I'm in 115+ Meta ad accounts. For this playbook we pulled 84 of them, ~$50M a month in spend, July through September.
Two parts. First, what to watch in your data going into Q4 (and what to stop reacting to). Second, the creative formats I'd test right now.
Subscribe free and the rest unlocks right here. You'll also get one of these every week, straight from the Meta ad accounts we are in (no guru guesses).
Q4 is just around the corner
I run Statiq, a strategic creative agency. We made ads for some of the fastest-growing brands in the world: AG1, HexClad, Hollow Socks, Mars Men, Jones Road, Everyday Dose, MUD\WTR, Vibe.
If you're walking into Q4 without enough new creative to feed the account, book a call with me and my team!
Part 1: What to watch in your data going into Q4
Don't judge an account by one day of CPA
Every media buyer has done this at least once. CPA spikes on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday half the account got changed, everyone goes crazy.
One account's CPA moves 14% from one day to the next. Month to month, 12.6%. That's a normal account on a normal day.
Stack 73 accounts together and the daily move drops to 2%. That's where the real trend is, and in September it looked like this: $75 the first week, $83 by the 14th, $83 until the end of the month. The median account ended September 6% more expensive than August.
So if your CPA went up 12% yesterday, you're fine.
Don't answer a bad week with a budget move
This is what usually comes next: someone panics and cuts the budget.
In August, the accounts that cut budget by more than 20% ended with CPA up 11%. In September, same group, up 16%, while the median account was up 6%. Only 5 of the 15 got cheaper. Two months, same result.
Scaling hard is less clear (+8.7% in August, flat in September). The accounts that held budget did at least as well as the median, both months.
CPA goes up for 24 hours and suddenly everyone acts like the account is on fire. Most of the time, the fire is what they do next.
Watch where Meta spends your budget
You set the budget. Meta decides where it goes. Whether you spend $200k or $2M a month, the algorithm moves that money to whatever's working at the creative level that week.
So stop looking at CPA by the day and do this instead: Ads Manager, ad level, last 30 days, sort by amount spent. The top of that list is where Meta is putting your money. That's your real winners list.
And that list is getting harder to get onto. Of the new ads launched in July, 6.8% crossed $1,000 in their first 14 days. August, 5.1%. September, 4.8%. Accounts launched 36% more ads, and fewer of them made it.
Launching more still works though. In August, the accounts whose CPA went down launched 41% more ads than in July. The ones whose CPA went up launched 2% fewer.
The catch is what you launch. The ninth version of your winner won't make the list. A new concept will.
Part 2: Creative formats you should test in Q4
Everything below is here for the same reason: it's what is working for most audiences right now. Nothing is 100% tested, it's all about testing different formats and see what works for your brand.
1. Loop debt (video)
Everyone asks what improves hold rate. The answer is open loops. We call the mechanism loop debt: every loop you open is a debt, and the viewer stays because you still owe them something.
One example running right now is Auniva: a 23-minute video, one man in first person. Frances, 71, a vascular surgeon for 34 years, telling you about the five months he spent testing blood pressure remedies on himself.
How the debt gets built:
The anchor loop. He refuses his own prescription, says "I am going to come back to that," and then doesn't for twenty minutes. That one open loop holds the whole video.
A villain with a name. Every remedy stalls at 140. "The 140 wall." Once the enemy has a name, every new attempt becomes its own loop.
Installments. Nine remedies, same shape: hope, day fourteen, the wall. Small loops close fast so the viewer feels paid, while the big one keeps growing.
The product as suspense. He doesn't say it works. He says week three is the test, then counts days. By the time the number lands, you've been waiting as long as he has.
The payoff. "Here is the part I promised to come back to." The longest loop in the ad pays off as trust.
[CREATIVE: Auniva ad]
The rule underneath: never close a loop without the next one already open.
2. Statics: three formats, three jobs
Statics are still taking more than a third of the money. 39% of spend in July, 39% in August, 36% in September. And it's about the same in a $50k account as in a $2M one.
Inside each account it's a completely different story. Among the 27 accounts spending $500k+ a month, one runs 6% static and another runs 97%.
So there's no right ratio. There's the right format for the job, and the accounts doing it right run three:
Native stops the scroll
Text-heavy tells the story
Offer converts what the other two warmed up
Native: the image is a scene, the ad is the primary text
A native has almost no text on the image. It's a scene. Say you sell something for knee joint pain: a woman around 60, white hair, at home, touching her knee. That's the whole image.
