Five Ad Meat Formats
Five proven ad body formats that work across every industry
The Five Ad Meat Formats provide a complete taxonomy of ad body types that Hormozi has tested across services, education, physical products, brick-and-mortar, and software industries. Rather than inventing new formats, the framework gives you five proven buckets to draw from: Demonstration, Testimonial, Education, Story, and Faceless.
Demonstration ads include live use, reactions, unboxing, comparisons, before-and-afters, and high-production hero ads. Testimonial ads encompass user-generated content, podcast clips, professional testimonials, walk-and-talk rants, group testimonials, and influencer collaborations. Education ads cover explainer videos, how-to listicles, whiteboard presentations, and repurposed organic content. Story ads include narratives, lifestyle content, documentary-style pieces, and brand manifestos. Faceless ads use screenshots, text overlays, slideshows, animations, and visual effects.
The power of this framework is in its simplicity and combinatorial potential. By mixing and matching formats, you never run out of creative ideas. The meat only takes 20% of your preparation time because fewer people see past the hook, so the body gets rotated less frequently.
- The meat of an ad fulfills the promise made by the hook
- Five formats cover virtually all successful ad types across every industry
- Mixing and matching formats within a single ad creates novel creative that stands out
- The body content needs far fewer variations than hooks because fewer viewers reach it
- When stuck on creative direction, simply pick a format from the list and start recording
- Select 2-3 Formats for Your Recording SessionBefore each recording session, choose two to three of the five formats that best suit your current assets and goals. If you have strong customer results, lean into Demonstration and Testimonial. If you have expertise to share, lean into Education. If you have a compelling founder story, lean into Story. If you lack on-camera talent, lean into Faceless formats using screenshots and text overlays.Pro tipRotate formats each week so you build a diverse library of creative over time rather than becoming one-dimensional.
- Script Each Meat to Align with Hook Awareness LevelMatch your ad body content to the awareness level of the hooks it will be paired with. Education meats pair well with Problem-Aware hooks. Demonstration meats pair well with Product-Aware hooks. Testimonial meats work across all levels. Story meats pair especially well with Completely Unaware hooks that need to draw people into a narrative journey.Pro tipYour highest-performing organic content often makes excellent Education ad meat with minimal modification.
- Record and Catalog Your MeatsRecord 3-5 meats per session. Tag each one with its format type and the awareness levels it pairs best with. Store them in a shared library that your entire team can access. Over time, you will build a reusable catalog of meats that can be paired with new hooks week after week, further multiplying your output without starting from scratch.Pro tipKeep recordings short. Most ad meats should be 15-60 seconds. Longer is not better; concise delivery of value is what keeps viewers watching.WarningDo not spend more than 20% of your preparation time on meats. The hook is what determines whether anyone sees your meat in the first place.
Hormozi's team clipped a segment from a podcast recording session where a customer shared their experience with Skool. This unplanned, conversational testimonial was packaged as a standalone ad with minimal editing. The authenticity of the podcast format gave it a natural, non-salesy feel that resonated with viewers.
Hormozi identified these five categories by analyzing every winning ad across all of his portfolio companies at Acquisition.com. He found that despite the apparent diversity of successful ads, they all fell into one of these five buckets. The categorization emerged from practical pattern recognition over 13 years of running paid ads rather than from academic theory.