Ad scripts
An ad script is the written plan for a video ad: what is said, what is shown, and when each beat lands. Below are six formats ecommerce brands actually sell with, each with its structure, its runtime, the funnel stage it suits, and three of them written out in full with timing cues and bracketed placeholders you can copy straight into a brief. The templates are free and there is nothing to download. The hard part is not the structure, it is filling the brackets with language your customers actually used, and the last section covers how to stop doing that by hand.
Each format below solves a different job, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a well-written script underperforms. A testimonial aimed at a cold audience asks strangers to care about a customer of a brand they have never heard of. An objection-handling script aimed at cold traffic answers a question nobody has asked yet. Match the format to the stage first, then write.
Runtimes matter more than they used to, because the opening is doing more work. TikTok tells advertisers to land the content proposition inside the first three seconds, and separately reports that around 90% of an ad's recall impact sits inside the first six. Every template here front-loads accordingly. The full reasoning behind that shape, and how to brief it out to a creator, is in the ad script generator playbook.
Hook names the problem in the viewer's own words. Body makes the cost of the problem concrete before the product appears. CTA offers the fix. The agitation beat is the one teams cut and the one that makes it work.
Opens on the customer, not the brand. A specific outcome in the first line, the objection they had before buying in the middle, and the resolution at the end. Lifted from a review rather than scripted from scratch.
Establishes the old state, shows the switch, lands on the new state. Needs the longest runtime of the six because the contrast carries the argument, and a rushed before beat leaves the after meaningless.
First person, handheld, no brand voice. Reaction first, product detail second, recommendation last. Written to be filmed by one person on a phone, which is why the script reads as speech rather than copy.
Names the exact hesitation out loud in the hook, answers it with proof in the body, then removes the risk in the CTA. The highest-leverage format you can run at people who visited and did not buy.
One claim, one proof, one CTA, nothing else. There is no room for setup, so the whole script lives or dies on whether the first line is a real statement rather than a throat-clear.
Copy these as they are. Everything in square brackets is a placeholder waiting for something specific from your product, your offer or your reviews. The timing column is a guide for reading pace, not a hard cut point.
30 seconds · cold audience · Meta feed or Reels
30 seconds · retargeting and abandoned cart · Meta feed
15 seconds · cold · TikTok and Reels, filmed on a phone
Cold traffic needs a problem or a hook, not a testimonial about a product nobody has heard of. Retargeting needs the objection that stopped the purchase. Matching format to stage before you write anything removes most of the rewriting later.
Fill the structural placeholders first: what the product is, who it is for, what the offer is. These are the parts you already know, and getting them down turns the blank page into an editing job.
Every bracket asking for a phrase, an objection or a reason wants a sentence a customer actually wrote. Not a paraphrase of one. This is the step that decides whether the script sounds like an ad or like a person, and it is the step that takes hours.
Speaking pace runs about two and a half words per second at a natural conversational delivery, so 30 seconds is roughly 75 words. If you cannot say it comfortably in the slot, the script is too long. Cut the setup, never the proof.
The body is the expensive part to produce and the hook is the cheap part to change. Shoot one body and three openings, and you get three tests for close to the price of one.
Read those five steps back and notice which one has no shortcut. Picking a format takes a minute. Dropping in the product detail takes five. Reading it aloud against a stopwatch takes thirty seconds. Step three, replacing the bracketed language with things customers genuinely said, is the one that takes an afternoon per script, because it means reading reviews, comment threads and survey answers until a pattern emerges, and then doing it again for the next product.
That is not a discipline problem, it is a volume problem. A brand with two thousand reviews across four products has more signal than any strategist can hold in their head, and the useful phrase is rarely in the first fifty reviews you read. So teams skip it, paraphrase from memory, and ship a script that is structurally correct and sounds like every other ad in the feed.
Quote, do not paraphrase. If a reviewer wrote "I stopped worrying about it halfway through the first week", that exact sentence is your hook. Rewriting it as "customers report rapid peace of mind" is how a real observation becomes marketing language, and the specificity that made it persuasive is the first thing lost. Lift the phrasing intact, including the awkward parts, because the awkward parts are what make it sound like a person.
Lead with the objection your best customers raise most, not the one you find easiest to answer. Rank objections by frequency across your whole review set rather than by how recently you read one. Then match the register to the platform: TikTok wants first person and handheld, a Meta feed tolerates a produced read, and email can carry a longer setup than either. The claim stays the same across all three. Only the delivery changes, which is why one good argument is worth more than three good edits.
Finally, tie every script back to a claim that has already moved conversion, and test hooks rather than artwork. This matters more each year: Nielsen credits creative, not targeting or media spend, with up to 89% of a digital ad's in-market success, Meta's own research on creative quality and ad ROI agrees, and Facebook cost per lead climbed almost 21% year over year in 2025, per WordStream's benchmarks. Grading the argument before you shoot it is covered in scoring ad creative, and the UGC script guide goes deeper on the creator-led formats above.
"A template fixes the structure, which was never the reason your ads underperform. The reason is that the words inside the structure came out of a meeting instead of out of a customer. Every brand already owns the good lines. They are sitting unread in the review feed."
Selzee removes step three. It connects to your reviews, comments, product data and campaign performance, ranks the objections and desires your customers raise by how often they raise them, and returns the hooks, angles and briefs those patterns support, each carrying the customer quote it came from. Instead of reading two thousand reviews to fill one bracket, you get the phrase, the frequency behind it, and the source, then drop it straight into the template.
Your strategist edits and approves rather than starting from a blank document, which is what turns a week of research into an afternoon and lets a team test three arguments where it used to test one. The templates on this page stay free either way. If you want to see the fill-in step run against your own store, that is what the demo is. The wider workflow around it is covered in competitor ads analysis and the AI creative strategist.
An ad script is the written plan for a video or audio advertisement: what is said, what is shown, and when each beat lands. For paid social it is usually a short document with timing cues down one side and spoken lines plus visual direction down the other, written so a creator or editor can film it without asking follow-up questions.
Match the word count to the runtime at roughly two and a half words per second of natural speech. That puts a 15-second script near 40 words, a 30-second script near 75, and a 60-second script near 150. Those are ceilings, not targets. Leaving room for a visual beat almost always beats filling every second with voiceover.
A complete statement the viewer can disagree with. TikTok advises advertisers to land the content proposition inside the first three seconds, and reports that the large majority of an ad's recall impact sits inside the first six. A hook that only sets up the real claim has spent the whole budget on preamble.
Your own reviews, post-purchase survey answers, support tickets and the comment sections under your existing ads. Sort by what recurs rather than by what reads well: an objection raised forty times is a script, and an eloquent one-off is a distraction. Doing that by hand across a few hundred reviews is what makes scripting slow.
The argument transfers. The delivery does not. A claim that lands on TikTok lands in a Meta feed too, but TikTok wants first-person handheld delivery and Meta tolerates a more produced read. Rewrite the register, keep the claim, and do not reshoot the whole thing to change platform.
Three to five genuinely different arguments beats twenty variants of one. Platform automation already optimises permutations of your assets, so testing six colourways of the same claim returns information the algorithm would have found without you. Different objections, different formats, one variable at a time.
Bring your store, your reviews and the product you are struggling to write for. We will run Selzee against them live and hand back the objections ranked by frequency, the hooks they support, and the customer quote behind each one, dropped into the templates on this page. You keep the output whether or not you buy anything.
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Keep exploring: how to generate ads end to end, the ad script generator playbook, the UGC script guide, Meta ads templates, scoring ad creative, competitor ads analysis, what ad creative is.