392: Screw Apple! Timeless Facebook Ad Strategies That Always Work With Jordan Menard

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The way to scale paid advertising is to think in angles: high-level approaches to your product centered on a single pain point or solution, where each ad communicates exactly one idea. Jordan Menard has spent over $100 million on ads for brands and figures including Robert Kiyosaki and Tai Lopez, and angle creation is the core of how he does it.

In this episode I sat down with Jordan Menard, founder of Motif Digital, to break down how he generates ad angles systematically rather than waiting for inspiration, and what actually changed after iOS 14.

Below is the full method: the word cloud research process, why one ad should contain exactly one angle, the Life Force 8 framework, why broad targeting now beats lookalikes, and how to measure attribution when the data is broken.

Key takeaways

• An angle is one high-level approach centered on one pain point. Never combine multiple angles in a single ad.
• Research beats inspiration. Pull competitor reviews into a word cloud generator rather than waiting to feel creative.
• Selling benefits is the laziest approach. Every brand claims their product is great, so audiences are desensitized.
• Life Force 8 is where real creativity comes from. Survival, food, freedom from fear, sex, comfort, superiority, protecting loved ones, social approval.
• Broad targeting beats lookalikes post-iOS 14. Targeting happens at the ad level, not the ad set level.
• The real iOS problem is signal loss, not attribution. The algorithm got dumber at prediction.
• Expect a 7% success rate on creative. 93% of what you make will fail.
• Start omnichannel from day one. Facebook-only brands took the hardest hit.

What is an advertising angle?

An angle is a high-level approach to a product or service centered around one pain point or one solution. It is what makes a purchase into something larger than the transaction.

Jordan’s example from a footwear client: the shoes are waterproof, which is one angle. They are also vegan, which is an entirely separate angle. The vegan angle turns buying shoes into contributing to a better world.

For Consulting.com, the angle was “how to become financially independent in 90 days,” where financial independence is the angle and everything else in the ad supports it.

If the angle is strong, everything downstream gets easier. Copy, creative, and targeting all follow from it.

Why every ad should contain exactly one angle

One ad communicates one idea. If the product is waterproof, the entire ad is about being waterproof. If it is vegan, the entire ad is about saving animals and helping the planet.

The reason is attention span. You get one chance to land an idea, and combining several dilutes all of them.

This is also the point of angles. Different people care about different things.

Someone buying for utility does not care about the vegan angle, and someone buying for ethics does not care about the waterproofing. Separate angles capture both sales where a general ad captures neither.

Jordan tested this at scale at Consulting.com using cultural clusters, the psychological finding that different regions hold different underlying values. Different angles performed better in different clusters, which confirmed that angle-audience fit is real rather than theoretical.

How to research ad angles with word clouds

Do not sit down and try to be creative. Jordan calls that “waiting for rain,” and the pressure of a blank page reliably produces nothing.

The process instead:

• Find your three biggest competitors on Amazon.
• Copy five to seven five-star reviews from each.
• Paste all of them into a word cloud generator and look at the largest words.
• Repeat with the one-star reviews.

Five-star reviews reveal the positive side of your angles: what the market actually values. One-star reviews reveal the negative side: what the product is not, what problems it defeats, and where competitors fall short.

The second research channel is Facebook Ad Library. Find your competitors, study what is currently running, and adapt it into your own version.

Jordan’s framing, borrowed from Austin Kleon: steal like an artist. The most creative people do the most research.

Why selling benefits is the laziest approach

Selling on benefits is the lowest-hanging fruit and the least effective, because every brand claims their product is great and audiences have gone numb to it.

The shampoo example: rather than saying this is the best shampoo, they ran a story about a mother whose hair damage from chemical-heavy mainstream brands had destroyed her confidence to the point she no longer wanted to go out on date night. After switching to natural products that restored her scalp’s pH, her hair improved and so did her confidence, and her husband noticed.

Same product, same benefits, entirely different mechanism. They showed the benefits through a transformation story rather than stating them.

The belt example works the same way: instead of “high quality belt that lasts forever,” the headline was “the belt that wears in, not out.”

The Life Force 8

The Life Force 8, from Drew Whitman’s Cashvertising, is the set of drives that produce genuine emotional response:

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger
4. Sexual companionship
5. Comfortable living conditions
6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses
7. Care and protection of loved ones
8. Social approval

Jordan’s argument for starting here rather than with benefits: you have no evidence anyone cares about your benefits. You care about them, and you are not your customer.

Nobody is passionate about belts. People are passionate about having better quality than the person next to them, which is drive six.

What great ads actually do

The strongest ads sell something larger than the product, and frequently barely mention it.

Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad sold independent thinking rather than a computer, and became the origin of “think different.”

