Welcome back to Funnel Vision, the weekly newsletter that puts performance creative & growth marketing in focus. Brought to you by the crew at Ready Set.

In 1913, Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line. By breaking car production into repeatable steps, he slashed the time to build a Model T from 12 hours to 92 minutes. Today the same principle is transforming performance marketing, just replace “cars” with “creative assets.”

Here’s what’s inside today’s edition:

• How one brand dropped CPA 28% by treating creative like a supply chain

• Why Meta just made creative diversity a "foundational best practice"

• An ad that targets the buyer behind the buyer

Reading time: 5 minutes

THE BRIEF 💼 

The latest DTC performance marketing news you need to know.

Meta declares creative diversity a foundational best practice.

If performance marketing had a word of the year, our bet would be on “creative diversity”. It was the defining term of 2025, and Meta was the reason.

Andromeda was the latest in a series of major upgrades to their AI-powered ads system. The new machine needs a steady stream of fresh, varied creative for “optimal campaign performance”.

So when Meta releases documentation on creative diversity, it’s a must read. Here’s the TL;DR:

• Creative diversification ≠ creative iteration

• Diversification = ads that are visually and thematically unique 

• Creative similarity drives fatigue and higher costs

• Meta groups similar ads, meaning they could compete with each other

Most striking is Meta's recommendation to embrace creative diversity as a "foundational best practice." The clearest signal yet that this isn't a passing trend, it’s a paradigm shift.

CLICKABLE LINKS 👆️ 

👀 Here are seven digital marketing trends worth watching in 2026.

🤖 CES wraps up today in Las Vegas. Here is the best (and weirdest) tech announced this year.

⏸️ Meta delays global rollout of Ray-Ban Display glasses due to strong U.S. demand.

🤑 Brands spent more than $1B on celebrity ad spots last year.

📈 Global ad spend forecasted to top $1.19T in 2026 with major events juicing spend.

CREATIVE STRATEGY

3 Creative Production Strategies That Dropped CPA 28%

Stop me when this sounds familiar... 

Your in-house team makes great ads. They’re lean, scrappy, and genuinely creative. You’re launching 3-6 new concepts a month. There’s a process. There are sprints. There’s momentum.

But despite that effort, you’ve hit a ceiling and growth has stalled.

That was Happy Head’s reality. They produced concepts at a respectable clip. But limited production capacity meant they couldn’t generate the volume and diversity needed to scale profitably. Testing velocity was constrained. Creative refresh couldn’t keep pace with platform demands. And CPAs kept climbing.

So they tapped Ready Set to break through the ceiling.

Three months in, conversions were up 38% and CPAs were slashed by 28%. Here are the three core strategies that made it happen.

1. Treat Creative Like Supply Chain, Not Craft

Most teams operate in a batch cycle: brainstorm, produce, launch, wait, repeat. This creates a feast-or-famine dynamic that no longer keeps pace with what platforms need. 

Meta's Andromeda update changed the game.

The algorithm needs constant fuel—new hooks, fresh angles, different formats—to find untapped audience segments. When you're only shipping a handful of concepts per month, you're not testing, you're hoping.

Happy Head needed a high-output system that could deliver both volume and variety without sacrificing quality or speed. 

The solution was scaling production to 120+ assets across 15 unique concepts per month as a repeatable system. This high-volume approach gave the algorithm the velocity and variety it needed, helping reach untapped audience segments driving lower CPAs and higher conversion rates.

What changed: Volume matters. Scaling from 6 to 15 concepts monthly gave the algorithm fuel to optimize.

2. Collapse the Silo Between Creative and Media

The handoff between media and creative teams is where performance goes to die.

Traditional setup: A media buyer spots a pattern Tuesday. Brief goes out Wednesday. Assets arrive next week. By then, the opportunity has shifted. Every day between spotting a winning pattern and acting on it is lost opportunity.

We applied an integrated model where creative strategists and media buyers operate as a single unit. 

Live performance data directly informed creative direction. When a hook pattern showed early traction, new variations were in production within days. This compressed learning loop became their competitive advantage, allowing them to capitalize on winning patterns before they cooled off and make every dollar of spend work harder.

What changed: Speed wins. Collapsing creative and media into one unit cut reaction time from weeks to days.

3. Systematically Expand Creative Diversity

If 80% of your spend goes to ads that look and feel the same, you've hit a ceiling with that specific audience segment. This is creative overconcentration. You're cannibalizing your existing audience, not scaling.

Happy Head's Creative Diversity Score^TM (CDS) started at 68.8. After auditing their ad mix, they expanded into stripped-back UGC, GIFs and animated ads, diverse talent, refined messaging angles, and platform-specific formats.

The goal wasn't just making more ads. It was systemically testing different creative territories to find untapped audience segments competitors weren't reaching.

The result? CDS increased to 93.8, a 36% improvement that unlocked entirely new audience segments.

What changed: Diversity unlocks growth. A 36% improvement in CDS opened entirely new audience segments.

The Bottom Line

Three months in, here’s what happened:

• 28% lower CPA

• 38% higher CVR

• 36% increase in creative diversity

Safe to say Happy Head crushed it.

The scaled-up creative engine produced 120+ assets monthly, providing the fuel and confidence to test aggressively without sacrificing brand quality.

Performance marketing in 2026 is a logistics game. Happy Head didn't stumble onto a lucky winner, they built a system that made winning predictable. If your CPA is climbing despite "doing everything right," the answer isn't a better bid strategy. It's a better production engine.

Want the full breakdown? Read the complete Happy Head case study to see exactly how we built their creative supply chain from the ground up.

AD OF THE WEEK ✨ 

Sometimes the biggest wins don’t come from new ideas, they come from smarter iteration.

This week’s pick from Happy Head takes a proven winner and evolves it. By keeping the hook consistent ("My boyfriend's hair...") while rotating product stories and talent, the team turned one concept into multiple controlled tests.

Brand: Happy Head
Length: 24 seconds
Platform: Meta

WHY IT WORKS 🧠

♻️ It builds on what worked. Why start from scratch when you can iterate? Fresh talent, updated framing, tighter narrative – same proven hook. 

🧬 It's a learning machine. Consistent hook + rotating product stories = controlled tests that reveal exactly what's driving performance. One concept, multiple insights.

🎯 It targets the buyer behind the buyer. Men's hair loss product told from a girlfriend's POV? That's strategic. The reframing invites women to spot the problem first, making them the emotional entry point to the purchase decision.

Creativity isn’t always about inventing something new. Often it’s about combining two familiar ideas in a way the audience hasn’t seen before.

Thanks for reading!

That’s all for this week. Seeya next time 🫶