Creative Brief From Account Data Ad Creative

Creative Brief From Account Data

Shared quality bar: ../references/output-standard.md. All numbers cited here live in ../references/thresholds.md. Input is an export, output is a brief a designer or copywriter can build from without asking a follow-up question.

Use this skill when

A production round is about to be commissioned and the account has run enough ads to have an opinion. Use it when a designer, editor or freelancer is waiting for instructions, when a monthly creative batch is being scoped, or when the last batch was briefed from opinion and nobody can say what it was answering. Do not use it to dissect one ad into a transferable pattern; that is winning-ad-teardown-ad-creative. Do not use it to audit coverage on its own, and route that question by its window rather than by the word coverage: what is live right now, and whether this week's spend can teach anybody anything, is asset-coverage-check-ad-creative; what the account has argued across the whole served library including everything paused is angle-inventory-ad-creative. This skill consumes a coverage count, it does not produce one.

Do not use it for the Monday report either. weekly-creative-readout-ad-creative starts from the same weekly ad-level export and also states spend, delivery share and the collapsed angle count, so the two look alike at the point of routing. They differ on the deliverable: that skill writes the week that has happened for a client and commissions nothing, and this skill commissions the next production round. If nobody is waiting to build anything, it is that skill.

Required input

• An ad-level export covering at least test.min_runtime: ad name or ID, spend, impressions, link clicks, link CTR, conversions, cost per conversion, and the first date the ad served.
• The creative itself, or a description of each ad's hook, offer and format.
• The objective the campaign optimises toward, and which conversion action counts as primary.
• Any creative or budget change made inside the window, with dates.
• Production constraints: who builds it, what assets exist, what cannot be shot.

Analysis workflow

1. Confirm the export is readable as creative evidence: check the date range against test.min_runtime and the per-ad volume against test.volume_floor. Ads below the floor enter the brief as context, never as proof, and every finding drawn from them is capped at low confidence. Then check each ad against delivery.never_delivered_floor. An ad under it did not lose, it did not run: mark it never_delivered, drop it out of the ranking and out of any cut list, and never let it enter the brief as a failed angle. Its angle goes back on the untested list. Then check each surviving ad against delivery.ranking_floor. Below that share the spend is too concentrated for a like-for-like comparison, so the ad may appear as context but not inside the ranking the brief is built from.
2. Label each ad with its angle stated as a sentence, its offer and its format. Use the definitions of creative and angle fixed in thresholds.md.
3. Rank on the objective's own metric, not on CTR, and record which metric you ranked on. reporting.no_view_through_in_ctr explains why a CTR ranking can invert a conversion ranking.
4. Collapse ties, and pick the key by what the difference is measured on. A gap in cost per acquisition, which is the metric most briefs are actually ranked on, is judged by money.relevance_floor and by nothing else; that key owns every cost per acquisition comparison in this pack, so the same gap is not a tie here and actionable in the readouts. test.material_gap stays where it belongs, on rate differences such as link CTR. Say which of the two you applied, collapse anything inside it into a single tie, and do not brief against a difference you have just called a tie.
5. Separate the angle effect from the execution effect. Where an angle appears in fewer than coverage.formats_per_angle, the result is about that one execution and the brief says so, labelled hypothesis.
6. Check supply: read the share of ad set spend riding old creatives against coverage.stale_spend_share, and the live angle count against coverage.angles_per_ad_set. The supply reading is on money rather than on the launch date of the newest file, because an account shipping every month always has a young newest asset while most of its budget can still sit on a handful of files from the spring. A shortfall on either sets the size of the round.
7. Where any figure in the brief rests on this period's conversions against a previous period's, either wait out the account's attribution window or state reporting.conversion_lag_bias next to the number. The current window is still filling in while the prior one has closed, so a flat month reads as a falling one and the brief would commission work against a decline nobody had.
8. Write the brief. Each item names the angle, the one element it changes against a named control (test.one_change_rule), the format, and the result that would make it a keeper. Cap the round at test.concurrent_variant_cap per ad set.
9. Mark every factual claim the brief asks a writer to make with [claim: needs source] under claims.evidence_rule, and list what you declined to brief.

