Hey Reader

Had a call with a subscription app’s growth team recently.

Preparing for the Q5 CPM crash.

..the big spike in January.

New Year New You etc.

They wanted to go big.

They were ready to scale.

But they weren't feeling it.

Creative tests werent translating to performance.

Every week, they were trying to come up with completely new ad concepts.

New hooks. New angles. New everything.

20 different ideas. 20 directions.

And nothing was landing.

Performance was flat. CPAs were climbing.

…and there's only so much you can blame Q4 competition.

They said: "We're doing everything right. We're shooting for creative diversity. We're testing constantly. We're producing more than ever."

…and when I took a closer look at the account, I realized that THAT was exactly the problem.

Every week was a blank slate.

Every brief was a new invention.

Every creative session started from zero.

Their team was fried. Their designers were frustrated. Their media buyers were scrambling.

And the algorithm? It had nothing to latch onto. 20 ideas. Zero compounding.

I told them: you don't need 20 big ideas. You need a handful of big ideas - extended, compounded.

Here's what we did.

We looked at their last 90 days of creative.

Found their top 4 ads that were actually working.

Then we went deep on WHY they were working.

The hook. The emotion. The urgency. The narrative flow. The visual format.

Our visual intelligence agent BruteForce AI broke it all down.

Then we surgically expanded.

Seeing exactly what variables we’d change, and what we’d keep intact.

Took an ad that was anxiety-driven. Made a version that was relief-driven.

‘Reskinned’ a FOMO-based message 5 ways.

Took a notepad ad, turned it into an AIGC.

Similar messages. New shells.

(...and only then did we test net-new concepts to take big swings).

Within a couple of weeks, performance stabilized. CPAs came down.

And it’s starting to look like they have some crazy momentum going into January.

This is the cadence of how we produce thousands of ads monthly. Without burning out. Without chaos. Without nuking performance.

If you spend $50k+/mo and want to see how we can help you get battle ready for Q5 and Jan, hit reply and say ‘JAN’ - and we’ll talk.

Later,

Shamanth