Design service / Ad Creative

Performance creative, tested.

At the speed the new algorithms demand.

A growth lead at a beauty brand called us in February. Her Meta CPA had doubled in nine days, and the four creatives she had launched the quarter on were burned.

Her incumbent agency had quoted four weeks for nine new concepts. We had three concept territories in her inbox inside 48 hours. Under Andromeda and Symphony, that is the cycle the platforms now reward.

Shanghai studio / Art-directed at volume

Overhead view of a hubStudio creative workspace: a phone showing a paused vertical-video ad, three printed storyboard cards and a graphite pencil on warm plaster. Studio work / Concept board

Why it matters

Two platform shifts.
One math problem.

Meta's Andromeda retrieval system, rolled out by late 2025, enabled what Meta's engineering team described as a 10,000-fold increase in retrieval model complexity. The algorithm reads visuals, copy, emotional signals and offer type at the content level, then decides which audience to serve each creative to before the auction runs.

Targeting, the way agencies used to build it, has stopped being the lever. The creative is. TikTok's Symphony stack added a second pressure wave: the platform recommends 10 to 15 conceptually distinct assets per campaign as a floor.

Brands shipped this year include HiSense, Camper and Shiseido.

A young woman at a sunlit cafe table holding a phone showing a paused vertical-video beauty ad.
The half-second test

Brands testing 20 or more entity-distinct ads per month see significantly higher ROAS than brands testing under 10. One ad set holding 25 creatives outperforms five ad sets of five.

8 wks Creative fatigue window Was 6 to 8 weeks before Andromeda
0+ Entity-distinct ads / month Threshold for higher Meta ROAS
0 Distinct assets / TikTok campaign Symphony floor for distinct assets

The work, defined

Two lanes, one creative direction.

A smartphone playing a paused short-form video ad for an apparel brand, an example of platform-native creative.
Global platforms

Coverage

Every format the platforms ask for.

Performance creative for Meta, TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Xiaohongshu, all in one shop.

Meta rewards entity-distinct concepts. TikTok rewards native, creator-coded work that doesn't read as an ad. A global campaign across these surfaces is really five different briefs.

Statics for Meta single-image and carousel, Pinterest, LinkedIn. Short-form vertical for Reels, TikTok, Shorts, Douyin. UGC sourced from the markets you actually sell into, with real creators where the brief calls for them and AI talent where volume calls for it. Always-on refresh on a weekly or biweekly cadence.

In scope

  • Static social
  • Carousel
  • Short-form video
  • UGC and creator-style
  • AI talent
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Always-on refresh
  • Hook design
  • Sound-on impact
A smartphone propped on a plaster ledge showing a clean static ad for a skincare brand, an example of cross-border creative.
Cross-border into China

Coverage

Douyin and Xiaohongshu, ran in-platform.

Seeding notes that read as reviews. Short-drama product integration. The warm-up plus livestream structure that's standard practice in Greater China.

Brands launching or relaunching in mainland China need creative built for those platforms, not Meta ads cross-posted with Mandarin captions. Tone, pacing, hook design and disclosure conventions all sit differently.

Our production team is based in Shanghai, which is where the in-platform fluency lives. We ship Xiaohongshu seeding notes, short-drama product integration, KOL casting briefs, and the warm-up plus livestream structure that brands use to launch a category.

In scope

  • Xiaohongshu seeding
  • Short-drama integration
  • Livestream warm-up
  • KOL casting briefs
  • Douyin native video
  • Bilibili content
  • WeChat creative
  • Local talent
  • Regulatory copy
  • Mandarin hook copy

Contact sheet

Selected creative.

Static frames and short-form hook frames from recent ad-creative batches, photographed in the studio. Each is authored work, not a stock pull.

