The Desire Foundation: Why Every Ad That Scales Starts With What People Want

A paint by numbers brand was positioning its product around emotional support. The hook was something like "POV you're my emotional support art project." Stress relief, anxiety, mental health. It was a real angle. Plenty of people genuinely buy craft kits to calm down.

The numbers just weren't making sense. The brand was stuck.

So the team asked a different question. Instead of stress and anxiety, what if this was a fun new activity? They changed the desire completely. The new hook: "This is for my girlies who need a girls' night soon."

Same product. Same budget. Same platform. Revenue went from $130,000 a month to $1.1 million a month. Profit went from $19,000 a month to $198,000 a month. All they changed was the desire.

That is the single most important lever in advertising, and it sits underneath every technique in the rest of this playbook. Before you write a hook, before you touch an AI tool, before you brief a single creative, you have to get the desire right. Everything else is secondary.

Desire is just what people give a damn about

Desire is what people want. What they care about. Right now, at the end of June, some people want to look slimmer for the beach. Some want more money because they're trying to afford flights. Some want to sleep eight hours without waking up. Some want more energy so they can work 14 hours a day without crashing.

At the most basic level, your product is the thing that gets people what they desire. That's the entire job of an ad: call out what someone wants, then show them your product as the way to get it.

The best way to think about this is a bridge.

On the left side of the bridge is where someone is right now: their current state, their problem, their pain. On the right side is where they want to go: their desired state, everything they're trying to achieve. Your product is the car that carries them across. Your ad shows them what's waiting on the other side, then introduces your product as the thing that takes them there.

Picture a man with low testosterone. He can't perform the way he used to. He's suffering, and he looks at guys who are lean and energetic and thinks, "I want to be like that." That is his desire. A good ad shows him what he wants, then presents the product as the bridge.

You can see this in real winning ads. "Drop a size before summer" calls out exactly what many women want: a smaller pant size. Then it defines the desired state further: "More sculpted look, waist and legs in 14 days." The product, its features, its benefits, all come after. First you call out the desire.

One product has many desires, and they are different sizes

Here is what most operators miss. A single product can speak to many completely different desires, and each of those desires is a completely different size of market.

Go back to the paint by numbers example. Stress and anxiety was a small market. Girls' night was a massive one. The product was identical. The desire determined whether the brand stayed stuck at $100k a month or scaled to $1 million.

Your product might have five different desires you could go after. Some are enormous. Some are tiny. Smaller market means less money. Bigger market means more money. And there might be one huge desire you haven't discovered yet, one that blows up everything.

This is why the standard plateau response fails. When a brand gets stuck, the instinct is to make new creative for the same desire: a new hook, a new format, a new spokesperson. That's fine as a first move. But if you've been stuck for six months and nothing is working, the problem usually isn't the creative. You've maxed out the market for the desire you're speaking to. The move is to go find a completely different desire. That's what took the paint by numbers client from $100k to $1 million.

The fastest way to estimate the size of a desire before you spend money is view count. Search the desire itself, not your product, on TikTok and YouTube. A handful of videos with a thousand views each means a small market. Videos with millions of views mean a large one. Cross-reference both platforms and you have a rough ranking of which desires are worth testing first.

The 4 levels of desire intensity

Finding the right desire is only half of it. The other half is how intensely people want it. Two people can want the same thing at completely different urgencies, which means completely different price sensitivity and completely different odds of buying today.

There are four levels.

Level 1, Must Be Nice. "Oh, that'd be cool to have." Low urgency, no real need. A lot of luxury products live here. Even at $50, people hesitate, because there's no urgency behind the want. Hard to scale, lots of objections. Stay away from this level if you can.

Level 2, Annoyance. "This bothers me, but I don't need to fix it right now." Real example: uploading ads manually to Ads Manager is annoying, but it's not urgent, so the fix gets put off for months until enough people recommend a tool. Better than Must Be Nice, but still not where the money is.

Level 3, Keeps Me Up at Night. "This is a serious problem. I need to fix this." Think of a week of bad ad performance. First night, no big deal. Third night, "what the hell is going on, am I going to lose this business?" Now they're desperately searching for a solution. At this level there's almost zero price sensitivity. Operators sign up for a $10,000 a month service without flinching, because the pain is real and the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of the fix. This is where higher prices start to feel lower.

