Roast My Ad
Upload your ad. An AI creative director will tell you what your agency won't — savage, specific, and free.
The 7 checks a high-converting ad passes
This is the checklist behind the roast — the same one a performance creative director runs in the first ten seconds of seeing your ad. Run it yourself before you upload:
- The thumbnail test. Shrink the ad to 150px. Can you still tell what's being sold and read the headline? Most feed impressions render close to that size — if it fails small, it fails, period.
- One message. An ad that says three things says nothing. The scroll gives you one claim; pick the one that moves your buyer and cut the rest.
- Product in the first glance. The eye should land on the product (or its result) before anything else. Lifestyle scenes where the product hides in a corner score high on aesthetics and low on sales.
- A reason to act now. Offer, deadline, stock, seasonality — anything true. “Shop now” with no why now is a wish, not a CTA.
- Trust in-frame. Star rating, review count, press, certification, guarantee — one credible trust element in the image itself, because most viewers never reach your landing page.
- Text under ~20% of the frame. Not because Meta still enforces it, but because dense text collapses at feed size and reads as effort. Say it shorter, or say it in the caption.
- Native to the platform. An ad that looks like a billboard gets treated like one: ignored. The best-performing D2C creatives look like content from the platform they run on — which is why UGC-style video keeps winning auctions against studio polish.
A practical cadence: roast your current best performer first, not your worst. The worst ad's problems are usually obvious; the best ad's hidden weaknesses are where the next win hides, because that is the creative your budget is actually riding on.
If your ad passes all seven and still underperforms, the ceiling is usually the format — static images earn fewer placements and less watch time than video in Meta's auction. That's the gap IgniteAI closes: it turns the product photo you already have into a UGC-style video ad, so the same offer competes in the format the auction favors.
Frequently asked questions
What does Roast My Ad actually check?+
It reviews your ad the way a performance creative director would: hook strength, visual hierarchy, legibility at thumbnail size, offer clarity, call-to-action, and trust signals. You get an overall 0–100 score, the issues ranked by severity, concrete fixes, and a rewritten headline and CTA.
Is my ad image stored anywhere?+
No. The image is analyzed in memory and never saved — only the generated critique is kept so your report can be retrieved. Your creative stays yours.
What image formats work?+
JPEG, PNG and WebP up to 4MB. Screenshots of live ads work fine — including ads pulled from the Meta Ad Library.
Why do static image ads underperform on Meta?+
Meta’s auction increasingly favors video: video ads typically earn more watch time, more placements (Reels, Stories) and cheaper reach. A common pattern is a static ad with a strong offer losing to a mediocre video simply because the format earns more inventory. If your roast score is decent but performance is not, the format itself may be the ceiling.
What is a good roast score?+
Scores are deliberately honest: a competent-but-generic ad lands between 45 and 65, and only genuinely scroll-stopping creative reaches 80+. If you score in the 50s, you are in the crowded middle where most D2C ads live — the fixes in the full report are usually worth more there than anywhere else, because small changes (legible headline at thumbnail size, one clear offer, trust element in-frame) move mid-pack ads the most.
Can I roast a competitor's ad from the Meta Ad Library?+
Yes — screenshot any live ad from the public Meta Ad Library and upload it. It is one of the fastest ways to build creative judgment: roast the three top advertisers in your category, note which issues they systematically avoid, and steal the structure (not the assets). Their live, long-running ads are effectively free market research — an ad that has run for months is usually an ad that converts.
Does it work on video ads?+
Upload a keyframe — the hook frame (first second) matters most, since that is the frame that decides the scroll. A video ad whose opening frame fails the thumbnail test usually underperforms regardless of what happens at second five. For a full video treatment, IgniteAI generates the video itself, scene by scene, with the hook engineered first.
Is this free? What is the catch?+
The roast is free with a fair-use daily limit; the full report unlocks with your email. The "catch" is transparent: IgniteAI sells an AI video ad generator, and some people who roast their static ads decide to generate video ads instead. The roast is useful either way.