What makes an ad hook stop the scroll when the offer is boring

Nobody wakes up excited about roof repair. Or insurance, or bookkeeping, or whatever it is you sell that makes people’s eyes glaze over at a barbecue.

So people try to fix the boring with cleverness, like puns, shock lines or a stock photo of someone screaming. Sometimes that makes scroll-stopping ads. Usually it gets the wrong attention, from people who are entertained and have no intention of buying.

If you take one thing from this piece, take this. The offer might be boring. The problem almost never is. A leaking roof isn’t boring to the person standing under it. The hook’s job is to find that person at that moment.

Here’s how I go about it.

Start with the person, not the product

You can’t write a strong hook until you have a clear concept. A concept is one specific person with one specific problem, at one point in time, with one way of seeing it. The hook is just the first few lines that open the door to that person. Each hook is a different door into the same room.

If you skip the concept and go straight to hooks for a boring offer, you end up writing about the offer, because it’s the only thing on the page. That’s where “Affordable, reliable roofing you can trust” comes from. There’s no person in that sentence.

So write the person down first. Who are they, what just happened to them, what do they believe about the problem? I went through the difference in an ad concept versus an ad hook, and for boring offers it’s most of the battle.

Then aim the hook at the problem, not the solution. Most people in a market haven’t decided on a solution yet. They’re in the problem state, and in my experience that’s where the magic is, especially if it’s a deep emotional problem. Nobody wants a drill. They want the hole. Hook the hole.

Find the moment they’re living in

This is where boring offers turn into scroll-stopping ads, because the moment is always more vivid than the product.

Here in Lancaster the winters can get rough. One year there was a monster icicle on my house that took up about half the roof. I actually tried to cut it down myself, got scared I was going to hurt myself, and gave up. That’s the kind of moment a roofer’s hook should find: a homeowner looking up at the roof, a little worried, not sure who to call. On a live workshop I used it to riff a concept for a roofer, built around what might be happening under the shingles that you can’t see from the driveway.

Notice the concept is built on that feeling of looking up and not knowing, much more than on roofing.

A friend of mine who ran a video game store did something similar with tiny local ads, targeting a couple of miles around the store with a simple “hey, I’m new to the area” message. What he was really going after was people who wanted fun things to do locally. That’s a much bigger and warmer group than “people who want to buy a used controller.”

The best place to find these moments is your buyers’ own words. Reviews, comments, the stuff they say at 2 a.m. that they never say on a sales call.

Give them the real reason

One of the strongest hooks for a boring offer is a reason. Specifically, the real reason the problem exists, or why the thing they already tried didn’t work. It’s the “oh, that’s why nothing worked” moment.

On the same workshop, a student had a roofing client in Texas, and the hook I riffed for him was: “Most homeowners have no idea that your roof is actually lying to you.” I want to be clear that was a live brainstorm, not a tested ad. But look at what it does. It takes the most boring object in the world and gives it a secret. Now the reader wants to know what the roof is hiding.

Any claim that follows a hook like that has to be true, of course. A hook that promises a reveal and then delivers nothing is worse than a boring hook.

Make it concrete, then write a lot of them

Abstract hooks die. When I looked at my own Instagram, a tactical post about three ad formats beat an abstract post about ideas and tension by about 11x. Psychology only travels when it’s attached to a number, a named thing, or a vivid moment. Scroll-stopping ads for boring offers need that even more.

So instead of “protect your home,” it’s the icicle. Instead of “save money on insurance,” it’s the specific bill they didn’t know they’d agreed to. Put those in the first two lines, because the first two lines are the rudder that steers the whole ad. I wrote more on writing the first two lines of a cold traffic ad if you want the mechanics.

Then write more hooks than feels necessary. Once I have a concept figured out, I can write something like 50 hooks for it and pull the best handful. Two openers I lean on a lot for unexciting offers: a plain qualifier (“If you’re a homeowner who…”), and the comparison opener (“It’s really not fair that…”), which works because unfairness is rarely boring.

When no hook will save it

Honest limit. If the problem is one that most people in your market genuinely don’t care about, even scroll-stopping ads won’t fix that. Are you selling a painkiller or a vitamin? A big market with a who-cares problem still won’t buy.

If you’ve written twenty hooks around real moments and none of them get traction, stop writing hooks. Go back to the offer and the market. The problem may be real but not urgent, or you may be catching people at the wrong time.

What to do this week

Write one sentence describing a specific buyer and the exact moment they realize they have the problem your offer solves. Then write ten hooks about that moment, and don’t mention your product in any of them. Put the best four or five into one ad set as simple image ads with the same body copy, and let the market tell you which door it walks through.

How do you write ad hooks for a boring product?

What is the difference between a hook and a concept?

Should an ad hook mention the product?