Every ad account has a graveyard. Ours had 706 campaigns in it — tested, abandoned, never pruned. That is normal and mostly harmless. What is not harmless is the other kind of stale: the ads that are still running, still spending, and have been quietly past their useful life for weeks.
The reason this is expensive rather than merely untidy is that it is invisible in every report that measures the account in aggregate. A campaign averaging 1.9 looks fine. Inside it, the ad that carried the first ten days is now at 1.2 and taking a third of the budget, and the only line where that would show up is one nobody prints.
The number, and where it comes from
Take a brand spending £15,000 a month on ads. Not a hypothetical extreme — the middle of the band we work in.
A winning creative at that spend level has a working life of roughly one to two weeks before its performance visibly decays. This is the least controversial claim in the whole piece; it is why your best ad from March is invisible in April, and you have watched it happen.
Now assume something ordinary: that across a year, about a fifth of the budget is sitting, at any given moment, in creative that has already passed that point and has not been replaced — because the replacement was not built, because the agency ships monthly, because it is Tuesday and there are other fires.
£15,000 × 12 = £180,000 a year. A fifth of that is £36,000. Add the two or three seasonal ads still running months after their deadline — the ones that promise “72 hours only” in July — and you are the far side of £40,000. Not lit on fire. Just spent buying impressions for a message that has stopped earning.
That £40,000 is a worked example, not a measurement of your account — we have said so on the plate, and you should hold us to that. The point of showing the arithmetic rather than the conclusion is that you can put your own spend in and your own decay assumption in and get your own number. If yours comes out at £12,000, the argument is the same argument, just cheaper.
The waste is not in the ads that failed. It is in the ads that worked, kept running, and were never replaced.
Why it keeps happening to competent people
Because it is not a diligence problem. It is a supply problem, and supply problems do not respond to trying harder.
To replace a fatigued ad you need a better one ready. To have a better one ready you need to have made several, because most of what you make is not better. To have made several you need production capacity that runs continuously — not in the week after the quarterly review.
A human creative team costs real money per asset and real time per cycle. So a retainer sized to a founder’s budget buys a handful of assets a month, which is arithmetically incapable of feeding a channel that consumes creative weekly. Everybody in the arrangement is competent. The arrangement is the problem.
Make the bench cheap and the fatigue problem disappears on its own.
If the constraint is cost-per-asset and time-per-cycle, then the fix is not better strategy or a more diligent account manager. It is changing the cost of making a candidate.
That is what the engine is. It drafts at volume, scores every concept against a fixed five-axis rubric — hook, clarity, distinctiveness, offer, brand fit — and kills its own work before anything earns production. Most of what it makes does not survive its own scoring, which is the point: the cheapest place to fail is before the spend, not after.
Senior operators direct it and sign off everything that ships. The engine never decides what a client sees. And we ran it on our own brand first, with our own money, which is why we can be specific about what it does and equally specific about what it does not — it does not fix a broken offer, and it does not make a bad product sell.
What to check in your own account this afternoon
Four things, none of which need a supplier, all of which take under an hour together.
Count the ads that spent money in the last 30 days. Not the ads that exist — the ads that spent. If the number is in single figures and your budget is in five, you have found the constraint.
Sort those ads by creation date. Anything older than about eight weeks that is still taking meaningful budget deserves an explicit decision rather than inertia.
Read the copy on your oldest live ad out loud. If it references a season, a deadline, a sale or a stock level, check the date it was written. This is where the “72 hours only, since November” ads live.
Open your email platform and count the flows sitting in draft. This one is not about ads at all, and it is routinely the largest number on the page — built, written, never switched on.
The honest objections
It is, and most of them do not mean a number by it. The difference worth checking is whether a supplier will put a figure on the page: how many assets, in what period, at what price. “Bespoke” and “unlimited” are both ways of declining to answer that.
Ours is on the pricing page, in public, in a number you can divide the invoice by.
A lot of it does, which is why the scoring matters more than the generating. Distinctiveness is one of the five axes every concept is scored on, and it is a common reason a concept is killed before it is ever rendered. The engine produces far more than ships; the bar is what makes the output worth looking at.
You can judge this directly rather than take our word for it. The sample report on our site includes the scores — including concepts that did not clear the bar.
Then the audit will say so, and it will say what is instead. In most accounts we read, creative volume is one of three or four findings, and it is regularly not the biggest one — dead email flows and misallocated budget both outrank it more often than we expected when we started doing this.
The report ranks findings by money moved, and states that ranking as the reason for the order.
The catch is that we hope you like it enough to talk to us. That is the whole mechanism. It costs us real compute and a senior operator’s review time, and we spend that because a good report argues for us better than any pitch we could write.
No call is required to get it, nothing is charged, and the report and the ad concepts remain yours whatever you decide.
Find out what your number actually is.
We'll read your account, name every pound that isn't earning, and show the arithmetic for each one — in 24 hours, free, with no call required.
You also get a batch of ad concepts built for your brand and scored before you see them, a page-by-page teardown of where clicks leak, a read on what your competitors are running, and a 30-day plan in the order the money moves.
Two minutes to start. A senior operator signs off every report before it reaches you.
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