Scaling Creative Production: The Ultimate Guide For DTC Brands

The 8-Figure Creative System Playbook

If your goal is to scale from 7 to 8 figures, you can’t rely on the same quantity of ads that got you early traction. At $50k+ in monthly spend levels, performance is no longer about a single great idea—it’s about building a repeatable system that consistently produces and tests new creative. Without this system, CPAs rise, ads fatigue faster, and growth stalls. With it, you unlock the creative volume and diversity needed to keep scaling profitably. No single agency or tool can do this for you.

The Solution: Creative Systems

Here is how we solve this:

• Planning and forecasting our overall creative needs (volume + budget) to determine where/how we need to source that creative

• Building a flywheel of UGC ad creative that is sourced on autopilot to complement ads that Flighted + your team are making

• Building lower-fidelity static ad and copywriting testing systems that can inform higher-production ad concepts

Step 1: Creative Forecasting

Use this Creative Testing Output Calculator to answer 2 questions: how many ads should I be making per month, and how much should I be spending to make them? Simply input your target CPA for a 12 month period, and spend growth targets, to get these datapoints. You should account for seasonality - slow months, holiday periods, etc. - when guesstimating your spend/CPA.

Based on these forecast numbers, start planning how you’ll fill this capacity - in-house produced content, UGC creator-produced content, Flighted-produced content, external creative agency-produced content, customer-produced UGC, organic social posts, and TikTok affiliate content are the most common sources of ads for other brands. Think of creative sourcing like investing - the more diverse your creative sources, the more likely you are to uncover new needle-moving ad concepts.

Step 2: Building the Flywheel

Sourcing Ads from Your Customer Base

First, identify an efficient way to source ads from your existing customer base. A referral/ambassador program is a great way to do this. The most common are: Brandbassador, Social Snowball, TYB, Superfiliate, and The Rave. It doesn’t matter which you use. What matters is being aggressive with rewarding customers to produce content for your business. Multiple touchpoints (post-purchase, email, IG) should promote your ambassador program, and I would recommend offering flat fee payments or generous view-based incentives for content creation.

Sourcing Ads from Professional UGC Creators

Next, identify an efficient way to source ads from professional UGC creators. These are NOT influencers. They usually have small followings. They are essentially actors. Here are the most common methods of doing this:

A UGC Platform

A done-for-you platform like Billo or Insense can vary in cost and creator quality, but is typically more expensive than direct partnerships. However, they save you a ton of time in outreach, payment, and shipping logistics. You simply set up a campaign/budget and creators apply to it for your review. Full list of marketplaces is HERE.

The Old-Fashioned Way

Form direct relationships with UGC creators, and paying them directly. This is the most time-consuming method, but typically is the most cost-effective (as you are working directly with them), and can soon become a MOAT for your business, as you trial-and-error your way to having a small group of elite, recurring UGC partners who understand your business. I would recommend hiring a VA off of Magic to do this searching/admin work for you at an extremely low cost. You can find creators direct by Searching “UGC” on Twitter to find creator profiles, and using the same approach as the above on Instagram

TikTok Affiliates

If you are not in a prohibitive category to do this, set up a TikTok affiliate account, along with a TikTok Shop profile, and start setting up “target collaboration” campaigns. You can invite up to 50 creators per campaign, and up to 1,000-2,000 creators a month. ~5-20% may accept and get shipped free product. From there, the majority will record a video promoting your product in exchange for commission. You can get usage rights to ALL of this content on Meta, typically for a very low cost, in addition to any sales they will drive organically on TikTok.

College Interns

They implicitly understand social content/ads better than you, they often have strong social presences themselves, and they have the lowest marginal cost per video than any other creator source. You can hire interns off of Handshake. Simply ask them to include a link to their own social profile, so you can watch their content and gauge if they be a strong content creator. Onboard them for free or for <$20/hour, and have them produce 5-10 videos per week for your IG/TikTok/Meta ads.

Step 3: Building Static Ad and Copywriting Systems on Autopilot

Meta needs creative diversity, which means a high volume of static ads to complement your video content. You have many options to produce these, including:

Human Designers

A human graphic designer. You can hire fantastic graphic designers with static ad design experience who cost <$2,000 a month off of onlinejobs.ph (Philippines) or LinkedIn (put the job posting in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia).

