Creator ads that cooked up cheaper trials
A meal planning app was spending well on Meta and TikTok, but its polished studio videos had stopped working. We rebuilt the creative pipeline around real home cooks and cut the cost of a trial by almost a third.
The challenge
The account ran on six studio-shot videos with perfect lighting and plated dishes. They looked great in a brand deck and blended into every food feed.
Cost per trial had climbed for four months straight, and the team had paused new channels because they had nothing new to run there.
What we did
- 1
Tagged every past ad
We labeled 140 historic ads by opening line, format and message. The few that had worked all showed a messy kitchen and a real weeknight problem.
- 2
Built a creator bench
Twelve home cooks with different family sizes and diets, briefed with a one-page script and a shared shot list.
- 3
Shipped weekly batches
Eight new videos a week, each cut in three lengths. Openings that held attention were reused with fresh endings.
- 4
Matched the store page
The first two screenshots were redesigned to repeat the promise of the best ads: dinner planned in five minutes.
The results
- new ads shipped in 10 weeks
- 96new ads shipped in 10 weeks
- thumb-stop rate vs the old set
- 2.4×thumb-stop rate vs the old set
- store page install rate
- +18%store page install rate
“The new ads look like something a friend would send you. That turned out to be exactly the point.”
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