Lesson 17 of 22
The ten things that make an ad look amateur
None of them are about the footage. All of them are visible in under two seconds.
You can generate flawless footage and still ship something that reads as fake, because most amateur tells live in the edit rather than the frame. They're also unusually easy to fix — each one is a rule you either followed or didn't.
The ten tells
- The same sound on every cut, or one dramatic hit on repeat.
- The same transition on every cut.
- A transition that lands on the same footage — the squish.
- Static captions: one position, one font, one colour, word-by-word pop.
- All b-roll in one register — a mood board of stock stills.
- Static b-roll held as a frozen frame. A still held two seconds is a slideshow.
- Holding the same talking-head frame across multiple cuts.
- A flat CTA slide, or a trailing black frame.
- Fixed-timer pacing with no rhythm.
- Meme sounds in a produced ad — instant register collapse.
The pattern underneath
Eight of the ten are the same mistake: repetition where there should be variety. Amateur edits pick one solution and apply it uniformly. Real edits vary the sound, the transition, the caption position and the b-roll register — because that's what holds attention across thirty seconds.
If you only fix one: captions. Static, single-position, single-colour, word-by-word captions are the fastest read on a scroll and the most common tell in AI-generated ads.
Takeaway
Eight of the ten tells are just repetition. Vary the sound, the transition, the captions, the b-roll.
Questions this raises
Isn't varied sound design just noise?
Varied means chosen per cut, not random. The failure is using one sound as punctuation everywhere. A reveal and a beat change do different jobs and shouldn't share a sound.
Course outline
Progress
0 of 22 lessons completed
Chapter 1
Start here
Chapter 2
The script
Chapter 3
The frame
Chapter 4
The clip
Chapter 5
The edit
Chapter 6
Judging it honestly