Maskbuddy · 2021
The Typo Ad That Outperformed Everything
Founder / Creative Director
Scope of Work
As founder, I ran creative and paid media as one function with no handoffs: scripting, shooting, editing, and Meta campaign management. A small crew assisted on lighting. The creative decisions and the ad spend were mine simultaneously — I owned the outcome in the most literal sense, every concept tested directly against my own P&L.
The Challenge
Maskbuddy needed to acquire customers through paid social in a crowded, commoditized category. We had a solid product but no proven creative playbook. No winning voice, no tested format, no established baseline. I was producing the creative and running the ad spend at the same time, so every creative call carried an immediate, measurable cost. The objective was to build a repeatable acquisition engine from scratch and scale spend behind it as the creative proved out.
My Approach
I ran a control-and-challenger methodology: keep the current top performer live while testing new hooks, captions, and formats against it week over week. One cycle, a version of an ad published with a typo I hadn't caught in time. I flagged it, had the corrected version ready, then watched the typo version outperform the corrected one on ROI. That stopped me. The imperfection was doing something intentional polish couldn't: it made the ad read as human, not produced, and that lowered viewer guard in the feed. I didn't file it away as a curiosity. I made it a creative direction principle. Roughness, specificity, and a voice that sounded like a real person talking carried forward into every subsequent asset: copy, captions, on-camera delivery. The pattern held at scale. In the DTC performance context, scrappy, UGC-style content consistently outperformed polished, highly produced spots. The winning ad isn't pretty, but it was the money-maker, driving a 6x return on ad spend and the results below.
Results
Next Campaign
Two Artists, Two Continents, One Canvas