Decision rules

• Angle beat its control on cost per acquisition by more than money.relevance_floor, or on a rate by more than test.material_gap, and cleared test.volume_floor: ship more of that angle, confidence high where the comparison came from a real split. Where the ads simply co-existed in one ad set, test.assignment_rule caps the row at medium and the brief says so.
• Cost per acquisition gap inside money.relevance_floor: a tie, whatever the rate table shows, and it is not briefed as a learning. That key owns this comparison and test.material_gap is not read against it here, so a brief written from this skill and a readout written from the money keys reach the same verdict on the same gap.
• Any verdict arriving from the early.* block: it is not a brief input. Under blocking rule 10 in ../AGENTS.md, everything in that block is low by definition, exists to give a decision on creatives that will never reach test.volume_floor, and does not become evidence by being repeated. A creative cut on early.hook_rate or early.cost_multiple may be named as context, and its angle goes back on the untested list; it never enters the ranking the brief is built from and never counts as an angle that failed.
• Angle won on thin volume: test it again with a bigger share, confidence low, and say the floor was the missing condition.
• Angle lost in one format only: rewrite in the missing format rather than cutting the angle.
• Live angles under coverage.angles_per_ad_set: the round's first job is a new angle, not a new execution.
• Ad under delivery.never_delivered_floor: it is not a finding of any kind. test its angle again with a share that lets it run, and say the previous attempt never delivered.
• Ad above that floor but under delivery.ranking_floor: it ran, so it is not never_delivered, but it is not ranked either. Carry it as context and say which question its spend share stopped it answering.
• Share of spend on old creatives above coverage.stale_spend_share: size the round on supply first. Optimisation of the current set cannot fix a budget riding files nobody has replaced.
• Winner cannot be explained by anything in the export: investigate, and label the explanation hypothesis under reporting.no_causal_read_from_export.
• Any brief item touching claims.restricted_topics: approval_needed.

Output format

No verdict line. A ranked evidence table, then the brief.

Then one brief item per production slot: angle sentence, control it tests against, single changed element, format, success condition. Then What this could not see, Missing data, Approval gates.

Practical example

Illustrative made-up account data, not a real advertiser. Export covers 28 days, 11 ads. "Agency cost" angle: 62 conversions, cost per conversion 41. "Setup speed" angle: 9 conversions, cost per conversion 38. "Founder story": 57 conversions, cost per conversion 44.

Two of the 11 ads fall under delivery.never_delivered_floor. They are marked never_delivered, kept out of the ranking, and their angles go back on the untested list rather than into the brief as things that failed. A third ran but sat under delivery.ranking_floor, so it is carried as context and left out of the ranking, which is a different exclusion for a different reason. The month against previous month conversion comparison the client asked for is not stated at all: the current window is still inside the account's attribution window, so reporting.conversion_lag_bias biases it against the present, and reporting it would commission work against a decline nobody has.

Reading: the ranked metric is cost per conversion, so the gap is judged on money.relevance_floor and not on test.material_gap. Agency cost at 41 against founder story at 44 is a difference of 3, which is 7.3 per cent of 41, inside money.relevance_floor, so they are a tie and no winner is named. Setup speed looks cheapest but sits far under test.volume_floor at 9 conversions, so its confidence is low and it is briefed as a retest, not as a finding. The claim that agency cost wins on creative merit is refused: two budget edits fall inside the window, which caps that row at low under the shared confidence scale.

Brief: three slots. One retest of setup speed at a larger share, one new angle because only two live angles clear coverage.angles_per_ad_set, one format extension of founder story into video. Declined: a "saves 37 per cent versus an agency" line, because no source was supplied for the figure. Also declined as an input: two further ads, both of which did deliver, were cut last week on early.cost_multiple, and those verdicts stay out of the ranking under blocking rule 10 in ../AGENTS.md. Their angles go back on the untested list rather than into the brief as arguments that failed.

Guardrails

• Never brief a difference smaller than money.relevance_floor on cost per acquisition, or smaller than test.material_gap on a rate, as a learning.
• Never carry an early.* verdict into the brief as evidence.
• Never rank creatives on CTR when the objective is conversions.
• Never write a number into a brief that the user did not evidence.
• Do not upload, launch or pause anything. The brief is a decision for a human.