Your Empathy Ads Aren’t Working

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

🎯  “We Understand You” Ads Fail

Every brand believes empathy is a shortcut to trust.

It isn’t.

Empathy only works when it surprises the viewer, when it reflects something they didn’t expect a brand to notice. The moment empathy becomes predictable (“We know life is hard”), the brain flags it as advertising and disengages.

Most operators assume empathy is about relating.

It isn’t.

It’s about recognition, the feeling of being seen in a way that feels oddly personal, specific, and true. 

Predictable empathy says, “This brand understands the category.” 

Unpredictable empathy says, “This brand understands me.”

That shift is the multiplier.

Predictable Empathy Signals Marketing, Not Understanding

Most marketers rely on empathy templates:

“We know your struggle.”“We understand your frustration.”“We get how you feel.”

These are vague containers with no emotional weight. The viewer doesn’t feel understood. They feel targeted.

But when you reveal a micro moment the viewer experiences privately, something unspoken, inconvenient, or embarrassingly familiar, their resistance drops instantly. The brain leans in because specific empathy reads as truth, not marketing.

Examples that consistently outperform broad empathy:

“Ever open your gym bag and instantly regret last night’s choices?”“Ever catch your own Zoom square and think… I look exhausted?”“Ever promise yourself you’ll fix this Monday… and suddenly it’s already Thursday?”

Oddly specific. Emotionally disarming. Undeniably human.

This type of recognition builds three to four times more trust in cold traffic because it bypasses the defensive filter entirely.

Automating the Hunt for Oddly Specific Empathy

Unpredictable empathy requires volume. You must surface dozens of micro emotions, pattern match them, refine them, and script them. Humans burn out doing this manually.

This is where Lindy becomes leverage, not magic.

Tell Lindy:

“Generate twenty micro moments my buyer feels but never verbalizes, fatigue moments, guilt moments, tiny self-judgment moments, and turn each into an ad script.”

Lindy handles emotional pattern discovery. You choose the hits. You can get started for free and claim your $20 in bonus credits.

Why Unpredictable Empathy Converts Three to Four Times Better

It activates all three layers of psychological recognition:

1️⃣ Personal Recognition: “This is exactly what I do.”
2️⃣ Private Recognition: “This is something I never admit out loud.”
3️⃣ Predictive Recognition: “If they understand this part of me, their solution might actually work.”

Predictable empathy treats the customer like a demographic. Unpredictable empathy treats them like a person.

Final Insight

Customers don’t buy from brands that relate. They buy from brands that can name the things they only think in private. Unpredictable empathy is not a tactic. It’s a psychological shortcut to trust, and the creative frontier almost no one is building on yet.

Together with Cloudways

This Holiday Season, Fix the Slowest Part of Your Funnel

You’ve seen it: campaigns look strong on paper, but conversions dip because the site gets a little slower under real traffic. Most teams don’t catch it until the numbers are already cooked.

Cloudways is the easiest upgrade because it gives you real cloud performance without touching DevOps.

• Built on a fast NGINX stack that keeps pages snappy under pressure
• Deploy on DigitalOcean, AWS, or Google Cloud with pay-as-you-go control
• Unlimited WordPress, PHP, Magento, or Laravel sites without server headaches
• Copilot + 24/7 experts handle maintenance so you stay focused on scaling

100,000+ businesses use Cloudways because the lift shows up instantly: faster TTFB, cleaner checkouts, and campaign performance that finally reflects what you paid for.

Imagine a holiday season with zero infrastructure anxiety, pages load instantly, traffic spikes don’t faze you, and your ROAS lives up to the deck.

If you’re tightening your stack, the 50% off for 3 months + 50 free migrations with code BFCM5050 is the easiest win you’ll grab this Q4.

Claim Your Cloudways BFCM Offer Today

⚡The Tiny Email Detail That Can Break Trust

This call-out is about a small but noticeable mistake: dynamic pricing that outputs £11.2 instead of a clean £11.20. It seems minor, but it instantly makes an otherwise polished email feel rushed or unprofessional, especially when the rest of the design looks premium.

Why this works: Details signal trust. When pricing looks clean and intentional, the entire email feels more credible. Customers may not consciously think “this decimal is wrong,” but they do feel that something is off. Where emails often trigger impulse buys, these micro-signals matter more than people realize. 

Where it needs balance: Not every ESP handles dynamic formatting the same way, and over-engineered personalization can introduce bugs if not tested. The key is to keep the formatting consistent, preview dynamic content across segments, and avoid adding complexity that breaks easily. Functionality first, fancy automation second.

🎥 Reel of the Day

What Works:

1. They use narrative vulnerability to create instant emotional grip - The cowboy walking in sad, heartbroken, and defeated is a universal emotional cue. Even if viewers don’t know him, they recognize the feeling, heartbreak, sleepless nights, emotional collapse.

2. The friend dynamic builds trust faster than brand-led messaging - Instead of the brand talking about the product, a friend recommends it. This taps into peer-to-peer influence, which feels authentic, intimate, and social-proof coded. People trust recommendations from “someone like me,” not brands

3. The polaroid-style photo moment is engineered for virality. - They take a photo of him holding SuperMush, then cut to that photo on screen. This creates a “collectible moment” a mini iconic freeze-frame inside the reel.

This reel wins because it doesn’t sell a sleep gummy, it sells an emotionally comforting moment between two friends. The cowboy heartbreak story lowers defenses, the friend’s recommendation builds trust, and the stylized world-building makes the product feel like part of a quirky universe rather than a supplement.

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. 🥰