How to Use Hooks
This guide shows you a simple system for finding hooks that already work in the wild. You will see how to use Foreplay’s Spyder to track winning openers, save them into boards, and build new ads on top of what the market has already proved.
Hooks are everything.
That first 1-3 seconds in a video decides if someone stops scrolling or keeps going. If you’re running paid social and doing creative strategy, you cannot afford to guess on hooks.
Foreplay makes this a lot easier.
Instead of watching hundreds of ads and typing hooks out by hand, you can see what is already working for the fastest growing brands and use that as your starting point.
See a brand’s best hooks in seconds
In Foreplay, you can open the ad library and see ads for any brand.
Let us use DRMTLGY as an example. They are a fast growing skincare brand, and I want to know which hooks are actually working for them.
In the Top Performing Hooks section in Spyder I can see every hook they’re using, sorted by how long those hooks have been kept on in live ads.
With one click you can jump into the Hooks view inside Spyder and see all their hooks in one place. You can do this for:
- Direct competitors
- Agencies
- Any fast growing brand in a similar space
You don’t need to test thousands of random hooks. You can start from what the market has already proved.
Longest running hooks tell you what actually works
By default, you can see the latest hooks a brand launched.
Sometimes that’s useful, but big brands launch a lot of creative and not everything sticks.
I recommend sorting by longest running.
Now you can see at the hooks that have been live for months, sometimes even years. For example: “It has tons of actives in it.”
It’s a simple line. Nothing fancy. But this hook ran for close to a thousand days.
You can click into the ad details and see:
- The structure of the video
- How many creators are in it
- How the product shows up on screen
- How the hook is delivered
If you want to focus only on what’s live right now, you can add the “Still running” filter. This will show you all the hooks the brand is currently using to find new customers today.
Foreplay writes the hooks for you.
You used to have to watch every ad, type out the first line by hand, and try to keep it all organized across brands and clients. It was slow, boring work that nobody on your team actually wanted to do.
With Foreplay, the transcript is already pulled for you and the hook is extracted. You see the line, how long it has been running, and which brand it belongs to at a glance.
From there you can:
- Pin winning hooks
- Save them into boards
- Use them as direct inputs for your next creative tests
Instead of “let’s think of 20 hooks from scratch,” your brief becomes “let’s test variations of these 5 hooks that have proven to work for brands like ours.” You get the leverage of AI without anyone needing a learning curve.
Could you hack together a similar workflow using multiple AI tools, exports, and scripts? Maybe.
But it would be:
- Hard to set up
- Harder to maintain
- Almost impossible to train a growing team on
Foreplay hands you the best hooks from the fastest growing brands. Your team can see what’s winning, pin the ones that matter, and turn them into tests.
You get AI doing the grunt work so your team can stay focused on ideas, not data plumbing.
Use Foreplay to find top performing hooks and build ads based on what the market has already proven to work.
