This was 2023, and the instinct across the industry was still narrow targeting — interest stacks, lookalikes, the belief that finding the right audience was the job.

We ran open instead, and let the copy do the finding. If the words named the actual problem a person was dealing with, the right person would recognise themselves in it regardless of how loosely the audience was defined.

So the copy stopped explaining and started talking. "Sorry, oxybenzone." "What hair fall?" "Hello, firm skin." Each headline picked a fight with the problem itself — mock-apologetic, conversational, dropped into the scroll like a comment rather than an ad. The functional proof didn't disappear; it moved underneath the headline, into callouts and clinical detail for the reader who'd already stopped to look. The headline's only job was earning that stop.