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Original source: Fullfunnel io
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If your product is hard to photograph, this four-step method gives you a compelling ad concept before your next coffee goes cold.
Analogy Ads: How to Visualise Abstract B2B Services in Minutes
When software services resist obvious imagery, the analogy ad technique offers a fast escape route. The process runs in four steps: identify the core promise (personalised engineering), find a physical parallel (ill-fitting clothes), pull a reference image from Google, and drop it into a Figma mockup. The copy gets its edge from a "flipped phrase" — taking the familiar idiom "one size fits all" and inverting it to "one size doesn't fit all" as the headline, with a call to action beneath.
The technique compresses what could be days of creative concepting into a rough sketch that already contains an image, a headline, and a message — leaving only layout polish for a designer or AI tool to finish.
"You can see how quickly when you use analogies, how quickly you can get a new visual idea for something that is seemingly very hard to show — like software services."
Live Ad Build: Claude Generates Headlines from a Figma Mockup in Real Time
Starting with a "food expectations vs. reality" image pulled from Google, a rough ad takes shape in Figma in minutes: two side-by-side photos labelled by city branch, a logo, and a placeholder headline about keeping menus consistent across locations. The mockup is then fed directly into Claude with a prompt requesting ten headline variations using different rhetorical devices, producing lines like "one branch gets a standing ovation, the other gets a health inspector — it's time to try Epicbase."
The workflow demonstrates how AI-assisted copywriting compresses the creative loop: rough visual to headline options happens in a single session, with the human role shifting to curation rather than generation.
"If one branch gets a standing ovation, but the other one gets a health inspector, it's time to try Epicbase."
'That Moment When': The Sentence Starter That Forces Relatable Ad Insights
The discipline of beginning every customer insight with the phrase "that moment when" acts as a reliability test for ad concepts: if the sentence reads like a comedian setting up a joke, the insight is probably relatable enough to build on. Applied to a restaurant software client, it produces: "that moment when you visit a restaurant you love, but in a different city — and it's terrible." That single sentence then gets compressed into a static visual, borrowing the familiar meme format of food advertising versus reality.
The technique bridges the gap between qualitative customer research and executable ad creative, giving marketers a repeatable filter before committing to a visual concept.
"That moment when you go to a restaurant that you already know, but in a different city — and it sucks."
Gemini Prompt Turns Ugly Stock Photo into Striking Ad Visual
Rather than settling for an unappetising raw photograph of spoiled food, a Gemini prompt — "turn this into an artistic still-life photography image, make the contrast striking and the colors strong and vivid" — reprocesses the image into something unusual enough to stop a scroll. Simultaneously, collaborative headline brainstorming in Figma produces the line "your margins get spoiled like your food," arrived at when a second voice in the session suggested the parallel.
The sequence illustrates two principles simultaneously: AI image tools can rehabilitate low-quality source material, and the best ad lines often emerge from real-time collaboration rather than solo ideation.
"Your margins get spoiled like your food."
Before-and-After Fridge: Turning Inventory Spoilage into a B2B Visual Hook
Applying the same creative framework to an inventory management problem, the approach starts with a Google image search for "spoiled food" and builds toward a side-by-side Figma layout: a fridge packed with rotting produce on the left, a clean and stocked one on the right, captioned "before Epicbase / after Epicbase." The visual works because over-ordering and spoilage is a physical, photographable consequence — something B2B software rarely produces.
The exercise shows how grounding an abstract operational problem in a concrete, universally recognisable image dramatically lowers the cognitive effort required to understand an ad.
"I think this is already a strong visual hook — spoiled food."
Google Ads Without Visuals: Alliteration, Personification, and Flipped Phrases as Copy Tools
Creative techniques built for visual ads translate directly into Google's text-only format. Flipped phrases — "one size doesn't fit all" — work as standalone headlines. Alliteration collapses a brand's entire value proposition into three words: "Swiss, swift, safe" for an email provider. Personification turns a product or its rival into a character, as Columbia's outdoor brand did with "this jacket is a climate denier" and Corona did with "some cans have all the fun." Classic lines like "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" demonstrate that pure observation can anchor a headline without any visual at all.
The speaker is currently building a dedicated copywriting tool and swipe-file library cataloguing these techniques, which will be shared via newsletter once complete.
"There are so many things we can try with copywriting — analogies, rhymes, alliteration, personification — and Google ads is one of the best places for it."
'World Without': The Exaggeration Technique That Generates B2B Ad Conflict
The "world without" technique asks a single question before any creative work begins: what is the worst conceivable outcome if a customer never uses the product? The answer is deliberately exaggerated beyond the obvious ("they'd use spreadsheets") into something narratively charged. Applied to restaurant management software, it surfaces a scenario where two restaurants — one vegan, one barbecue — accidentally swap recipe spreadsheets, with consequences vivid enough to anchor a story.
The method works because advertising requires conflict the same way fiction does. A mixup that ruins a meal is more compelling than a margin percentage, and exaggeration gives a creative team something concrete to visualise before a single image is searched.
"We want to exaggerate it — think about what can actually go wrong. Maybe they'd mix up the spreadsheets between two restaurants: one vegan, one pure barbecue."
Search '[Industry] Memes' Before Writing a Single Ad Headline
The most reliable way to calibrate the humor of a target audience is to search for how that audience already jokes about itself. Searching "HR memes" or "software engineering memes" on Google or TikTok surfaces the vocabulary, references, and tone a professional community uses when no one is selling to them — raw material that can be adapted directly into ad creative. Beyond research tactics, the broader finding is that the ads outperforming everything else right now share one quality: visible craft. In an environment flooded with AI-generated content, ads that show genuine thought — in the headline, the image choice, or the visual composition — stand out regardless of format.