Subscription Platforms

Subscription platforms like Konstant Kreative or Statiq are also fantastic for static production at scale, and relatively affordable.

Creative Concept Database

Be sure to use Flighted’s proprietary Creative Concept Database. This is a database of 200+ ad formats that we’ve ranked by efficacy, from all-time winners to more experimental concepts. There are tons of static ads you can give as a reference to a human editor to recreate in this database.

Canva Templates

Buy predesigned static ads from sources like Creative Donut or Creative OS - use them as references, add your brand kit to Canva, copy the templates that you think could work well for your brand, and rewrite them/quickly reformat them using your brand kit for your product.

AI-Driven Workflows

AI-driven production workflows. Any ecommerce brand owner should be using AI agents to supercharge their creative strategy. We highly recommend Gumloop - it is the most user-friendly, no-code AI agent builder. You can view previews of some of the Gumloop flows we have built below - all you need to do is sign up for their Pro plan to authenticate into these flows and use them for your business. Use code FLIGHTED for 20% off :) 

• Meta ad video script generator - input your brand’s URL and a competitor’s URL. This flow will then transcribe your competitor’s video ads, and rewrite the ads to fit your unique product (name, features, benefits, etc). This generates you ready-to-produce video ad scripts.

• Comprehensive creative analysis - scrape your brand’s ad library for a complete creative analysis - strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future iterations and net-new concepts.

• TikTok video transcript scraper - enter a keyword related to your brand (collagen, coffee, etc) and generate a Google Sheet list full of transcripts of ALL TikTok videos that have been posted related to that keyword. This is great for handing off to an organic social manager for creative inspo.

• Static ad JSON prompt generator - this scrapes your competitor’s Meta ads library, analyzes their static ads, then rewrites prompts for those ads that you can simply paste into ChatGPT along with a PNG image of your product.

Putting It All Together

The system that you use to ensure you hit these targets, and to manage how and when creative is deployed, can vary. Anything from Notion, to ClickUp, to Airtable, to a simple Google Sheet can suffice. It’s recommended that you try to use a single task management platform to track the different stages of your creative - ideation phase, in production, needs edits, approved, and published. You can link your external partners to this task management tool, so that they can upload their ads in the very same workflow.

Naming Conventions

The purpose of robust ad naming conventions is to ensure that you can track the recurring themes that drive success in your paid ads - essentially, predefined groups of variables that you can export and pivot your ad data on to track. Here is an example of a naming convention that we use for all of our ads: Creative Source_Format_MonthYear_Angle_Editor Name_Hook Iteration Text_LandingPageSlug

An example output of this might be: Flighted_Static_Jan2025_UsvsThem_David_Fresh or frozen the choice is yours_get-started

If you sync your ad data to Google Sheets or Looker Studio, you can easily pivot on any of these variables to aggregate spend by different common patterns like editor or angle.

Creative Analysis + Iterations

There are several creative analytics tools out there with varying degrees of functionality - Motion, Atria, and Adnova are 3 commonly used vendors for this. If you’re simply looking for inspiration for future ad ideas, Foreplay is a fantastic tool for creative ideation. It allows you to look at competitor’s ad libraries, but more importantly, sort their ads by “longest running” so you can ensure you are repurposing only their most impactful ad formats.

Additionally, you can input your brand’s Facebook Ad Library URL into the Flighted Creative Analytics Gumloop Flow and get personalized insights on your ad strategy’s strengths, weaknesses, and dozens of suggestions of iterations and net new concepts to test.

That’s everything! As you source diverse creative, you can use the above-mentioned tools to pay close attention to the patterns in your top performers. What specific visual queues/hooks, customer pain points, product features, or UGC creators seem to consistently drive strong results for you? Once you have those learnings, make sure to feed it back to your creative sources to use in future concepts. 

What’s most important is that you maintain a healthy mix of creative formats. An official Meta study found that advertisers who employ creative diversity saw 32% more efficient direct response outcomes than advertisers who don’t.