How to make a great static ad: Over the last five years my team has made more than 50,000 ads for brands spending anywhere from a few thousand a month to a million on Meta, and a big share of that spend has gone to statics. You need to use statics to your advantage instead of talking about what it can't do compared to video. You get one frame. It is the cheapest way I know to test messaging with ads. Every static we have made that performed started with a sentence about a customer. If you open a design tool before you can say what the ad is trying to communicate, you are going to push words around an image until something looks nice. David Ogilvy said that you spend 80 cents of your dollar on the headline. He was talking about newspapers, and it is just as true for a static or the first three seconds of a video in today's world. If the headline does not earn a second look, nothing else on the image gets read. So I put most of the effort there. If the ad does not work as a headline alone, no amount of design will rescue it. Once the headline has someone, everything below it has a different job. It is there for the person who already wants to learn more. That changes how I write the callouts and subheads. You don't have to do callouts, but if you do, keep them to about three. Pick the three that build off the headline and cut the rest. Design has one job, which is to make the headline easier to read. Bad design pulls the eye somewhere else. Good design sends it straight where you want it. What To Do With This Pull up the last static you ran. Cover everything except the headline. Now write one sentence about the customer that headline came from. What did you know about them that made you write it? If you cannot write that sentence, the ad started with design. That is probably why it is not working, and it is the first thing I would fix. If you can, count the callouts and cut them down to three. I made a full video on this, where I take you through how we make static ads from research to copy to design, with the finished ads on screen.