What to make next, in every market.
How a global delivery platform went from one creative report a quarter to a brief for every market, every week, built on what actually wins.
Lead with speed, put a customer on camera, and show the offer before the second scene.
0 to 2s Order arrives at the door, timer overlay reads 11 min.
2 to 6s Customer on camera, one line on why they ordered tonight.
6 to 10s Offer card, plain type, one call to action.
Evidence: €4.10 per first order across 14 creatives carrying these tags in Portugal over the last 8 weeks, against a €6.30 market median.
Illustrative. A brief as Plug produces it, drawn with example markets and figures, not the customer's data.
A creative team that ships new templates for every market each quarter, and a performance team that was supposed to tell them what to make.
Creative direction was meant to come from data. The data arrived after the briefs had gone out. And when a template is wrong, it is wrong in every market for three months. Three things the team said when we first talked:
“Our quarterly creative research takes weeks, and lands after the briefs have gone out.”
“The naming convention tells us market, format and version. Never why a creative wins.”
“The data sits in different tools. Someone glues it together by hand, every quarter.”
Four ways to answer it. Each one stops short of connecting the creative to the results, market by market, and doing it again next week.
The quarterly research project
Real effort, real findings, once a quarter. Weeks of pulling numbers and screenshots, landing after the next round was already in production. A snapshot, not a system.
A stricter naming convention
Fast and consistent, and it only carries what was planned: market, format, version. Who is on camera, whether the price shows, the motivation the creative leads with, none of it fits in a file name. It covered under half of spend on a good day.
Building it in-house
Ingestion pipelines for two ad platforms, kept alive as the APIs change. Vision models on every frame of every creative, run reliably. A taxonomy that needs re-validating as concepts move, with accuracy and reproducibility someone has to sign off. A model bill, a build cost, a maintenance cost, and an owner, permanently. Not their core business.
Off-the-shelf creative tools
Good libraries, predefined tags. The tags are the vendor's, not the team's, and nothing connects back to the media buying: the spend, the conversions, the cost per result in each market.
Creative volume without learning is waste at scale.
What decided the outcome, who is on camera, whether the price shows, how the creative opens, does not live in a metric or a file name. It lives inside the creative. And when someone did read it, the finding never connected back to which market, which funnel stage, how many conversions it brought and at what cost. The learning was not lost because the team was sloppy. It was lost because there was no place to put it, and nothing to bring it back at the next brief. So the next brief got written on gut, and the next batch scaled the guess.
The team wrote down the tags they always wanted. Plug did the rest.
Connect the sources of truth
The ad platforms are the record, so Plug reads them directly. Meta today, TikTok next. Events mapped, KPIs agreed.
Say it in your own words
The team wrote five tags in their language: the motivation the creative leads with, who is on camera, when the offer shows, how it is produced. Plug brings 50+ more out of the box.
Plug reads everything, and keeps reading
1,500+ of their own ads and 3,500+ from their main competitors, frame by frame, tagged the way the team would have tagged them. Between 40 and 200 new creatives join every month, tagged on arrival.
Tags without numbers are a mood board.
Every tag Plug applies is tied to the media buying behind the creative: the spend, the conversions, the cost per result, on the conversion event each campaign optimises for. So the team can ask how each one performs per market, per funnel stage, per optimisation goal, per audience or format, in any combination. What wins in one market and loses in the next stops being a hunch. The gaps show up too: the combinations nobody has tried, and the competitor angles never answered. Each gap is a brief, and Plug writes the first draft.
Variety wins Spain at conversion. Nothing in the current batch leads with it.
€3.40 per first order at the conversion stage against a €5.10 market median. The tag carries 24% of spend and no creative made this quarter. Storyboard and tag targets attached.
Illustrative. Rows: markets. Columns: the team's own tag values. Cells: cost per result and spend share. Keep, test, cut, and the whitespace to brief next.
From one report a quarter to a brief for every market, every week.
“Everything that I need on the custom tags is already there. It's aligned with what I requested.”
“The AI-derived tag is what I need for my analysis, which is currently missing from our naming at the moment.”
Fifteen minutes on a Monday. What is working, why it is working, what to create next, where to deploy it.
Plug is not the pipes, and not another place to store creatives. It reads the creative, the brand context and the media buying, and connects them, so the loop runs on evidence instead of on whoever had time to look.
PlugMonday 08:00 · Three things for this weekIn PlugSlackClaudeNothing waits to be asked.
The winner to graduate, the angle nobody has tried, the ad set quietly leaking. Plug brings it first, in Plug, in Slack or in Claude, with the evidence. You say go. The analyst's read, the strategist's brief and the media buyer's Monday checks, from one system, with your people deciding.
Want this on your account?
Book 20 minutes with one of the founders. Bring the question your creative team keeps asking. We will show you how it gets answered on a live account. To start, all it takes is the ad account connected and your tags in your own words; Plug does the rest.
Book a 20-minute callBest for: teams running paid social across several markets with real creative volume, where the next brief still comes from a quarterly report or from gut.