Level 4, Bleeding Neck. "I need this fixed right now. Price doesn't matter." If you cut your neck and blood is gushing, you go to the nearest hospital immediately. You don't compare prices. You just need it fixed. The most reliable Bleeding Neck window in ecommerce is Black Friday through mid-December, and it doesn't start on Black Friday. It starts the week before, November 21st to 23rd, when consumers are already in research mode. By the actual sale, it's full Bleeding Neck: the deal ends in 24 hours, stock is limited, and the first thing that makes sense gets bought. Conversion rates run 2x to 3x above normal. Then December 1st to 15th, the shipping deadline takes over and urgency climbs every day until the last reliable ship date.

Lead with Level 3 and Level 4 whenever you can. If your positioning is at Level 1 or 2, the market isn't the problem. The intensity is.

Desires have seasonal relevance

Intensity isn't static. It moves through the year.

Take dry skin. In winter, dry skin is a Bleeding Neck problem for a huge part of the population. Cold air, indoor heating, cracked hands. In summer, at 90 degrees, nobody is thinking about it. It drops to Must Be Nice. Push a dry skin product hard in July and you're selling to people who don't care right now, no matter how good the creative is.

The tool for this is Google Trends. Search the desire or the problem, not your brand, and set the range to five years. You'll see exactly when it peaks and when it crashes, confirmed across multiple cycles. That tells you when to scale hard and when to hold back. Start ramping creative four to six weeks before the peak so you have proven winners ready when it hits.

How to find desires for your product: 6 methods

1. Break down your product. Feature to performance to benefit to desire. The classic iPod example: feature is 1GB of storage, performance is 1,000 songs, benefit is 1,000 songs in your pocket, desire is the freedom to walk around anywhere listening to your music without a clunky CD player. Keep asking "so what?" until you reach something people actually care about. Do this manually first. The process builds conviction in your positioning. Notice Apple didn't advertise "1GB of storage." They showed the desired state: people walking around New York City with white earbuds in. Freedom. Show the desired state, don't just say it.

2. Customer survey. If you have existing customers, this is one of the most valuable sources you have. Send a survey to all-time customers but exclude the last 30 days, so you're talking to people who've actually experienced the product. One brand with 6,000 customers got 652 responses this way. Ask why they bought, what problem they were solving, what desired state they wanted, and what they love now. Incentivize it with a giveaway, like a $100 Amazon gift card. The gold is in their exact language.

3. YouTube and TikTok. Search the benefit, the problem, the performance, the desire. Watch the view counts. A few thousand views means a small desire. Millions of views means a big one. This ranks the size of different desires so you know which to test first.

4. Reddit. Look for threads with 50, 60, 80, 100 or more comments. That volume means the pain is real. In the comments, look for the desired state. A first-time mom describing "Mom Brain" wrote: "Before having my baby, I had the memory of a child. You couldn't tell me anything that I couldn't bring up years later with perfect accuracy." That is the desired state, in her exact words, for free. She wants that sharpness back.

5. Competitor 5-star reviews. Not 1-star, 5-star. The glowing reviews tell you what desire people are actually buying the category for and what result made them happy. Then decide: go after the same desire with better creative, or find a different desire to separate yourself. If a competitor's ad library shows weak creative, you can win the same desire by simply out-producing them.

6. TrendTrack (and other ad libraries). Pull ads from a completely different niche than yours and study the structure of their top performers. Longevity is the proxy for performance: an ad running for months is almost certainly working. You're not copying the ad. You're pulling the structure (how they call out the problem, build tension, introduce the mechanism) and bringing it to your niche where nobody has seen it.

The checklist

• List every desire your product can credibly speak to before writing a single ad, aiming for at least 5
• Never stop at the most obvious desire — it's usually the smallest, and it's where all your competitors already are
• Rank desires by market size using TikTok and YouTube view counts before spending money
• Score each desire on intensity right now — lead with Level 3 (Keeps Me Up at Night) and Level 4 (Bleeding Neck)
• Check Google Trends on your main desire and time your scaling to the seasonal peak
• Run the 6 research methods to find the language your buyers actually use, then write ads in their words
• When you've been stuck for 6 months, change the desire, not the creative

Next: [The Anatomy of a Hook — Why People Stop Scrolling and How to Make Them Stay →](02-the-anatomy-of-a-hook-why-people-stop-scrolling-and-how-to-make-them-stay.md)