience at?

Some people will already be aware of the problem you’re solving, others won’t. Your ads need to tell your story in a different way for each of these audiences.

Know the problem (acne, back pain, slow WiFi): You can be direct. Price anchor, Offer-first banner, Us vs Them — hooks that signal “we have the thing you’re looking for” — rank among the highest hit-rate tactics across the Motion dataset. These work because the buyer has already done the emotional labour of identifying their need. Your ad just has to intercept them efficiently.

Don’t know the problem (gut health before 2020, blue-light glasses, posture correctors): You have to create the awareness before you can sell the solution. This is where formats like Problem agitation, How-to, and Founder stories earn their keep. You need more time in the ad. You need narrative. You are not selling the product — you’re selling the problem first.

🪩 Question 3: Is this a solo decision or a social one?

Some purchases are private. Others are performed — worn, displayed, shared, posted about. This changes what the ad needs to show.

Solo decision (supplements, software, bedding): The buyer is optimising for themselves. They want evidence that it works. They don’t care what it looks like on someone else’s shelf. Testimonials, data-led claims, screen recordings, demo videos — all of these let the buyer evaluate the product against their own criteria without needing social validation.

Social decision (fashion, home décor, food, gifts): The buyer is partly imagining how other people will perceive the purchase. Lifestyle imagery, influencer endorsement, aesthetic product shots, and trend-adjacent formats perform here because they answer an unspoken question: “Will this make me look good?” The Motion data shows that Celebrity, Podcast, and Influencer endorsement formats carry disproportionate spend in socially-visible categories.

🪩 Question 4: How much does the buyer already know about the category?

A first-time buyer in a new category needs education. A repeat buyer in a saturated category needs differentiation.

Low category knowledge (emerging categories, technical products, novel ingredients): Lean into explainer formats. How-to, Expert explained, Behind the scene, and Founder content all allow you to teach while you sell. The ad has to do double duty: explain what the category is and why your product is the best version of it. Long-form tends to win here because you simply can’t compress education into three seconds.

High category knowledge (commodity products, saturated markets): The buyer has seen it all. They know what protein powder is. They know what a candle does. Your job is to break the pattern. This is where unconventional formats — Quiz, Meme, Post-it, Unconventional text placement — show up as winners in the Motion data for categories like Fashion & Apparel. The format is the differentiator because the product can’t be.

If your creative all looks like everyone else’s in your category, you’re not playing it safe — you’re invisible.

🪩 Question 5: What is the buyer’s emotional state when they encounter your ad?

This is the one a lot of brands skip, and it might be the most important.

Someone scrolling at 11pm in bed is in a different emotional state than someone scrolling during a lunch break. But beyond time of day, think about what need state your product addresses.

Aspirational (fitness, fashion, travel, career): The buyer is in a “future self” mindset. They want to see the version of themselves that exists after the purchase. Lifestyle imagery, transformation content, and cinematic production work because they sell the feeling of having already bought.

Functional (cleaning products, insurance, tools, SaaS): The buyer is solving a problem, not building an identity. They want clarity, speed, and proof that it works. Text-only, Product image with text, and GIF formats — some of the highest hit-rate asset types in the Motion benchmarks — win because they deliver information without dressing it up.

Emotional (gifts, memorial products, pet care, children’s products): The buyer is making a decision rooted in love, guilt, or care for someone else. Hard-sell tactics feel off here. Storytelling hooks, UGC, and confession/relatability angles perform because they match the emotional register of the purchase.

If the emotional tone of your ad doesn’t match the emotional state of the purchase, the viewer will feel it — even if they can’t articulate why.

Putting it together:

Run through all five questions for your product. Write down your answers. You’ll find that the format choices narrow themselves down to maybe 3–4 that actually make sense for your specific buying context — and they probably won’t be the same 3–4 that a brand in a different category would pick.

That’s the point. The Motion data shows that across half a million ads, the winning formats are radically different depending on context. The strategists who outperform aren’t the ones following format trends — they’re the ones who understand their customer’s decision well enough to know which format will do the work.

Give this a go and let me know how you get on 💪🏼

Wider Reading

On buying psychology and decision architecture

Decoded — Phil Barden. The best book on applying behavioural science to marketing decisions. Barden breaks down how implicit goals (security, excitement, autonomy) drive purchase behaviour in ways that conscious reasoning doesn’t. If you want a rigorous framework for why different products need different creative approaches, start here.

On how format follows function in advertising

How Brands Grow — Byron Sharp. Sharp’s work on mental availability and distinctive assets explains why some formats build salience and others don’t. His argument that brands grow primarily through reach (not loyalty) has direct implications for creative format selection — it’s not about deepening engagement, it’s about being noticed by the right people in the right moment.

On creative strategy specifically for paid social

Creative Strategy and the Business of Design — Douglas Davis. Less tactical than the others but excellent on the discipline of matching creative decisions to business problems. Useful for reframing format choice as a strategic input, not a production decision.

Data and benchmarks

Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 — The full report this piece references. The vertical breakdowns (pp. 15–20) are the most actionable section if you’re trying to see what actually wins in your category vs. the aggregate. Pay special attention to the difference between hit rate and spend use ratio — a format can produce winners without capturing proportional spend, and vice versa.

Case study: how buying psychology shapes format

The power of ugly ads: A breakdown of why lo-fi, “ugly” ad creative outperforms polished production in certain contexts.

If you found this email useful, pass it onto your team…

I’m Katherine, a freelance paid social creative strategist. I’ve worked with brands such as ZOE, Chāmpo, Stride, Rise & Fall, SURI and many more.

Having worked in startup marketing for 10 years, my category experience is broad (everything from bio-fuels to homeware) but the common thread that ties it all together is social-first creative, rooted in customer insight.

🪩 Work with me: katherineheath.com
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