Fifteen seconds is about 225 characters of script, or 35 to 40 words. That’s a hook, one thing the product does, and what to do next. Most scripts that don’t work are trying to say four things.
Here’s how to write one that sounds spoken, and how to make it in Shotz.
The shape
The first sentence is the hook: a confession, a surprising result, the viewer’s problem or a question. Then what the product does about it, with one concrete detail. Then a short call to action. No list of features, no slogan.
A woman in her thirties in a yellow raincoat standing on a cliff-top road beside a small camper van at sunrise, looking out over an endless sea of clouds below, a thermos in her hand, vertical framing.
Here’s one that runs about 13 seconds: “I used to pack three jackets for one weekend. Now I pack this. It folds into its own pocket and it’s kept me dry on every cliff road this year. Link’s below.”
Write it to be said
Read it out loud before you make it. Use contractions and short words, and write numbers the way you’d say them. Put a full stop where you’d breathe, and cut any sentence you stumble on twice. Leave out stage directions: write only the words.
If it runs long, cut words, not pace. A rushed read sounds like an ad, and the first thing people do with an ad is scroll past it.
Make it
Open Tools, then Voiceover, and paste the script. It shows about how long it runs and what it costs. Pick a voice: 21 on ElevenLabs v3, each with a play button for a sample, or 30 of Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS’s own voices, for fewer credits. A character Element with a voice speaks in it, so your creator always sounds the same. It speaks the language you write in.
On ElevenLabs, a voiceover up to 30 seconds is free three times a day. If all you have is a rough idea, Write it for me turns it into a script, in your brand’s voice if you have one.
An ElevenLabs voiceover lands in your Library with every word timed, so captions line up without waiting.
One script, more languages
Once the ad is cut, Dub makes it speak other languages, up to five at a time from 29, in the speaker’s own voice. It takes a video of up to ten minutes, and each language comes back as its own video in your Library.
Write your 15 seconds, read it out loud twice, then make it in two voices and keep the one you’d listen to.
