How intentionally bad ads grab attention?

Founders usually discover the power of intentionally bad ads by accident. They pour money and time into glossy campaigns, brand books, and clever taglines that sound like they came straight out of a conference keynote. Then one day, someone on the team uploads a rough mockup for fun. The layout is clumsy, the fonts clash, the image is a badly cropped screenshot, and the copy reads like something typed in a rush on WhatsApp. That throwaway creative quietly enters a small test. A few days later, the data comes back and the ugly ad is the top performer. The expensive campaign loses to what looks like a last minute joke.

Behind the frustration there is a more useful story. Intentionally bad ads do not work because audiences suddenly hate design. They work because of how people move through digital spaces. Most people are not consciously evaluating branding when they scroll. They are skimming in a half distracted state, filtering out anything that looks like a typical ad from a professional team. Polished creative often blends into the background of a busy feed because it resembles every other polished brand. The ugly ad, by contrast, feels like something that slipped through the cracks. It looks like a real person posted it, not a committee. That alone is enough to trigger curiosity.

Think of a feed like a crowded street. Clean, consistent design is a beautiful storefront. Intentionally bad ads are more like someone waving a handwritten sign from the sidewalk. In a design textbook the sign looks terrible. In real life it sometimes gets more people to stop. Ugly creative functions as a pattern break. When the layout looks slightly wrong or the visual feels homemade, the brain pauses for a split second to process the anomaly. If the message is simple and relevant, that moment of surprise converts into a click.

This dynamic is especially visible in early stage startups. Many young companies follow the visual language of big tech brands. Gradients, soft shadows, smiling faces with phones in hand. Everything looks safe and modern. That safety comes at a cost. It tells the consumer that this is yet another company repeating the same promises. When a team dares to publish a brutally straightforward screenshot, circled in a garish color with blunt copy, it cuts through the sameness. It may not look clever, but it feels direct.

One founder in Southeast Asia once described this as the difference between a keynote slide and a forwarded message from a friend. Her team had spent months creating a beautiful campaign for a new feature in their app. The visuals were minimal, the typography refined, and the messaging perfectly aligned with their brand values. Results were acceptable but not exciting. Later, a designer made a rough slide to explain the feature internally. It had red arrows, yellow highlights and a caption written like a quick explanation to a colleague. In a moment of experimentation, they turned that slide into an ad and tested it. The rough creative did not only match the polished campaign. It beat it.

What changed was not the product. What changed was the perceived distance between the company and the audience. The polished ad sounded like a brand talking down from a stage. The rough ad sounded like a person saying, here is how this actually helps you, let me show you quickly. In markets where people are already skeptical of marketing promises, that informality feels more believable than a perfect sentence that has clearly passed through several layers of review.

There is also a psychological element at play. Over the years, consumers have grown wary of perfection. They have seen enough high production campaigns that hid inconvenient truths behind beautiful storytelling. When something is too smooth, some people instinctively suspect that important details are missing. Imperfect presentation, when handled with care, can signal that no one has bothered to hide the seams. A simple screenshot with visible flaws says, this is the real product, not a fantasy render. A caption that sounds unpolished suggests that a human sat down and tried to explain things, not a committee crafting slogans.

Of course, this tactic can become dangerous when misused. Intentionally bad ads can lure teams into playing with trust. The same rough style that makes you look honest can also be used to push irresponsible claims or bait people into click traps. A financial product that uses chaotic, meme style ads to promise unrealistic outcomes might see strong short term performance. Over time, however, that promise collides with reality. When customers feel tricked, they do not only leave. They tell others that your brand treats attention like a loophole to exploit instead of a relationship to earn.

This is where founders need to be brutally clear about what game they are playing. Intentionally bad ads are a tool for gaining attention, not a license to disrespect it. The question is not whether this creative style works. It does, in many contexts. The real question is whether it fits the kind of brand you are trying to build and the kind of trust your product requires. If you operate in categories such as health, finance, security or education, the tone of your ads becomes part of the safety signal around your product. If you lean too hard into chaotic, joke driven creative, you may later struggle to convince people that you can handle their data, money or long term wellbeing.

There is also an internal cost that founders sometimes overlook. When intentionally bad ads become the main performance engine, your team may start to believe that taste and craft do not matter. Designers who trained for years to create thoughtful systems watch their most careful work lose to assets that look like rushed slides. Over time this can turn into cynicism. Marketing starts to chase quick wins instead of thinking about positioning, narrative and long term equity. You still see green numbers on a dashboard, but your brand slowly drifts into a space where nobody is quite sure what it stands for.

A healthier approach is to treat intentionally bad ads as seasoning rather than the entire dish. There are channels and moments where rough creative makes sense. Fast moving social platforms, limited time offers, experiments around new angles or audiences these are good places to deploy pattern breaking visuals. Meanwhile, your website, onboarding flows, physical materials and key brand assets can remain aligned with the level of trust and quality you want to signal. The ad does the job of interruption, the rest of the experience does the job of reassurance.

Founders can also set boundaries that keep this tactic from slipping into chaos. Ugly does not need to mean confusing. A simple layout, a clear screenshot and one honest line of copy can be enough. When an ad turns into a noisy collage with multiple offers and a dozen text blocks fighting for attention, it stops being intentionally rough and becomes careless. The line you want to avoid is the one where people feel that you are shouting at them or trying to distract them instead of helping them decide.

Another advantage of experimenting with intentionally bad ads is speed. Early stage teams rarely have the luxury of long creative cycles. Rough ads let you test messages quickly without waiting for a full design sprint. You can validate which benefits resonate, which objections matter and which audience segments respond to which angle. Once you have that learning, you can invest in higher quality creative that still carries the same clarity. In that sense, rough ads are a research tool as much as a performance tool.

However, this only works if you are honest about your motives. If you are using ugly ads because you are genuinely curious about what your market reacts to, you are probably fine. If you are using them because you want to avoid the harder work of clarifying your positioning, pricing, and product promise, you are storing up trouble. No creative tactic can compensate for a weak value proposition. At best, it delays the moment when the market tells you the truth. The founders who navigate this well tend to hold two ideas at once. They respect design and brand building, and at the same time they are not too proud to run a scrappy experiment when the situation calls for it. They do not mistake performance tricks for strategy. Instead, they use the results from intentionally bad ads to sharpen their understanding of what people actually care about. Once they know which messages cut through, they translate those messages back into a coherent, long term brand expression.

If you and I were sitting in a small café after a long day of reviews, my advice would sound something like this. Let yourself be surprised by what works, but do not let a single winning ad dictate your values. Use intentionally bad ads to see your product through your audience’s eyes without polish. Treat the insights as raw material, not as a permanent identity. In the short run, ugly ads can help you rent attention at a lower cost. That is useful in a noisy market, especially when cash is tight and growth targets are aggressive. In the long run, what keeps customers and brings them back is not the ad that caught their eye, but the experience they had after they clicked. Attention opens the door. Trust decides whether they stay.