For agencies making creative at volume
Which ad angles actually hold?
Every ad on Meta carries a public start date and a public status — still running, or gone. I count both across an entire category and sort the ads that lasted by the angle they open with, so your next brief starts from what has already survived in that market.
$400 one-time · two working days
Two ads · one category
One of them is still running. The other was switched off in days.
Ad A · still running · 327 days
Ad B · switched off · 9 days
The problem
More creative was never the hard part.
Your team can make more this month than it made last month. Volume is solved. What is not solved is the question sitting underneath every brief: of all the angles you could open with in this category, which ones actually survive contact with the market?
The same problem, three ways
The spend goes up, the output goes up, and nothing anyone can point to has moved.
What works stops working sooner than it used to, and the team cannot keep up with it.
Hundreds of pieces a month, and most of that volume was never going to land.
None of that is a production problem. The volume exists because nobody knows which angle is going to hold, so the safe move is to make more of everything and find out afterwards. That is what the spend goes on, and it costs more every quarter.
The signal
An ad that keeps running is telling you something.
Meta publishes, for every commercial ad, the day it started and whether it is still active today. Nothing private, nothing modelled: the difference between an ad that has run all year and one that lasted nine days is arithmetic on public dates. The work is doing it properly for an entire category.
First
I pull every advertiser competing in that category and take out what does not belong — chains, suppliers, resellers, out-of-area advertisers. This part cannot be automated, and it is most of the work.
Then
For every ad they are running I take three things: when it started, whether it is still live, and the line it opens with.
Finally
The opening lines get sorted into angles, and I look at which angles keep turning up among the ads that are still alive — and which ones only ever show up in the short-lived pile.
Longevity is not performance. An ad nobody bothered to switch off also runs long.
What it is: the one signal on public record that an advertiser has been paying for, day after day, with their own money — and that they would have killed the moment it stopped earning.
Why an agency cares
You are not buying more creative. You are buying a shorter list of angles worth making it for.
Brief with a reason
The angles that keep surviving in that category are the ones to push harder. Not the ones that sounded good in the room, and not the ones that worked in a different category last year.
Stop making the doomed ones
If an angle has never lasted a week in that market, that is worth knowing before the shoot rather than after the spend. Less blind production, same output budget.
Defend the plan
When the client asks why this angle and not theirs, the answer is a public, checkable fact about their own market. It is not taste, and it is not my opinion.
What it turns into
A category goes in. A shorter list comes out.
You name it. City too, if the business is local.
Every opening line in that market, sorted into the angle it uses.
How long the ads using each angle have actually stayed live.
The angles worth another brief, and the ones that keep dying in days.
The shape of the answer
Four angles in one category. Two are worth another brief.
Who does the work
One person, start to finish.
Ziga Petkovic
I build the advertiser set by hand, count the ads myself, and tell you what is in there. There is no account manager between you and the work, nothing to log into, and no call to sit through before you find out the price — it is further down this page.
The hand-picking is the part that cannot be handed to software: deciding whether an advertiser is really competing in that market is a judgement, made over and over for every category. That is also why one person doing it beats a process, and why I take one category at a time.
You deal with me on the first message and on every one after it.
Pricing
Prices are on the page.
Three ways to buy the same work. No call needed to find out which one you want.
One category
$400One-time
Every advertiser competing in that category, the angles they open with, and how long each angle has held.
One city
$400One-time · £300 in the UK
The same work scoped to a single city, for categories where your client competes street by street rather than nationally.
Every week
$1,200Per month
The same category measured again every week. Meta drops deleted ads from the public record, so a week nobody captured is a week nobody can go back for.
White label included Your logo, your template, my name nowhere on it. You are free to sell it on to your own client as your own service, at your own price. There is no surcharge for that.
Turnaround Two working days from the moment you name the category. If the category turns out to be too thin to say anything honest about, I tell you that instead of filling the space.
Name a category. Find out what holds in it.
Tell me the category, and the city if the business is local. You get back who is actually competing, the angles they open with, and how long each of those angles has managed to stay alive.
ziga@alexoscreative.com · reply within a working day