The startup Lettuce, a fintech platform for single-person businesses, now produces almost all its ads on Meta using Ads Engine, a tool integrated into ElevenCreative. According to Danny McCullough, Lettuce’s Head of Performance Marketing, this method has reduced creative costs by about 75% and lowered cost per lead by 40% to 60% compared to other creatives run over comparable periods.
Lettuce brings together accounting, taxes, health benefits, and retirement for its clients in one place. Meta is its most creative-intensive acquisition channel. Ads Engine connects to ad platforms, pulls in ads that are already running, and then allows them to be adapted for new markets or for generating variants.
Weeks of Delay, Seconds of Generation
Before this tool, each new Meta ad started with a brief written by Danny McCullough and passed to the creative director. At best, it took over a week to get a finished ad. Modifying an ad already live meant going back through the creative director, adding at least another week. McCullough notes he has seen the same process take a month at larger companies.
With Ads Engine, any team member can describe a new ad or modify an existing one using a prompt. The creative comes back in about forty seconds. Before going live, the creative director and a performance marketing manager review each ad, and this approval is now the only step between an idea and a live ad. The creative team’s original assets serve as the starting point for each generated version, and the team approves all ads for brand consistency.
Every Winning Ad Becomes the Next Test
Ads Engine pulls in creatives currently running on Meta and sends finished ads back to the platform, so the entire iteration cycle happens in one place. “I don’t have to go into any other application,” says McCullough. “I pull the creative, I modify it, I send it back. A lot of the friction in my job is moving from one system to another, and that friction is gone.”
The team uses this loop to decide what’s next. They start with the ads receiving the most budget and design variants to test. Lettuce’s top-performing ad on Meta came from this process: it’s an iteration between the 15th and 20th of an original piece of content produced by the creative team.
A Test Volume No Longer Tied to Production
For a long time, the number of ads a team could test was fixed by its production capacity. At Lettuce, iterations now happen at the level of each ad, and each result feeds the next test round as soon as spend data is available. McCullough estimates it takes just a few hundred dollars to evaluate a new idea and that a hundred iterations now fit into a week, compared to a year ago.
According to McCullough, the change has reduced the company’s creative costs by about 75%. He also says ads made with Ads Engine have lowered cost per lead by 40% to 60% compared to other creatives run over comparable periods. Lettuce, he specifies, had spent about a year trying to make Meta work as an acquisition channel, and the clearest progress dates from adopting Ads Engine.
