By Ilja Mathijssen, Art Director, SuperHeroes
How often does a static ad actually make you stop scrolling through your feed? Not just glance at it, but properly pause and take notice?
For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the answer is almost certainly ‘rarely’ (if ever). These generations are fluent in the language of social – swiping, skipping, and bouncing between platforms in seconds. According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index, 89% of Gen Z users are on Instagram, 84% are on YouTube, and 82% are on TikTok. They don’t sit still in one feed – they move fast, scroll instinctively, and dodge anything that smells like a traditional ad.
Their attention spans are famously short – reportedly just eight seconds. For brands, that presents a brutal reality: if your creative doesn’t grab attention almost immediately, it probably won’t grab any at all.
Why static creative can’t keep up
This reality exposes the limits of a static-first approach. No matter how witty or clever the creative, static formats simply aren’t built for today’s media habits. They rely on pause, reflection or context, all of which are in short supply when someone’s swiping at speed.
Video, on the other hand, has the power to grab attention mid-scroll. It can surprise, entertain and deliver a message within seconds. But only if it’s built with a platform-first approach.
Don’t repeat yourself. Hijack the feed
Too often, brands take a one-size-fits-all creative asset and push it across every social platform with minor tweaks – hoping it will still land. It rarely does. When an ad feels out of place, it gets ignored.
To win attention today, brands must work with the unique rhythms of each platform, not against them. That means understanding what people expect to see, how they scroll, and how to surprise them in a way that feels playful, not pushy.
Take our recent ‘Grab the Cookie’ campaign for Oreo. To launch their new recipe with more cocoa, we created ‘fake ads’ for fictional products – a horror movie, museum portrait or a perfume launch. Each looked like standard content… until something strange happened. The character broke the fourth wall and stole an Oreo cookie from the ad next to theirs.
What made it work? Every version of the ad was tailor designed for the platform it lived on.
On TikTok, the Oreo ad smartly mirrors the platform’s vertical scroll by showing a creepy clown from a new movie poster reaching downward through the current video frame to steal a cookie from the ad “below” it, as if physically interacting with the next video in the feed. On Facebook, a woman in a faux perfume ad reaches up into the Oreo creative above her in-feed. For digital OOH, we had characters stretch across side-by-side placements, while on YouTube, the action was compressed to play out before the six-second skip button appeared.
The creative idea was consistent. The execution was anything but. Each version was adapted visually, tonally and behaviourally to the platform it lived on. And that’s what made it scroll-stopping.
The principles still matter
Of course, none of this means anything if you forget the fundamentals of social media advertising.
First: get to the point. You’ve got a few seconds to win attention, so make sure the brand appears early – ideally within three seconds.
Second: keep it short. Attention nosedives after 10 seconds, no matter how good the idea is. Brevity isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s essential.
Third: don’t be boring. That should go without saying.
This kind of attention-hijacking isn’t for everyone. And even when it is, it shouldn’t be overused. You can’t build a whole brand strategy around one visual trick – it wears thin quickly.
It is best reserved for moments when you need to inject energy into a campaign, reach new audiences, or show up in culture in a way that feels immediate and alive.
What’s next: break the walls
We’re only just scratching the surface of what’s possible. New creative technologies, from AI to mixed reality, are set to evolve this space even further. Imagine a future billboard that lets you be the one to steal the cookie.
But while the tools evolve, the principles won’t. Because in a fragmented, scroll-first media world, success won’t come from being louder or more aggressive. It will come from being platform-native, motion-first, and behaviour-aware – built to move with the feed, not fight against it.
