When it comes to Paid Social, people want weird and real. In fact, the weird makes it real.

When I joined Resi, our paid social advertising was limited in both spend and effectiveness. Cost-per-lead (CPL) hovered around £15, and creative output was minimal—mostly static images, overly polished, and overly concerned with how the website looked, rather than how users actually behaved.

My core insight? People don’t want perfect. They want real. More specifically: they want video—and they respond best to video that feels authentic, unpolished, and a little bit weird.

Our most successful creative to date? Me, in one of our office meeting booths, talking to a puppet and explaining Resi’s value proposition. Simple, scrappy, and honest. That single shift in creative strategy brought our CPLs down from £15 to under £5—hitting as low as £2.30.

As a result, Facebook quickly became our most performant acquisition channel. Over the course of a year, it grew to drive the highest volume of new NPUs, with the best ROAS and the lowest CAC, by a significant margin.

Sometimes the smartest move is to stop aiming for nice and start aiming for real.