What is the Problem and solution ad format?

A named pain is dramatised first, the product answers it second. It appears in 44,855 of the 7,00,232 classified creatives in this library, run by 514 different advertisers.

The ad spends its opening on the viewer's pain, named and dramatised, and only then introduces the product as the answer. Effectively every example in this corpus is video, because the format is a two-act structure and needs time to run both acts.

Also a hook type

Problem-Solution is counted on two axes, and the two numbers are not the same: 44,855 creatives here as a visual format, against 70,128 ads as a hook type.

They measure different things. A visual format describes the shape of the whole creative; a hook type describes only how it opens. An ad built as a problem and solution piece can still open on a price line, so it counts once and not the other. The two also run over different sets of advertisers, which is why the advertiser counts (514 against 167) diverge further than the ad counts do.

See it as a hook type→

Medium

Video and static

Funnel fit

Mid to bottom of funnel

Video share

100% of the format

How it sits in the corpus

By volume this is the 5th largest of the 20 formats in the library: 6% of every classified creative carries it.

Every format in the library by creative count; this page's format in orange.

514 of the 1,103 advertisers analysed (47%) run it.

Depth per advertiser sits near the middle of the pack: about 87 creatives each, against a cross-format median of 49.

Each dot is a format; dot area is creative volume, dashed lines are the cross-format medians. Click a dot to open that format.

At 100% video it is effectively a pure video format; there is no meaningful static version to fall back on, so the production bar is the price of entry.

How this format's creatives split between video and static, against the average across all classified creatives.

When to use it

When the audience feels the problem but has not connected it to a category.

It sells the problem before the product. An audience can feel a pain daily without ever connecting it to a purchasable category; the dramatisation does that connecting. Recognition is the hook ('that is exactly what happens to me'), and it buys the attention the solution act spends. The product then enters not as an option among many but as the specific mechanism that removes the specific pain just shown.

Anatomy of a good one

The structural parts a competent problem and solution always has, and what each is for.

The pain, staged

A concrete moment of the problem happening, shot from the sufferer's point of view. Specificity is what triggers recognition.

The agitation

One or two beats on the cost of the problem: time, money, embarrassment, repetition. This is what separates the format from a demo.

The turn

The product's entrance, positioned as mechanism: how it removes the cause, not just the symptom.

The after

The same scene replayed without the problem. The mirror structure is what makes the argument feel complete.

The instruction

What to do next, framed as escaping the problem rather than acquiring the product.

A relatable sufferer

The person having the problem cast as the audience, not as an actor's exaggeration of them. Recognition is cast before it is written.

Craft rules

01
Open inside the problem, not before it. The first three seconds must show the pain happening; setup is scroll-away time.
02
Pick one problem per ad. The product may solve five, but recognition is singular; a viewer identifies with a moment, not a list.
03
Make the problem the audience's actual phrasing of it. Corpus examples fail most often by dramatising the brand's diagnosis instead of the buyer's complaint.
04
Spend at most a third of the runtime on the problem; agitation past recognition curdles into dwelling.
05
Show the mechanism at the turn. A product that fixes the problem by cut ('and then everything was fine') asks for faith the format was built to avoid needing.

How it goes wrong

A problem so exaggerated the viewer disowns it. Recognition fails both when the pain is too generic and when it is cartoonish.
The unearned turn: agitating one problem and demonstrating a product that answers a different one.
Running it to buyers already past the problem stage, for whom the first act is a delay in front of the spec answer they came for.

The shapes it takes

One label, several distinct executions. The variants are worth testing as separate ads, because the platform will price them differently.

Slice of life

Acted scene of the pain, product resolves it. The canonical TV-inherited shape.

Talking diagnosis

A presenter names the problem to camera, then demonstrates the fix. Cheaper, faster to test, carries most of the corpus volume.

POV problem

First-person footage of the problem as the viewer meets it. The strongest opens in feed environments.

Myth and fix

'The reason X keeps happening is not what you think.' The problem is reframed before being solved; strong when the category has a wrong default explanation.

When it wears out

The structure does not fatigue; specific dramatisations do. When a winning ad decays, keep the two-act skeleton and recast the pain moment for the next segment. A problem-solution library is really a library of recognisable moments.

What to run alongside it

Who runs this format

514 advertisers run this format. Of the brands with a page in this library, Oolka runs it hardest, with 7,514 creatives in this shape.

Problem and solution ads in the wild

15 real creatives carrying this format, drawn from across the advertisers analysed. Video entries show their opening frame.

IGP.com Problem and solution ad — IGP.com

vandanasathya.offcl Problem and solution ad — vandanasathya.offcl

GoodScore Problem and solution ad — GoodScore

Be Bodywise Problem and solution ad — Be Bodywise

Jar App Problem and solution ad — Jar App

TamilShaadi.com Problem and solution ad — TamilShaadi.com

Nikki gets hypd Problem and solution ad — Nikki gets hypd

Other formats

Sourced from public ad libraries. The source data carries no visual-format field, so this format is assigned by matching each creative's own description against the taxonomy's vocabulary, which makes the counts indicative rather than exact. Brand pages currently cover the two-wheeler and EV set for Aug 24, 2025 → Aug 24, 2026; the format count above spans every advertiser analysed.