14th April 2026 - 10 mins read
Someone at a Bible app looked at cheating paranoia content and said, "Yes, this is for us." They were right. 18 million views right! 🤯
Welcome to another new edition of Ad Break!
So… what is this exactly?
Ad Break is a creative newsletter powered by Ramdam. Twice a month, we share what’s happening in the world of ads: the creative shifts, the trends in your feeds, and the ideas you should probably be paying attention to.
Who am I?
I’m Mitalee. I watch a lot of ads, so you don’t have to sit through the bad ones.
The goal is embarrassingly simple:
Every issue should leave you with at least one idea you can actually use in your next creative brief.
⚠️ Fair warning: after reading this, you're going to start noticing every ad differently. 👀
Today, we're discussing:
Let's get right to it!
What do these hooks have in common?
They're all selling the same emotion.
Different product, different category, and different audience, but all revolving around one core feeling. The specific discomfort of jealousy, suspicion, or the fear of being left behind. It's one of the most scroll-stopping emotional states on the internet right now.
For years, dating apps owned that feeling. Cheating paranoia, lock screen receipts, fake notifications...they built entire creative strategies around it, and it worked.
But the thing about emotions is that they are transferable, and any product can borrow them 😳
A Bible app. A fitness app. A language learning app. None of them sell anything remotely romantic but all of them borrowed the same emotional structure and are now gathering views by millions.
→ Step 1: Find your emotional moment
The feeling someone has right before they need you (and no, not the functional problem your product solves)
→ Step 2: Find the drama that lives in that moment
Every emotional moment has a drama format that fits it naturally. Don't go around inventing it; just find the one that already exists around the feeling your product resolves.
→ Step 3: Let the drama lead and the product resolve
The product should never feel like it barged in. It needs to feel like the natural continuation or ending of the story that the drama started.
Let's see what this looks like in practice:
It doesn't matter what category you're in. If your product can live inside a moment someone is already feeling, it can use this format (think jealousy, suspicion, the devastation of realising something is off).