The challenge
Verrin sells mid-priced headphones into a category where every competitor runs the same unboxing format. Their media buyer had done the structural work properly — consolidated ad sets, clean tracking, sensible optimisation events — and performance still degraded month over month. The diagnosis nobody wanted was that the account was starved: winning assets fatigued in about three weeks, and the studio produced four new pieces a month against a hit rate of roughly one in eight. The arithmetic guaranteed decline no matter how the media was bought.
What we did
Measured the fatigue and hit rates before changing anything
We pulled twelve months of asset-level data to establish two numbers: how long a winner lasted before performance dropped materially, and what share of new concepts ever became winners. Those two figures set the required monthly output. Until they existed, every conversation about creative volume was an opinion.
Separated concept testing from production polish
The studio was applying full finishing to every asset, including the seven in eight that would be killed within a fortnight. We split the pipeline: rough concept cuts tested cheaply at low spend, and only proven concepts received the expensive treatment. Same team, same hours, roughly six times the concepts entering the funnel.
Built a modular asset system from one shoot
Rather than commissioning a shoot per campaign, we filmed a component library — hooks, product beats, demonstration segments, testimonial fragments — that recombine. A new concept became an edit rather than a production, which is what made the throughput sustainable after we left.
Made the opening the unit of testing
We tracked hook rate separately from conversion, which showed that several assets with strong closing arguments were never being watched. Re-cutting openings onto existing footage recovered three concepts that had already been written off, at the cost of an afternoon each.
The result
Cost per acquisition fell 38% over six months with no change to targeting, bidding or budget. The gains came almost entirely from having enough viable concepts in rotation that fatigued assets could be replaced before performance degraded. Hook rate on winning concepts rose 41% once openings were tested independently. The modular library is now on its third quarter of use and the studio's output has held at roughly six times the original rate without additional headcount.
“We spent a year assuming we had a media problem. We had a supply problem, and nobody had put a number on it. Being shown the arithmetic — this is your fatigue rate, this is your hit rate, therefore this is what you must produce — ended an argument we'd been having internally for months.”