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Notes

Why 'More Videos' Stopped Being the Hard Part of Content Production

Published

Everyone in this category still sells volume, because volume is what used to be scarce. It isn't any more. What's scarce is somebody willing to tell you which four to run.

What changed

Five years ago the reason a DTC brand didn't have enough creative was production: shoots cost money, creators were slow, and editing was a bottleneck. Every business model in this category was built around relieving that constraint, which is why they all sell you a number of videos per month.

Generation removed the bottleneck. It is now trivially possible to produce a hundred videos a month, and Meta will generate variations inside Ads Manager for free. The scarce resource moved and the pricing didn't follow it.

Where the constraint went

It went to review. Someone has to watch every file and decide whether it's good, and that person's capacity is fixed. A hundred videos a month is not a hundred videos of value — it's a hundred videos somebody has to sit through, and if nobody does, it's a folder.

The tell is the ratio between what a brand produces and what it actually runs. Thirty assets produced and four run isn't an under-supply of creative. It's an over-supply of production and an under-supply of judgement.

Why a hundred variations aren't a hundred tests

The other half of the problem is that volume from a pipeline which isn't reading your results tends to be volume of the same idea. Twelve executions of one angle fatigue together, because they were always one angle. You didn't run twelve tests; you ran one, expensively.

Distinct angles are the scarce thing, and they don't come out of a prompt. They come out of your reviews, your comment sections and your competitors' comment sections, which is work somebody has to do.

What we sell instead

Fewer pieces, each of which we can defend, plus a note on which ones to put money behind and which to kill. That's a smaller number on the invoice line and a larger amount of the actual job.

It's a worse pitch. "Twelve videos" loses to "a hundred videos" in every side-by-side a buyer runs, right up until they've bought the hundred once.

The sizing question — how many you actually need — is in how many ad creatives does a DTC brand need. What that costs is on the pricing page.

Start here

One angle, two finished videos, three business days. $50, one-off, and you own every file.