Thinking · Newsletter
Sound is half the ad and most teams treat it as the last five minutes
A lot of creative looks good and still fails. Very often the reason is audio, and it is the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
This piece is now part of a longer guide: UGC ads for performance: the complete guide.
A great deal of performance creative looks good now. Colour, pacing, framing, all competent. And a lot of it still leaves you unsure what you just watched. The usual culprit is sound.
What audio is actually doing
It carries the promise when the visual cannot. A viewer with the sound off gets one version of your ad. A viewer with it on gets a different one, and on most placements a meaningful share of people are in the second group.
The three mistakes
Music chosen last. A track laid over a finished edit fights the cut instead of supporting it. Pick the energy before the edit, not after.
Voice mixed too quietly against a bed. If the line is the point, the line has to win. Duck everything else.
No silence. A beat of nothing is the loudest thing in a feed of noise. Almost nobody uses it.
What to test
The same cut with three audio treatments: voice-led, music-led, and one with a deliberate pause in the first second. It is the cheapest test in creative because you are not reshooting anything, and in our experience it moves hold rate more reliably than most re-edits.