Volkswagen’s “Think Small” ad triggered the creative revolution on Madison Avenue. In an era when car advertising sold status so aggressively that it was making people anxious, Bill Bernbach’s firm ran a small photo of a Beetle on a gray background.

It was controversial enough that the creative who made it flew back to Germany the day it released. Children cut it out of magazines and pinned it to their walls.

The caution: attempting depth and executing it badly reads as an edgy teenager. If you cannot land it, do not try it.

What actually broke with iOS 14

The real problem with iOS 14 is signal loss rather than attribution. Facebook lost data from a large and arguably the most valuable segment of users, which means the algorithm became substantially worse at predicting who resembles your existing buyers.

The algorithm got dumber. Attribution and reporting problems are layered on top of that, and they are not the core issue.

Nobody has a solution, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying. What you can do is mitigate the impact, and the single highest-leverage mitigation is making better creative: ads that convince people to buy without relying on Facebook’s predictive targeting.

Why broad targeting now beats lookalikes

Lookalike audiences are performing worse than Jordan has ever seen, and remarketing has degraded substantially. Most of his spend now runs completely broad with no targeting, no age restriction, and no gender restriction.

The reasoning: any restriction shrinks the audience and raises CPMs, and broad lets Facebook do the work.

His underlying position is that targeting happens at the ad level rather than the ad set level. Most people believe targeting is whatever they type into the audience field. Jordan believes the creative itself does the targeting.

This holds even for narrow offers. On a Robert Kiyosaki offer about real estate investing without becoming a landlord, they split-tested personal finance, real estate, and investing interests against no targeting at all. Interest targeting sometimes produced a lower CPA at small scale, and broad scaled far better: as spend increased, broad CPA came down while interest CPA went up.

The testing sequence for a new account: start broad, find creative that works, then test interests against the winning creative. When broad wins, stay there.

How to measure attribution when the data is broken

The approach is establishing a worst-case floor and comparing it against Facebook’s reported numbers.

The method: dynamically pass ad set ID and ad ID through UTM parameters, run a last-click analysis in GA4, and pull it into Google Data Studio for reporting. That gives you actual last-click sales, which Nick Shackelford frames as the number nobody goes broke using.

Layer MER (media efficiency ratio, total sales divided by total spend) on top, which most omnichannel brands are already tracking.

Between the worst case from last-click and the best case from Facebook, you have a range to allocate budget against.

On paid attribution tools: Jordan finds Hyros genuinely valuable for info products with multi-step funnels (webinar, call booking, purchase) and less so for ecommerce, where Google Analytics covers most of the need.

What a new brand should do first

Four priorities for a brand starting today.

Start omnichannel from day one. The iOS 14 reckoning hit Facebook-only brands hardest, and building on a single channel is now a clear structural risk.

Solve user-generated content early. Platforms like Insense connect you with content creators who produce UGC and can be whitelisted for ads, which offloads creative production for a new brand with no in-house capability.

Know your numbers. Margin, cost of goods, lifetime value, average order value. These dictate budgets, target CPA, and everything downstream.

Expect to fail. If you are good, roughly 7% of your creative will succeed. Go in anticipating that 93% does not.

Frequently asked questions

What is an advertising angle?

A high-level approach to a product centered on one pain point or solution. Waterproof shoes and vegan shoes are two separate angles for the same product. A strong angle turns a purchase into something larger than the transaction, which is what makes the rest of the ad work.

Should an ad contain more than one angle?

Never. One ad communicates one idea, because audience attention will not support more. Combining angles dilutes all of them. Different people respond to different angles, so run them as separate ads to capture both segments rather than neither.

How do you come up with ad angles?

Research rather than inspiration. Pull five to seven five-star and one-star reviews from three Amazon competitors, paste them into a word cloud generator, and look at the largest words. Five-star reviews show what the market values, one-star reviews show what problems your product defeats.

What is the Life Force 8?

Eight fundamental human drives from Drew Whitman’s Cashvertising: survival and life extension, food and drink, freedom from fear and pain, sexual companionship, comfortable living, superiority, protecting loved ones, and social approval. Starting here produces stronger angles than starting from product benefits.

Why did Facebook ads get worse after iOS 14?

Signal loss rather than attribution. Facebook lost data from a large segment of users, so the algorithm became much worse at predicting who resembles your existing buyers. Attribution problems are layered on top. The main mitigation is stronger creative that converts without relying on predictive targeting.

Should you use broad targeting or lookalike audiences now?

Broad. Lookalikes and remarketing have both degraded substantially since iOS 14. Any targeting restriction shrinks your audience and raises CPMs. Targeting effectively happens at the ad level through the creative itself, so start broad, find winning creative, then test interests against it.

What percentage of ads actually work?

About 7% if you are good, meaning 93% of what you produce will fail. That expectation should be built into how you plan creative production and budget, rather than treated as a sign something is wrong.