Episode Details

Making a single ad used to cost half a million to a few million dollars. You poured everything into one hero execution and you had to be right, because that was the bet. That world is gone. Today a brand can make a few hundred ads off an iPhone, put a bit of spend behind each, and let the market decide.

Here's the shift most teams haven't made: finding a breakout ad isn't about one person being braver, it's about how the whole team works. Loosen the approvals so more creative goes live, trust the data over opinion, and let go of the idea that any single Meta ad is your whole brand. Most of them are disposable.

This Playbook is anchored by Mark Broadhead, Head of Creative and Growth at The Lad Collective, who made around 15,000 ads in four years to find fewer than 10 that truly flew, and grew the brand to 200,000 customers and a US launch on the back of it.

In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about finding their unicorn ads:

• Take more shots and ring-fence your testing budget from your proven winners, because volume is now a strategy
• Change your approvals, not just your attitude, so the default is that ads go live and the data decides
• Give your long shots their own budget, because the algorithm optimises for the next sale, not your next unicorn

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