Friction Breeds Attention
⚡How Controlled Discomfort Builds Unforgettable Brands, Media Buyer Index of the week, and more!
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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
⚡ Friction Breeds Attention
💹 Ad Efficiency Shifts Across Major Platforms
🏆 Ad of the Day
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⚡ Friction Breeds Attention
When every brand chases comfort, clean layouts, obvious offers, cheerful urgency, the ones that win create pause.
Not through chaos, but through controlled unease.
They design micro-tension: visuals that almost clash, headlines that linger a second too long, humor that feels slightly wrong.
Why?
Because discomfort = dwell time.
The brain lingers on what it can’t instantly categorize. The best BFCM creative doesn’t make you smile, it makes you hesitate. That hesitation is gold.
💥 The Psychology of Attention Friction
Attention thrives on contradiction. When everything feels “right,” the brain moves on. When something feels off, but interesting, dopamine spikes.
That’s why desirable discomfort works:
Contrast tension: Soft visuals paired with aggressive copy (“Come unprepared.”)
Context tension: Using luxury aesthetics to sell low-ticket offers.
Temporal tension: Slower pacing in a sea of flashing cuts.
Each creates micro-friction, forcing the audience to stay, process, and remember. That’s how “cool” becomes conversion-ready.
🧠 How to Engineer It Intentionally
You don’t create discomfort by being weird, you create it by interrupting expectation.
Framework:
Set familiarity (start with known symbols or tones)
Insert dissonance (color, rhythm, or emotion that contradicts expectation)
Resolve meaning (clarity that justifies the tension)
Example: a serene ASMR video that ends with a bold “DON’T MISS OUT” punchline. The transition itself is the attention driver.
🧩 The Systemic Layer: Building a Creative Tension Engine
The challenge? Most teams can’t execute this consistently.
It requires creators who naturally work inside tension, those who can be funny and unsettling, stylish and raw.
That’s where Modash changes the game.
With Modash, you can find creators who thrive in controlled discomfort, people whose humor, tone, or editing already dance on that edge. Filter by vibe, past performance, or narrative tone.
Build your “tension cohort” before Black Friday hits. You can try Modash free for 14 days Because it’s not about who shouts loudest, it’s about who makes the scroll stop.
The paradox of cool is that comfort fades.
BFCM is a battlefield of comfort, everyone’s agreeable, everyone’s urgent. But the brands people remember are the ones that made them feel slightly off balance.
They made them pause, think, feel something unfamiliar. And in that discomfort, the brain made space.
So this year, when the feed floods with noise, Don’t blend in.
Don’t amplify. Agitate, just enough to be unforgettable.
💹 Ad Efficiency Shifts Across Major Platforms
The latest Northbeam Media Buyer Index (Oct 22–28, 2025) reveals how platform costs and returns are evolving across the ad ecosystem. From falling acquisition costs to surging ROAS on emerging AI platforms, performance marketers are entering a new optimization phase for Q4.
The Breakdown:
1. CPC Trends - Click costs fell significantly on Snapchat (-13.7%) and Microsoft (-11%), signaling cheaper top-funnel opportunities. However, Anthropic (+9.2%) and YouTube (+4.1%) saw rising CPCs, likely due to increased competition for high-intent audiences, suggesting brands are rebalancing spend toward efficiency-first platforms.
2. CAC Movements - Acquisition costs improved most on YouTube (-11.7%) and Microsoft (-10.4%), while Anthropic (+15%) and Google (+2.4%) became pricier. Declining CAC reflects better audience quality and conversion flow, while higher CAC may indicate ad fatigue or rising auction pressure.
3. ROAS Performance - Anthropic (+15.8%), Microsoft (+4.5%), and TikTok (+2.9%) led in ad profitability, while Pinterest (-15.1%) dropped sharply. The performance gap reflects how AI-integrated ad systems are now delivering higher returns per dollar spent.
Meta and Google still dominate overall budgets with 62.17% and 26.2% shares, but emerging players like TikTok and YouTube are gaining traction through higher efficiency. As performance dynamics shift, advertisers are expected to diversify spend into platforms that balance scale, creative adaptability, and short-term ROAS stability.
🏆 Ad of the Day
What Works:
1. Systematic Visual Hierarchy That Feeds Comprehension - The ad’s layout mimics a product feature map, every benefit radiates out from the bottles, turning them into the visual hub. The eye reads the offer like a flowchart, not an ad. Structure subscription ads like UX, clarity and spatial logic make conversion frictionless.
2. Comfort-Oriented Subscription Framing - Benefits like “pause, skip, or cancel anytime” and “delivery every 2, 4, or 6 weeks” lower psychological resistance. It turns commitment into comfort. Anticipate objections within design, visually bake flexibility into your subscription promise.
3. Lifestyle Tone Over Transactional Copy - Even the CTA “Shop Now” feels soft, rounded, and integrated, not pushy. It complements the visual calm rather than breaking it. Align CTA tone with the product’s emotional role; here, calm and convenience sell more than urgency.
This ad turns a routine coffee purchase into a lifestyle ritual. Every visual and phrase reinforces ease, warmth, and rhythm, the three pillars of a subscription brand that sticks
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