Ending on a high note

Welcome to a space where every edition delivers insights, strategies, and inspiration to fuel your advertising brilliance. 🤯

⚡️Ending on a high note

If you watch ads long enough, you start noticing a pattern.

Plenty of them get the scroll stop. Some even hold attention all the way through. Then… nothing happens.

No click. No action. Just a clean exit back into the feed.

That drop-off almost never comes from the opening. By the time someone reaches the final second of your creative, relevance is already established. What’s still unresolved is what they’re supposed to do with that attention.

That’s where end cards quietly control CTR.

Here’s the mechanism that actually matters:

Hooks create curiosity. End cards collapse uncertainty. When the final frame gives the brain a clear instruction and a visual full stop, clicking becomes the path of least resistance instead of a decision.

We see this constantly in live accounts. Same footage, same offer, same hook. Swap only the ending, and CTR moves 2–3×. 

Nothing else changes because nothing else needs to. The intent already existed. The ad just wasn’t capturing it.

Where performance breaks are also consistent.

• Logos without direction forces interpretation.
• Clever taglines delay action.
• Multiple messages at the end reopen thinking instead of closing it.

Thinking is friction. Friction kills feed behavior.High-performing end cards behave differently. They do three things at once, and only once: signal finality, clarify the action, and remove ambiguity. 

One outcome. One behavior. One visual anchor that says, “this is the moment.”

There’s a practical reason this lever is so powerful. End cards are modular. You don’t need new creators, reshoots, or concepts to improve results. You can rotate endings across proven creatives, test structures quickly, and compound gains inside a week.

The tradeoff is restraint. A strong ending forces a choice. You can’t ask for awareness, trust, and clicks in the same frame. You have to decide what success looks like in the final second and design only for that.

If your ads are being watched but not clicked, don’t rewrite the hook again.

The failure usually isn’t at the start. It’s that the ending never told the viewer what to do next.

Together with Motion

Most Teams Are Missing This Paid Social Skill

Paid social is not broken. Teams are missing the skill that actually converts spend into results. Without a real creative system, more testing just creates noise and slows learning.

Motion’s Creative Strategy Bootcamp is a free, 8-week live program built for you to learn how to run a full creative sprint, from idea to insight, without guesswork.

This is hands-on training led by active Creative Strategists working on brands like Calm, Harry’s, and Happy Mammoth.

• You learn how to turn product features and customer insight into hooks that consistently convert.
• You work on real ads every week through live classes, office hours, and direct coaching.
• You graduate with a portfolio of ad wins and a Motion certificate you can display on LinkedIn.

The program runs live every Tuesday at 1 PM EST, with recordings shared within 24 hours.

Seats are intentionally limited to keep feedback high quality. It starts on starts March 17th.

Reserve your free spot now!

⚡ Why big ad budgets still don’t deliver real cases

 This comes up a lot with service businesses. On paper, everything looks right. Solid spend, a CRM in place, an intake team answering calls. But when you look closer, marketing and sales are completely disconnected. Ads are optimized for leads, not outcomes.

Why this breaks: If signed case data never flows back into campaigns, the ad platforms are flying blind. You end up paying for volume without knowing which channels, keywords, or ads actually turn into revenue. Rankings and lead counts look fine, but cost per signed case keeps creeping up because nothing is being trained on what “good” really means.

The real takeaway: Traffic without feedback is just rented attention. If the goal is more signed cases, CRM data has to inform bidding, targeting, and optimization. Stop optimizing for leads. Start optimizing for what closes.

Together with The Shift

The AI Newsletter Built For People Who Actually Use AI

Many AI newsletters are interesting. Very few are useful.

The Shift is built for execution, not curiosity.

Every edition shows you exactly how you can use AI right now to save hours, reduce costs, or replace entire workflows. No theory, no tool dumps, no trend watching.

You get practical breakdowns, daily copy-paste prompts, simple systems, and access to over 3,000+ vetted AI tools and a tried and tested Prompts Library (500+ Prompts)

So you can apply everything immediately. If AI is part of your work, but still feels underutilized, this newsletter fixes that.

🎥 Reel of the Day

What Works:

1. The hook exploits curiosity, not spectacle - Nothing loud happens. A normal store aisle, two employees, a floating can. Your brain immediately asks “how?” That unanswered curiosity drives retention harder than explosions or exaggerated reactions ever could.

2. The discount prop turns the joke into retail context - The thread is literally a 10% discount sign. Genius. The offer becomes part of the story, not a CTA. That’s embedded commerce, where sales happen without breaking entertainment flow.

3. Familiar staff makes it feel local, not branded - These aren’t influencers or actors. They look like coworkers you’d actually meet. That authenticity lowers ad resistance and makes the brand feel friendly, approachable, and worth supporting.

This reel wins because it doesn’t try to impress. It uses curiosity, misdirection, and a human reveal to earn attention, then quietly anchors the brand to humor and value. That’s how simple content lasts years.

Thanks for reading this edition! Keep pushing boundaries, testing ideas, and staying inspired. See you in the next edition with more ways to ignite your marketing success. 🥰