A smartphone propped on a plaster ledge showing a clean static Instagram carousel ad for Soren skincare.
Soren Skincare carousel
A hand holding a smartphone showing a paused short-form video ad: a young person in a taupe knit hoodie for Halo apparel.
Halo Apparel UGC
A smartphone laid beside a chilled aluminium drink can on teal concrete, the screen showing a hero static for Drift.
Drift Beverage hero
A smartphone propped against vintage travel guides showing a Pinterest pin-format ad for the Vesper travel app.
Vesper Travel pin
A smartphone on a black slate beside a small chrome earbud case, the screen showing a paused short-form video for Kora.
Kora Tech hook frame
A smartphone on a folded gym towel beside a steel water bottle, screen showing a static habit-tracker ad for Loop.
Loop Fitness static
An art director leaning over a long worktable of printed ad-creative variants, post-its and a laptop in a Shanghai design studio.
A hand pinning a small printed storyboard card to a fabric pinboard beside other ad concept cards.
48–72 hrs Brief to first concept territories

The craft

Direction is the lever.
Production is the wheel.

A model renders 500 product shots overnight. Knowing which 30 are worth running, why the rest will tank, and how the next batch should be different, is what art directors do. It is what we hire for.

We map the testing matrix before production starts. Three to five concept territories per campaign, each carrying a hypothesis about audience, hook and offer. Each ladders into 15 to 30 variants that share the hypothesis but vary on execution.

  • Concept territories
  • Entity-distinct
  • Hook-rate testing
  • Brand-safety review

Algorithms see ads at a granularity human producers used to ignore. Two creatives that look different to a designer can land in the same Entity ID cluster and compete as one ad. Variants ship with structurally distinct fingerprints, so each one earns its own ticket into retrieval.

If you already keep a brand agency for tentpole work, no problem. We handle the always-on lane and step back from the brand-strategy seat.

Our process

Creative is where
it is won.

Most studios sell process. We sell the creative call. AI made the technical side cheap and fast for everyone. It did not replace the eye that picks which hypothesis is worth scaling, and which one will fatigue inside a week.

First two steps are where it is won or lost. The rest is execution.

An open notebook with hand-drawn audience-funnel diagrams beside two smartphones showing competitor ad screenshots.
Where it is won

Brief and channel strategy.

Audience, offer, hook hypothesis, channel mix, KPI targets. Locked before a frame is built.

An art director arranging printed ad-creative storyboard cards into a single concept territory on a plaster wall.
Where it is won

Concept territories. The step that matters most.

Senior art directors set three to five concept territories per campaign, each carrying a hypothesis about audience, hook and offer. This is the lever the algorithm rewards.

A laptop screen showing a dense grid of generated ad-creative variants, the same model in many subtle styling variations.
The rest is execution

Variants engineered to be entity-distinct.

Fifteen to thirty executions per territory, each with a structurally distinct fingerprint so the algorithm reads it as its own ticket into retrieval.

Two smartphones on a deep navy desk showing a social-ads launch interface and a short-form-video upload screen.
The rest is execution

Platform-native delivery.

Statics, vertical video, UGC and creator-style cuts, sized and finished for Meta, TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Douyin and Xiaohongshu.

A performance dashboard on a monitor beside a smartphone showing the next batch of three fresh ad creatives queued for launch.
The rest is execution

Always-on testing and refresh.

Weekly or biweekly drops against a running test plan. Territories that hold get extended. Territories that break get retired and replaced from the brief.

The new math

How AI changes
the refresh cycle.

A beauty brand calls in February. Meta CPA has doubled in nine days, the quarter's four creatives are burned. The same brief, quoted two ways.

The agency quote Four weeks
Brief One week Concepts Two weeks Production One week

The incumbent quote: one week of brief and strategy, two weeks of concept development, one week of production. Four weeks to nine creatives. By the time they ship, the burn has moved on and the test plan is already stale.

Our cycle 48 hours
First concept territories 48 to 72 hours

Our cycle: first concept territories in the inbox inside 48 hours. Dozens of entity-distinct variants per territory in the first drop. Photoreal mockups before a creator is booked. Refresh ships weekly, not quarterly.

48 to 72 hours for first concept territories on a rush brief. Five to seven business days for a full launch batch on a standard brief, including statics, video cuts and platform-native variants. Always-on clients run on a weekly or biweekly drop schedule agreed in the retainer.

