Comparison & Positioning ad angles

A two-column argument where the second column is a composite. “Them” is the typical way this gets done — the category’s default provider, the standard process, the thing most people in the audience are currently putting up with. You get the clarity of a head-to-head without naming anyone, which means no legal exposure, no free advertising for a rival, and no obligation to keep a specific competitor’s facts current.

It also outperforms the named version more often than people expect, because the reader casts the villain themselves. Every person who sees it fills “them” with whichever option actually burned them, and their version is more specific and more annoying than any composite you could have written. You supply the shape of the complaint; they supply the details. That is a better division of labour than it sounds.

The craft is in the axis, not the columns. Pick the single dimension you genuinely win on and stay on it for the whole ad — speed, or control, or what you don’t have to know beforehand. A list that wins on eight dimensions reads as a brochure and persuades on none of them; one axis, stated twice, reads as a position. And watch the tone the taxonomy warns about: “them” must never quietly include the reader. Most of your audience is currently using them, and an ad that mocks the alternative is mocking the choice they made last year.

You name them. This is the highest-intent ad in the family and it works for a plain reason: the reader was going to run this comparison anyway, in six tabs, over an evening, badly. Doing it for them intercepts the research rather than interrupting it, which is why product-aware audiences reward it so heavily. You are not asking for attention here, you are answering a question already open in their browser.

Three rules keep it from backfiring. Concede a row — the honest thing the other product does better — because a comparison you win entirely is one the reader knows you wrote. Date it, because the taxonomy’s weakness column is really a maintenance problem: their pricing page changes without telling you, and a stale comparison is a false claim you are paying to distribute. And only name upward. Comparison lends salience in both directions, so naming a rival bigger than you borrows their recognition, while naming a smaller one buys them an introduction to your audience at your expense.

Remember the comparison is public. Meta’s Ad Library carries active ads for anyone who looks, so assume the named competitor reads it the same afternoon, and write the version you would be comfortable defending line by line. In practice that discipline improves the ad. Claims you can support tend to be specific, and specific claims are the ones that convert; the rows you would have to argue about are usually the vague ones that were doing no work anyway.

The same two-column structure with the rival swapped for a date. The opponent is not a company, it is a method — the sequence of steps the reader currently performs, presented as the thing everybody sensibly did until recently. That is why it carries cold traffic when the rest of the comparison angles can’t: understanding it requires no knowledge of any brand, only recognition of a process.

Its real trick is converting a purchase into an upgrade. People switch reluctantly and upgrade easily, and the difference is entirely in the framing — switching implies the earlier choice was a mistake, upgrading implies it was correct and has been superseded. Nobody has to be wrong in this ad, only early, and that removes the defensiveness every other comparison angle has to work around.

It needs a recognisable old way, which is the constraint the taxonomy names and the one people underestimate. If the audience does not already perform the ritual, there is no contrast to feel — you have written a description. So show the old way in their own hands, in steps and hours rather than adjectives, and describe it fairly. A caricature is the standard failure here: the reader is still living in the old way this week, and an unfair version of it insults them at the exact moment you wanted recognition.

Compare against a completely different route to the same destination — not the rival product, but the thing the money is currently doing. For most businesses that is not another tool at all: it is a freelancer, an agency retainer, an internal hire, or the decision to keep doing nothing. Your real competitive set is a list of line items, and it rarely matches the list a review site put you on.

Widening the frame is what makes this angle worth its Mid placement. Category comparison fights over a budget that already exists; substitution goes and finds one somewhere else, which is where genuinely new demand comes from. It also reframes the price question before it is asked — measured against a category rival you are expensive, measured against three months of a freelancer you are a rounding error, and the comparison you choose decides which of those the reader does in their head.

The failure the taxonomy names is distance. The comparison only holds while the reader agrees both routes reach the same place, so keep the goal fixed and vary only the method; the moment the substitute solves a slightly different problem, the ad stops being a comparison and becomes a non sequitur. Find yours by listening to what customers say they stopped doing rather than what they say they switched from — the first answer names the substitute, the second names a competitor.

This one does not argue that you are cheap. It argues that the reader is dividing by the wrong number. Price is a figure; value is that figure over a unit — per ad, per month, per campaign, per hour not spent. Supply the denominator and the comparison turns into arithmetic the reader performs themselves, and a conclusion somebody reached on their own does not need defending.

Choose the unit carefully, because the wrong denominator is the tell. It has to be something the reader already counts in their own head, and the comparison has to be against what they currently spend on the same job — not against a coffee, not against a gym membership, not against anything that trivialises a decision they consider serious. Trivialising comparisons read as a dodge, and a reader who catches you dodging price starts wondering what the honest number was.

The taxonomy’s warning is the important part: this makes price salient. That is a real cost, and it decides the stage. Run it where price is already in the room — retargeting, people who reached the pricing page and left, anyone deep enough to have started doing the maths — and keep it away from cold audiences, where you would be introducing an objection nobody had raised yet. Used correctly it is not a discount argument at all, it is permission to charge more.