A well-constructed message, the argument goes, will perform across video, static, GIF, and Google text ads without needing to be rebuilt for each.
"Stuff that's working best is stuff where you can see there is actual effort behind it — a headline that was actually thought of, a visual that is actually interesting."
ABM Ads Should Use the Same Formats as B2B — but Personalised to One Company, City, or Person
Account-based marketing unlocks a level of creative specificity that mass-market brands cannot justify. When a single contract is worth $200,000 or more, spending time to personalise an ad's visuals, references, and headlines to a specific company, team, or city becomes economically rational in a way it never is for a $100 product. The ad formats themselves — testimonials, feature highlights, creative concept ads — remain identical to standard B2B; what changes is the depth of tailoring applied to each.
The principle extends the standard insight-generation process: instead of identifying pain points for a job title or industry, the creative team identifies pain points for one named account, producing ads that feel less like advertising and more like a colleague who understands the exact problem.
"Think how specific your insights could be if you're thinking of one person, or just one company, or one team at one company."
Why Software Companies Struggle with Ad Visuals — and How Analogies Solve It
Physical industries have a natural creative advantage: a restaurant client gives an ad team food, kitchens, and menus to photograph. Software companies offer none of that. Showing "personalised engineering services" in a single image is a problem most B2B marketers quietly accept as unsolvable, defaulting to generic stock imagery or interface screenshots. Analogy ads reframe the challenge: instead of visualising the product, visualise an equivalent situation from an entirely different domain.
The shift is conceptually simple but practically significant — it opens the entire physical world as a source of imagery for products that exist only as code.
"We can't actually show the software that easily — and that's a problem we're all facing in B2B."
Inconsistent Food Quality Across Branches: The Relatable Pain Point That Anchors a B2B Campaign
Live brainstorming with a client surfaces the insight that drives the strongest creative: the experience of loving a restaurant chain in one city and being disappointed by the same brand in another. That single, universally shared moment — arriving at a familiar place and finding the food unrecognisable — becomes the emotional core of an ad campaign for inventory management software, because it makes the abstract cost of inconsistency feel personal and immediate.
The session demonstrates a core principle of the approach: the best ad insights are not invented by the creative team but excavated from real customer experiences, then validated for relatability before any visual work begins.
"This point is very relatable — we've all eaten at different food chains and seen that the food is actually very different in each branch."
B2B Ads Were as Boring as Car Ads Before Bill Bernbach — the Same Shift Is Overdue in Software
Before the 1950s, car advertising was as earnest and feature-driven as most enterprise software ads are today. The logic was identical: serious purchase, serious buyer, serious ad. Bill Bernbach broke that convention with the Volkswagen campaigns — "Lemon," "Think Small" — and the industry never went back. The argument is that B2B software is at the same inflection point, and the path forward is the same: not comedy for its own sake, but ads so accurately tuned to an audience's real frustrations that they feel like recognition rather than interruption.
The key distinction the speaker draws is between being funny and being relatable. A VP of Operations scrolls TikTok. The ad that catches them needs to earn attention the same way any content does — by reflecting something they actually know.
"If somebody can make a fun ad when they're selling a $100,000 car, then you can also have fun when you're selling expensive software."
Fiverr's 'AI Just Took My Job' Campaign Shows How to Weaponise an Overhyped Trend
Fiverr built a campaign directly out of the AI-displacement narrative saturating every media channel, running the line "AI just took my job" — then pivoting the copy to reframe the platform as the solution. The technique is trend-hijacking: take a phrase the audience already hears constantly, acknowledge it directly, then add a twist that redirects attention. Applied live in the session, the same logic produces the line "software engineering is dead" with a typographic stress on "dead" — borrowed from cultural saturation to arrest a scroll before delivering a counter-message.
The approach requires no original concept, only the ability to identify what a target audience is already fatigued by and redirect that energy toward a product's value proposition.
"Software engineering is dead — but not just dead, it's like dead."
The Biggest B2B Humor Mistake: Trying to Be Funny Instead of Trying to Be Relatable
Brands fail at humor in B2B advertising not by being offensive but by chasing laughs without earning them — producing jokes that feel forced because they are not grounded in a real pain point the audience recognises. The more durable standard is relatability: an ad that touches something true about a buyer's daily experience will always carry at least a trace of warmth, even without a punchline. A secondary failure is imitation — copying the comedic style of another brand rather than working from what the company and its team are genuinely good at, whether that is sharp copywriting, subtle wit, or character-driven video.
A practical calibration method: observe the language and jokes that appear in client meetings over time, not formal discovery calls but recurring working sessions. The register people use when they are comfortable is a direct signal of the humor level acceptable in ads targeting them.
"Whatever you wouldn't write or say in a real conversation over lunch, we shouldn't use in our ads."
Also mentioned in this video
- His B2B ad framework, emphasizing the importance of both technical product… (0:46)
- Creating effective ads is simpler than perceived, as successful ad techniques… (2:47)
- 'Epicbase,' an AI-native operating system for food service that replaces… (4:00)
- An ABM campaign for European manufacturers, where a 'rollercoaster' visual and… (30:21)
- The speaker identifies Arabis's main promise as bespoke software engineering… (31:48)
- The host shares a past ABM campaign that successfully used a 'Most Wanted'… (49:09)
- Creativity in B2B marketing, arguing that fear of being different often leads… (50:02)
Summarised from Fullfunnel io · 59:24. All credit belongs to the original creators. Streamed.News summarises publicly available video content.
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