A real customer beat our best studio ad

Halden's polished studio ads had stopped finding new customers. Six creator videos later, one of them carries 60% of the budget.

ROAS on new customers

1.9× → 4.1×

Over 4 months

Past results, not a promise.

Client

Halden Skin

Skincare, barrier serum

Channels

Meta, TikTok

Monthly spend

$62k

The brief

Halden sells one product, a $34 barrier serum, and had built the brand on three studio ads shot in early 2024: soft light, slow product turns, a voiceover about ceramides. They spent $62k a month on Meta, almost all of it on those three ads. Returning customers still bought. New ones had stopped: cost per new customer had doubled in a year, and every attempt to "refresh" the studio look made it worse.

Ines, the founder, didn't want another shoot. She wanted to know whether the problem was the ads or the product.

What we made

We read 1,400 of Halden's reviews and pulled out the sentences people wrote in their own words. Six of them became six creator videos in the first month, each built on one line: "I stopped hiding my chin," "My husband asked what changed," "It's the only thing I didn't return." Same budget as the best studio ad, ten days each, same audience.

Two beat the studio ad in the first week. "I stopped hiding my chin." became the account's best ad by day nine and now carries 60% of spend. Since then we've made 22 ads for Halden, mostly variations on that first winner: different creators, different first lines, the same honest tone.

What didn’t work

A before-and-after carousel lost to everything, including the studio ads. People scrolled past it as soon as they saw a split-screen. TikTok never paid back at Halden's price point either: lots of views, few orders. We switched TikTok off in week six and moved that budget to Meta, where the creator ads were already working.