The mirror image: their price is not their cost. Add the evenings, the redos, the replacement six months later, the ad spend that ran behind something that was never going to work. The reader has usually already paid all of this and simply never totalled it, which is what makes the angle land — you are not introducing information, you are handing somebody a receipt they had been keeping in pieces.

So total it in units of their life rather than in money. Hours, weekends, reshoots, the third time they rebuilt the same asset. Money invites a counter-argument because the reader can dispute your figures; time does not, because they were there. And attack the arithmetic rather than the quality — “the cheap one is bad” is an opinion the reader can reject in a second, while “the cheap one costs four hours a week” is a sum they either recognise or don’t.

The taxonomy is right that this sounds self-serving without evidence, and the fix is a boundary. Say plainly who should still buy the cheap option — the person making one ad a month genuinely should — because a comparison that admits a limit is the only kind a sceptical reader will finish. It is also the safest way to defend a premium price, since it never claims the alternative is inferior. It just finishes the calculation the alternative left half-done.

Name a shared adversary and stand on the reader’s side of it. Not a competitor — a practice: the industry habit, the accepted waste, the convention everybody complies with and nobody defends. The reader agrees before they evaluate anything, and agreement is a much cheaper first transaction than belief.

It recruits rather than persuades, which is why it survives cold traffic and why it outlasts the campaign. A well-chosen enemy is the most memorable thing a brand can own, because positions are easier to remember than features and a reader who has adopted your enemy carries your positioning around for you. The requirement is that the enemy already annoys them and they have not yet put words to it. Articulating a resentment somebody is already carrying feels like being understood; announcing one they have never felt feels like a stranger shouting.

Two constraints. It must be a practice rather than a group of people, because the instant the enemy is a category of person your reader might belong to, half the audience is defending themselves instead of agreeing with you. And you have to be clean. This angle is a promise the product is then obliged to keep, so an ad attacking templates from a company whose output looks templated does more damage than no ad at all. Polarisation is only worth its cost when the people it excludes were never going to buy.

Take something the audience believes, show that it is false, and let the correction land on your territory. It runs cold because it needs no product knowledge and because correction is the most naturally shaped piece of writing there is — claim, contradiction, resolution — so the reader is three beats in before deciding whether to be interested.

It also trades on status, gently. Being told you are wrong about your own field is uncomfortable enough to hold attention and useful enough to forgive, and a reader who finishes the ad has learned something at your expense rather than bought something at theirs. That is a good exchange to open a relationship with, provided the correction is real.

Which is the whole risk the taxonomy names: the myth may not be widely believed. Straw myths are the standard failure of this angle — “people think ads don’t work” is not a belief anybody holds, it is a sentence written to be knocked down, and readers detect the setup instantly. The test is whether a customer could have said it out loud last week, which means the good ones come from sales calls and support tickets rather than from brainstorming. Then actually bust it. A myth stated and answered with “and that’s why we built this” is a pivot, not a correction, and the reader came for the correction.

Take a position the reader’s own industry would dispute. It is the sharpest scroll-stopper in the family, because disagreement is involuntary — you cannot decide not to react to a sentence you think is wrong — and it builds authority as a side effect, since arguing credibly against the consensus requires knowing it well.

It is worth being precise about how this differs from Myth Busting, because they get written as the same ad. Myth Busting corrects a factual error: the audience believes something untrue, and you supply the evidence. Contrarian disputes a judgment: the thing everybody believes is broadly true, and you argue it is still the wrong thing to do. One ends in a fact and the other ends in a position, and a position is the harder, more valuable thing to own.

The reason the taxonomy calls out clickbait is a structural mismatch rather than a tonal one. A contrarian opening that resolves into a conventional pitch has taught the reader that your headline is decorative, and that lesson survives longer than the ad. So pay it off: the position has to cost you something visible — a customer segment you send away, a limitation you accept, a popular feature you refuse to build. If the argument costs you nothing, it was a costume, and the audience most attracted to this angle is the one best at spotting them.

The plain statement, with no opponent in the frame at all: here is what is true of this and not of the alternatives. It is the safe one and the flexible one — nothing to keep current, nobody to be fair to — which is exactly why it is the one most likely to be dull. The taxonomy says it is often boring without proof or a point of view, and the reason is more specific than that. Most “why we’re different” copy lists things that are not differences.

Run the so-does-everyone test on every line. Read each claim and ask whether the obvious rival would happily print the same sentence on their own page; if they would, it is a category requirement rather than a difference, and it comes out. Easy to use, powerful, built for teams like yours — those aren’t claims, they are the entry fee, and stacking four of them produces a paragraph the reader has already read on three other sites this week.

What survives that test is usually a trade-off, which is the real find. You built one thing instead of another, refused a feature everyone has, optimised for a use case that costs you a different one. A difference that was free to have is a feature and a rival can copy it by Thursday; a difference you paid for is a position, and stating what you gave up is what makes the claim land as true rather than as asserted. Pair each one with its cost, and use this as the landing-page counterpart to whichever comparison ad won — the page the click arrives on is the right place for the version with no opponent in it.