Psst...Here Are 3 Great Hooks You Should Steal

Here's the thing: a verbal hook narrated by creators or shown in caption overlays—the one-time darling of video creatives—is no longer enough. We need MORE🔥. Enter the …

✨Visual Hook✨

Whether piquing our curiosity, banking on familiarity, or making us go 🤔“Huh” for long enough to watch the whole video, these 3 ads show you how easy it can be to hook your viewers from the first scroll.

ClearScore Canada

ClearScore Canada’’s “Would you rather….” campaign has a great verbal hook: Would you rather have dinner with Drake or….? But here’s why this campaign isn’t just great, it’s genius: It ALSO features three (3!) killer visual hooks in the very first second:

✅Drake

✅Niagara Falls

✅Someone about to answer a question

First, the visual of Toronto-born Drake is a no-brainer. Whether you love him, love to hate him, or vaguely remember crying along to his music in high school, his face is uber-recognizable.

It doesn’t hurt that this ad dropped at the height of the Kendrick-Drake beef. But the ad does more: On the off-chance that you’ve never seen Drake before, there’s also Niagara Falls in the background, subtly signaling to Canadians 🇨🇦 that this video is for them🫵.

Finally, the street interview setup piques your curiosity; for some reason, we just love to know what other people think. 

Our inBeat team used Drake’s star power + Niagara Falls + Street Interview to make the target audience stop their scroll.

We can do it for your ads, too. Just book a call, and let’s chat!

DRMTLGY

Sometimes you don’t need to evoke more than a “Hmmmm...What am I looking at right now” feeling to have a good visual hook. What makes this ad by skincare brand DRMTLGY so captivating is the combination of a scroll-stopping visual with a negative ad approach in the verbal hook. 

Right off the bat, “4 reasons I regret buying this tinted moisturizer” hooks the viewer. Our natural desire to avoid regretful (purchase) decisions compels us to watch the full video.

The bizarre visual is a game-changer: it catches you off balance and slows your scroll as your brain tries to figure out what exactly you are looking at here! Gradually, you find yourself enthralled in the glowing skin shown off by the creator!

A shining ✨ example of great hooks!

Surreal

This ad by Surreal, an indie cereal brand in the UK (that’s a phrase you’d have a hard time explaining to your ancestors) is almost embarrassingly simple. Love this thing? Try this thing. Here’s why it works: 

Instead of placing their (new-to-market) product as the visual hook, Surreal uses a very well-established product with stratospheric levels of “recognizability" as the hook. The product is so iconic that they can cover the logo with black tape and we still know what we’re looking at.

Our brains 🧠 are hard-wired to gravitate toward things we’re familiar with, and this ad does an incredible job of piggy-backing on that. Plus, if you can be stopped by Oreos paired with the verbal hook: “Love these cookies?”, you are very likely to be interested in Cookies & Cream Flavored Cereal.

The visual and verbal hooks work hand-in-hand here, to capture and segment the intended audience seamlessly.

Want to create some smashing performance creative ads? Don’t hesitate to book a call with us!