Zillow Home Loans Facebook ads — two rewrites

Zillow Home Loans runs a lot of Facebook video ads. Two of them came through my feed with copy that was describing the product instead of selling it, so I rewrote both.

Mortgage advertising is a constrained category. Say the wrong thing about a rate or a down payment and you trigger a stack of required disclosures. Both rewrites stay inside those limits.

Ad one: tenant to homeowner

The original opened with a definition: Zillow Home Loans is a mortgage lender with expert loan officers. That’s a sentence about the company, written from the company’s side of the table. “Finance it with confidence” closes on an abstraction — confidence isn’t a reason to click.

My version names the transition the reader is actually considering: renting to owning. Then it replaces “confidence” with the two things a renter is weighing, which are the rate and the down payment. The down payment is the real barrier for most first-time buyers, so saying there are low options addresses the objection that stops the click.

I also rewrote the link description. It said “Zillow Home Loans,” which the ad already told you twice. “Explore Mortgage Options” uses that space for an action instead of repeating the brand.

Ad two: walls you can paint

The original leaned on a seasonal hook — new year, new home, new mortgage options. Three parallel phrases that say the same nonspecific thing, and a hook with a shelf life of about six weeks.

My version opens with the smallest concrete detail of owning instead of renting: you can paint the walls whatever color you want. Nobody dreams about amortization. They think about the thing their lease won’t let them do. It gets the reader into the feeling of ownership before the ad says the word “mortgage.”

The second half does the same work as the first ad — competitive rates, low down payment options. Specific enough to be a reason, vague enough to stay clear of the disclosure rules.

A note on this piece

This is spec work. Zillow didn’t hire me. I saw the ads, thought the copy was leaving money on the table, and wrote versions to show what I’d do differently.