I analyzed 100+ Facetune ads and 1,000+ reviews. Their best-performing ads are all one trick, and their own reviews are asking for four more.
100+ ads analyzed | 1,000+ reviews read | 2 of their 3 most recent test lanes still build on hair
The Four Opportunities:
1. Winner Extensions
The pattern: hairstyle reveal is the top performer, and two of their three most recent test lanes just rebuild it with a new creator or language.
The fix: keep the “wrong hairstyle to right one” shell, vary the cut, color, creator, or language.
2. Adjacent Extensions
The pattern: the “wrong choice” hook only ever gets applied to hair.
The fix: run the same mechanic on outfits, makeup, lighting, and nails before a party or date.
3. New Lanes From The Reviews
The pattern: reviews keep bringing up background removal, skin smoothing, and golden-hour lighting. Almost none of it is in the ads.
The fix: build ads straight from what reviewers already praise.
4. Emotional Specificity
The pattern: every ad shows the transformation, almost none show how it happens.
The fix: name the fear of looking fake, show the dream of looking glamorous, then prove the in-app moment that bridges the two.
Facetune has a proven winner in hair transformation. The same mechanic, and the same “wrong choice” framing, is sitting untested across outfits, makeup, lighting, and every theme their own reviewers keep naming.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Here’s how Facetune can 2X their creative-led growth.
Facetune, if you’re not aware, is one of the top AI apps in the photo and video space, and they’re advertising quite aggressively. They have hundreds of ads, which we’ve deconstructed using our agent Brute Force AI. We’ve also analyzed over 1,000 App Store reviews to understand what users truly want and to identify some of the big opportunities they have.
Let’s look first at what’s actually winning in the account. Then let’s look at how they’re testing. Then I’ll get to some of the big opportunities they have.
What’s winning is a lot of hairstyle-focused videos. Quick cuts showing different hairstyles. These particular ones are Spanish ads, which is also a good sign, because it means they’re localizing and clearly targeting different geos with localized versions of their ads.
Look at the aesthetic that’s high-performing here. Different characters, different women, showing very similar kinds of hairstyles. It’s very TikTok native, which we know works well, and the message is essentially “I have always had the wrong hairstyle.”
These are some of the best performers, and as you can see, a lot of them are built around personal style, and hairstyle specifically, which seems to be working really well.
This next one is a split screen with quick cuts, and the hook is “these are literally the same videos.” That version is in English.
So the top performers are really based on the reveal, or the transformation. They show how a user can imagine themselves being different, showing different hairstyles, showing a different person.
Now let’s look at what they’ve tested most recently.
We looked at their most recent tests: 18 ads across three big lanes. One is the hair reveal trick. Another is avoiding a bad haircut. The third, which isn’t as prominent, is natural look versus heavy filters.
It’s great that they’re building on their top performers, and it’s very clear that hairstyle is their best ad.
Here are four of the ads they tested, and the hook is “these are literally the same videos.” The second is in Spanish, the others are in English. The fourth one I can’t identify the language of, but it carries the same line.
These are built on the top performer we identified earlier, which is great. They’re trying to improve on their top performer rather than starting from scratch.
Then there are other hairstyle-focused ads: avoid bad hairstyles, avoid bad style. The fourth one is different styles. Style one, style two, style three, and then “let me show you how to do these.” That’s one of the top performers we saw. Again, they’re building on what’s already performing, which is good to see.
The third big pillar is bad filters, artificial filters, fake AI filters. This one is an AI-generated creative with an overlay of an AI creator. This one is a static. That’s the third thing they’ve tested, so this seems to be the new lane they’re exploring. The other two lanes are based on their top performers.
Now, what I think the big opportunities are for them: completely new lanes, and extensions of their high performers. They’re sitting on big opportunities in both.
So how do they 2X their creative velocity? How do they 2X their creative-driven growth?
Build on what already wins.
They’re doing this to some extent, but there’s a whole lot more they can do. Hair is what’s working well. They could go to different outfits, different makeup, different lighting, different backgrounds.
A lot of the ads are women-focused and Spanish. I would review and confirm what their ideal market is, but it seems like their ideal users are women, so that’s who they want to focus on.
They could also change up the emotion. Avoid real-life fashion mistakes. Change the hook to “I’m going to a party,” “I’m going to an event,” and build hooks focused around those moments.
They’ve had talking head demos. They could test different formats too: split screen, wall of text, POV style ads.
There’s a lot of room for extensions of the high performers. Even if you want to build on the hairstyle angle alone, you don’t just do bangs and bobs. Switch up the cuts. Switch up the colors. They’re already testing new faces. They could test new languages on these too.
Similarly, with the wrong-choice framing, it could be wrong color, wrong length, wrong before a party, wrong before a date. There are a number of ways they can extend this, and I think they’re huge opportunities.
These are the lowest hanging fruit, because what they’ve done so far is take the exact scripts of the high performers and remake them with new AI creators. But there are tangential extensions like these that I would test, because in my experience these are the kinds of tangential extensions that often unlock big winners.
The other opportunity is in asking: if this is true, what else is true?
If a different hairstyle is something people want to imagine, could they imagine different outfits? Different makeup? Different lighting? Retro looks? Different ages or epochs? Different backgrounds? Different nails? Play around with a lot of these mechanics and make them part of the tests you run. I think those could be huge opportunities.
Interestingly, this is also what the App Store reviews already point to. People absolutely talk about hair. They also like backgrounds and background object removal, skin smoothing, lighting and golden hour, and natural or subtle edits. People are asking for a lot of these in the reviews, and a lot of them aren’t focused on in the ads at all.
The ads primarily focus on hair try-on. Some of these other angles and directions are great opportunities to test.
Here you can see examples of App Store reviews that talk about what users like and appreciate in the app itself. In addition to hair, there are a number of other things they can play around with and test.
The other big opportunity is to get much more emotionally specific.
Right now a lot of the ads use quick cuts and a TikTok-style aesthetic, where the video moves very quickly and shows transitions. That’s working well for a certain demographic and a certain kind of user.
But in our experience, the other big opportunity is emotional specificity. The way to think about this is to ask what the enemy is. What is the product fighting against? The fake filter. Then the dream, which is you actually looking like a model, you looking glamorous. Then the bridge, which is how the app does it, and how you do it inside the app.
A lot of the videos don’t really show the how very clearly. Focusing on that in the ads is another big opportunity.
So in summary, there are a lot of tangential opportunities they haven’t tapped into nearly as much: nails, outfits, retro, and more. And then there’s emotional specificity, really speaking to the emotional lived experience of the users.
Here’s the summary of the big opportunities they’re sitting on.
One, scale the hair reveal in different ways: different cuts, colors, creators, languages.
Two, extend adjacent angles and pillars: outfits, makeup, lighting.
Three, go after the lanes the reviews point to that haven’t really been tested.
Four, be much more emotionally specific.
Those are the big opportunities they’re sitting on, and I think with a lot of these they can dramatically improve their creative-led growth and their creative testing on Meta.
That’s all I had for today. If you’d like us to do a similar deconstruction for you, or produce creatives based on a creative strategy like this one, hit me up and I’d love to chat and connect.
Want the deeper, scene-by-scene creative teardown? Get our full Facetune decosntruction here.
