The secret behind “ugly” marketing

I know a lot of marketers and designers who probably don’t want me to tell you what I’m about to say.

You are probably wasting most of your marketing dollars.

There. I said it.

I know because I used to waste people’s money too.

Not intentionally, of course. I had the best of intentions.

But the reality is that most of what is taught as good marketing simply isn’t.

The unlearning

I was fortunate enough to come across a very successful mentor who took me under his wing and taught me what was behind his own internet marketing success.

In the beginning, it was a real struggle. There was a lot of unlearning I had to go through, and a lot of things that were not intuitive. Like the fact that ugly designs can often outsell gorgeous designs.

In retrospect, knowing what I know now, it makes perfect sense.

But I had earned a name for myself as a Swiss Army knife of beautiful design. I was building websites and technology, marketing materials, and branding that got me a lot of praise for how pretty or cool they looked.

But the truth is that I had no idea if my marketing was working.

And this is the problem with most marketers, web developers, and copywriters.

What makes them good is also what makes them bad. You see, these guys are creative types who look at what they do as an art form. I know, because that’s what I used to think too.

Marketing is not an art form.

As an artist, this was hard for me to surrender, but I acknowledge it now. The art is the icing on the cake. The substance of that cake is science, based on data and solid research.

There is a science to marketing, and if you and your marketer don’t understand the psychology of it, and don’t have systems in place to test and measure your results, then you are truly flushing money down the proverbial toilet.

That sounds pretty bad, but it gets even worse.

Bad marketing can unsell your customers.

There’s a common misconception (even among most marketers) that goes something like this:

“Any marketing is better than nothing.”

And this is a story that most mediocre marketers and advertisers push, as if marketing runs on a scale from 1 to 100. We are to believe that it only improves your business and your bottom line.

(If you believe that, then there’s a banner on a bench I’d like to sell you.)

This is, at best, a mistake. At worst, it’s a flat-out lie.

The reality is that bad marketing can unsell your customers.

Let me repeat that:

Your bad marketing could be unselling your customers.

Whose portfolio is your budget paying for?

So what is your marketing money going to?

Here’s the dirty secret:

It is very likely that, without knowing it, you are funding the development of someone else’s portfolio.

Let me explain how the business works from the perspective of a web design company, an artist, or a marketer.

Once they have a contract with you, their focus generally is not how to get you as many customers and as much money as possible.

Their next main concern is how to bring in the next project.

Now when a prospective client looks at the portfolio of a marketer, web developer, or artist, they have no idea how successful it was. It is impossible to see how many customers it brought in, or how much money it made.

So what can a prospective client see?

How pretty it is.

Marketers and designers are rewarded for creating pretty things.

Their focus is how to turn your logo, website, print material, etc. into a beautiful portfolio piece that will help them sell their own services. And that is the only real marketing going on.

They are concerned about marketing themselves.

Now I don’t want you to think that these are bad people. They’re not. They’re doing what they’ve been taught to do, and they’re doing what they have found works for them. Pretty designs and cool websites bring in business for web designers and marketers.

But what works for them is not necessarily what will work for you.

And that's where the secret of ugly marketing comes in.

After working with my mentor for several years, I had the opportunity to test beautiful designs against ugly designs. Fancy layouts versus very simple layouts. Sophisticated, animated, full-featured pages versus plain-looking ugly pages.

I didn’t like what I found.

I didn’t like what it implied about the work I had done in the past.

Because what I found was that a very sophisticated website with lots of animation, links, and features didn’t perform nearly as well for his market as something very simple and focused.

For this audience, I discovered that what was written on the page was much more important than how the page looked.

I tested this out with quite a few different markets and demographics, and time and time again, I found similar results:

Lots of fancy options, animations, and bells and whistles often unsold customers, by giving them too much to think about, and too much to be distracted by.

(When I built the first version of this site, I put an animated series of testimonials on this page. It looked cool, but it would have distracted you every five seconds and made it very hard to follow the important message I’m sharing with you. The message won out over the coolness factor. It still does.)

What I discovered (after running split tests for a large information product company) was that good marketing is not just about things being pretty. And good marketing copywriting is not the same as good writing for a college report.

They are totally different animals.

Marketing that sells is about creating something that is custom-tailored to the specific kind of person that your product or service targets. It’s about addressing the conversation your customer already has going on inside their head: getting their needs, concerns, and frustrations, and providing a product or service that will help them and give them great value.

Beautiful design has its place, and I do believe that it can increase sales, as well as develop the value and perception of a brand (otherwise, this web page would be plain white, with some ugly font and nothing else).

But (and this is a big but), the design must work hand-in-hand with the writing, the strategy, and the very focused message: a message that builds a solid relationship with your prospect, and makes them want to continue the relationship with you as a customer.

Update for 2026: the reader that skips your design

The argument has only gotten stronger since, because your website has picked up a new kind of reader.

When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, the answer is written by AI, often drawing on what websites say. Google puts its own AI summary above the links for a real share of searches, too: about one in five in a March 2025 study. And when it does, people click through less. In that study, people who saw a Google AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no summary appeared.

Those answer engines don’t care about your parallax scrolling. They read your words and the structure around them. A clear, specific, well-organized page gives them something to work with. A pretty page with nothing to say gives them nothing.

In other words, what’s written on the page matters more than how the page looks. Again.

That doesn’t make design irrelevant. People still land on your site, and they still judge you by it. It means the design has to serve the message, for both kinds of reader.

Source: Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” July 22, 2025, based on the browsing data of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025.

Remember, marketing is not magic. It’s not a mystical black art. And it shouldn’t be a secret.

Marketing is a science. If you know its laws and principles, you can use it to attract customers.

If what I’ve shared here makes sense, we’d like to hear about your project. If it doesn’t resonate, that’s OK. I’m happy to refer you to someone else.

Attract customers like a Marketing Magnet.