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Ads That Work Weekly

Ads That Work Weekly · 2026-W40 · 2026/09/28

Entertainment ads, the AI UGC math, and the marketing engineer

Seedance animations that pull 165k views, the 800-ads-a-month arithmetic, agents that make and buy the creative, and the Meta toggles costing you 4x.

Nobody loud in paid social was talking about targeting this week. They were talking about creative volume: animation ads built in Blender and Seedance, AI UGC run as arithmetic, and agent pipelines that go from ad research to a Facebook upload with no one in the middle. Underneath it, Meta told advertisers its models reward creative diversity while the settings that waste the most money stayed three menus deep. Our ProvenHits data at the end shows what still runs after 90 days.

1. Entertainment ads are the format of the moment, and animation is the cheapest way in

TL;DR Song ads, drama ads and educational animation are the three formats top brands keep landing on, because they do not feel like ads. AI animation just made the third one cheap.

Why it matters People scroll to pass time, not to shop. An ad that entertains earns the watch time a pitch cannot. Pound's Blender plus Seedance workflow cut regenerations enough to make an animation ad three times cheaper, and one post about it brought him twenty inbound brands in a day. Vlad's "Zack D style" ad runs 41 seconds from one generation, twice what he has seen a competitor sustain. Suno song ads are still a top spender months after launch for at least one account.

What people are saying

Do this Pick one product and write a 30-second script that is a joke, a drama or a lesson first and a pitch second. Generate it as animation or a song ad, run it against your current best hook at equal spend, and judge on thumb-stop and cost per purchase, not on how it looks to you.

2. AI UGC is now arithmetic, and the gap between "AI UGC" and a winning ad is the whole game

TL;DR The people scaling with AI UGC treat it as a volume equation: hundreds of ads a month, five percent winners. The ones warning about it say slop brands are pushing their own CPMs up.

Why it matters Vlad's math is the clearest statement of the model: $100k a day at 2.5 ROAS is $40k of spend, which needs about 40 winners a month, which at a five percent hit rate means 800 ads, which is 27 a day at five minutes each. His tool stack for that is about $97 a month. Enzo runs four AI creators who have never existed and never changed appearance, held together by JSON prompts. Kristian's one-liner, amplified by Pound, is the counterweight: making AI UGC and making an AI UGC ad that spends are different skills. And a media buyer's complaint about all-AI brands, surfaced by Cody Plofker, is the risk on the other side.

What people are saying

Do this Steal the structure, not the face. Pull ten proven scripts from the Meta Ad Library in your category, transcribe them, rewrite for your product, and generate five variants each. Keep a real creator in the mix for the ads that need trust.

3. Marketing engineering: the creative pipeline is becoming a script

TL;DR The "marketing engineer" idea went from a joke to a job description this week: a coding agent with the right tools researches winning ads, makes 100 to 500 variations, uploads them, and reads the results.

Why it matters Alex Cooper's list is the whole loop in one breath: research with the Parker or Trendtrack MCPs, concept and script with Claude, generate statics and video through Higgsfield, source creators with Apify, review footage against the brief from Google Drive, QA the final cut. He calls the static side a window of creative arbitrage, because a skill that makes 500 good statics for almost nothing lets you test messaging faster than anyone in your category. Cody Schneider's version pipes Seedance into ffmpeg into json2video into the Facebook Ads API so creative never runs dry. Nik Sharma's picture of it is an agent in the paid-media Slack channel answering the media buyer's follow-up questions from the reporting data.

What people are saying

Do this Build one pipeline, not ten. Take your best-performing static, have an agent produce 50 headline and image variations in your brand fonts and colours, bulk upload to one ad set, and let the ad platform pick. Keep a person on the brief and on the kill decision.

4. Meta wants diverse creative, and the account settings still leak money

TL;DR Meta told advertisers its models rank diverse creative higher and is testing creative insights metrics in the API. Meanwhile Audience Network is on by default and costs up to four times more per impression.

Why it matters The platform advice and the operator advice point the same way: more distinct creatives, judged individually. Alex Page's two tips are the practical side. Audience Network runs by default on every new ad set and converts at near zero for most DTC accounts, and the toggle is buried in ad set settings. The "breakdown by image, video and slideshow" view shows each creative's own CPA instead of the blended number, which is where the $9 winner hides behind an $18 average. On the same week, r/FacebookAds filled with reports of delivery breaking after the September 22 outage, and a German court held Meta liable for scam ads.

What people are saying

Do this Open your best campaign today. Turn off Audience Network on every ad set, switch the breakdown to "by image, video and slideshow", and move the top two creatives into their own campaign with their own budget.

By the numbers

From ProvenHits, our ad library, this week: ads that are still active after 90 or more days, by vertical. An ad that keeps getting paid for is an ad that works.

  • Supplements: 32 ads over 90 days. NutraBio has run "Clean Ingredients That Work" for 300 days with 25 variants in the group.
  • Dental: 18. Biltmore Dental Center's "Let's Get You Booked" is at 499 days.
  • HVAC: 15. Day & Night Air's "Schedule Today!" is at 501 days, the longest runner in the set.
  • Med-spa: 10. Vibrant Skin Bar's "$150 Off Lip Filler, Phoenix" has run 189 days: a plain offer, a city, a number.
  • Activewear: 6. Alphalete's "Shop Pump" family has held 125 days across three variants.

The pattern across all five: a direct offer or a booking verb, run for a year or more, with variants iterated inside one creative group rather than replaced.

Worth a click

From ProvenHits

Every theme above starts with the same move: find the ads competitors keep paying for, then make yours. ProvenHits is the library for that. It shows which Facebook ads have run longest and iterated most in your vertical, scores them, and then generates your own image and video ads and landing pages from what works. The "By the numbers" section is a small slice of it.

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