We track at the territory level, not the variant level, because that's how the algorithm sees it. Hook rate and 6-second view rate on video. Thumb-stop and CTR on static. Then CPA and ROAS by territory once spend matures. A territory that holds CPA for two weeks gets extended. A territory that breaks gets retired and replaced from the brief. We don't promise specific performance numbers up front, the variables outside our control (offer, audience, landing page, attribution model) move them too much. We do promise the production cadence, the entity-distinct discipline, and the testing matrix.

Project-based for one-off campaigns. Monthly retainer for always-on testing programs, billed quarterly in advance for retainer clients. The quote depends on channel mix, concept territory count and refresh cadence, which we lock after the first call. We share the full pricing once we understand the brief, because anything we quote before that is either too high or too low for the actual work.

Depends on the media spend level and the channel mix. A typical launch batch for a Meta-led campaign is three to five concept territories, with 20 to 40 statics and 6 to 12 video cuts per territory in the first drop. Always-on retainers usually ship dozens of entity-distinct creatives per month against a running test plan. We size the volume to what the algorithm is asking for at your spend level, not to a fixed package.

Brand guidelines if you have them. Product imagery, current best-performing ads, current losing ads, audience and offer notes, channel mix, media spend level, KPI targets. Access to your ad accounts if you want us to look at fatigue data directly. If brand guidelines don't exist, we build a working visual system in the first sprint and hand it over.

Art directors from agency backgrounds (think Publicis, Ogilvy, WPP) lead every concept territory. AI specialists handle production volume. Performance creative leads run the testing matrix. No junior teams running the brief alone. The creative direction layer is the single thing we won't compromise on, because it's where the AI slop risk lives.

Like you. We train our models on your existing brand assets, much in the spirit of Coca-Cola's StyleID approach, so the output sits inside your visual system rather than the model's default look. For brands without a documented system, we build one in the first sprint and hand it over. Avoiding the trust penalty is the single most important judgment call on every project, and it sits with the art director, not the model.

Every batch passes a brand-safety review before delivery, covering on-brand consistency, factual claims if any, and platform compliance. Where talent likeness is involved we secure rights documentation. We use commercially safe generation models and keep the workflow logged, so if an AI disclosure is required (the IAB's January 2026 framework is voluntary but increasingly expected on regulated channels) we can supply the metadata.

You own the final deliverables. We use commercially safe models and document the workflow. For the legal side in full, see our Copyright and AI guide .

Yes. Talent sourcing in the markets you sell into, voice-over and subtitle localization, regulatory copy variants by market, currency and offer logic. We've shipped campaigns across the US, EU, UK, Middle East, APAC and Greater China. Cross-border into Douyin and Xiaohongshu is a lane we run regularly for brands launching or relaunching in mainland China.

Native. Vertical first, sound-on hook design, creator-coded scripts, the cadence the platform actually rewards. We benchmark hook rate and 6-second view rate against TikTok Creative Center category norms before a batch ships, and design each hook to clear the 30 percent hook rate floor. Cross-posting Meta ads to TikTok is a known way to underperform.

Our production team is based in Shanghai with creative direction distributed across Europe and Asia. Most clients run on a 24-hour build cycle with that setup. Brief at end of day, first output at start of next day in their time zone. For Greater China work this is also where the in-platform fluency lives.

Fine. Many of our clients keep a brand agency for tentpole work and use us for the always-on performance creative the brand agency isn't built to staff at volume. We deliver into your naming convention and step back from the brand-strategy lane.

Two rounds of revisions are included in the standard concept quote. Beyond that we quote hourly, but it's rare. Inside the always-on retainer, revisions roll into the next cycle since the workflow is iterative by design. Rejected concepts stay yours, and we keep the source files on our side for 12 months in case you want to revive a direction later.

Yes. Send us one campaign brief. Inside one week you get a first concept batch and a refresh-cycle estimate sized to your media plan. No retainer, no commitment, the work is yours either way.

Try us

Try it on a
real brief.

Send us one campaign brief. Inside a week you get a first concept batch and a refresh-cycle estimate sized to your media plan. No retainer, no commitment. Whatever we produce is yours to keep, even if you walk.