The ad lives in the caption primary text. A huge wall of it, written as her story. An example for this visual could be: Yesterday I woke up and couldn't take it anymore. Went down the stairs, called my daughter. The story ends at the product, and the click goes straight to the product page.
PRO TIP: Natives aren't only for 60-year-olds, which is the part most brands forget. For a 25-year-old, active, going through an identity crisis: her being shown from her boyfriend's POV. The story is after a cheating boyfriend, she goes into pilates classes, she falls in love with a guy that goes with her, and he gifts her that pilates mat after their 1st month anniversary.
Text-heavy: it starts with a sorted line
Text-heavy is a headline, a few sentences, maybe an illustration in the corner. It all depends on the headline, and the headline has to be a sorted line.
A sorted line doesn't talk about the product. It doesn't even just talk about the problem. It talks about one person living inside the problem.
❌ "Having trouble sleeping?"
❌ "Our product fixes your sleep."
✅ "Sleeping with one leg out."
That third one calls out one woman, too warm at night because of perimenopause, who knows exactly what you mean. Then four or five sentences about living with it, and the product.
Offer: room to go creative
Product in the middle, benefits, a sorted line on top. You can reuse the same one from your text-heavy ad.
Will people buy from this if they haven't seen the other two? Probably not. That's fine, that's not its job. Its job is converting traffic the rest of the account already stopped. Which is why this is where you can go the most aesthetic and composed in the whole account.
The real work is the offer itself. Subscribe & save, BOGO, buy three get three. Test for the one that brings the highest LTV fastest, not the one with the best-looking discount. Push subscribe & save and have everyone churn in month one, and it wasn't the better offer.
3. AI drama
Most brands have benefits people need to know. Then they explain them like an infomercial: five benefits, one after the other, and nobody stays.
AI drama flips it. Instead of listing what the product does, you build a short story around someone who has the problem. You watch it happen to them, you get attached to them, and the product shows up inside the story, at the moment it matters.
It educates your audience without making them feel they're attending a lecture.
And it compounds. Someone who stays because they want to know what happens next is giving you that whole time to explain the product, without a pitch. People watch longer, share more, and Meta gets more signal to find the people who respond to it. That's where the cheap CPMs come from, and the cheap CPAs after them. No targeting trick. Just an ad people wanted to finish.
Ad Library link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?id=2079699489652175
4. Animated AI-songs
If you want Gen Z and millennial women to sit through a 10-minute ad, make it about protecting their mom. A whole generation grew up on Gilmore Girls: mother and daughter as best friends, the two of them against the world.
Quasi is running an AI song ad built on exactly that. Fully animated, 10 minutes long, crushing right now. And the ad isn't really talking to the mother. It's talking to the daughter watching her.
The base story is betrayal, then rebirth:
The hook. A dad walks into his son's wedding with the woman he left mom for, young enough to be his daughter.
The hinge. The pain stops being about the divorce and becomes mom, alone, asking what's wrong with her own face. Heartbreak becomes an appearance problem.
The authority opens a loop. An older woman with skin like glass hands the daughter something unlabeled in the middle of the night and barely explains it. The story moves on. The audience doesn't forget.
The demo that doesn't read as one. The daughter applies it to her mom at the kitchen table, the night before the wedding. Texture, setting time, what it feels like at each stage, all inside the story. That closes the first loop, and by then three more are open: will he notice, will she say anything, what happens at the wedding.
The payoff. It isn't "wins dad back." It's mom recognizing herself in the mirror, while the woman who "won" him re-fixes her makeup in the bathroom. Mom wears none.
The product earns its way into frame. By the time it's named, you already want to know what it is. Only at the very end does it turn into a pitch: ingredients, guarantee, urgency.
Going into Q4
Don't read one day of CPA. One account moves 14% day to day, that's normal. Read the last 30 days, sorted by spend.
Don't cut budget because of a bad week. The accounts that cut more than 20% were the most expensive group in August and again in September.
And put the work into new concepts, not new versions. Every format in Part 2 is on this list because it tells a story about one specific person and gives you a reason to keep watching.
Meta decides where your budget goes. Your job is giving it something worth spending on.
Q4 starts tomorrow. If your account is running on the same winners it had in Q3, that's what we fix. Book a call with me and my team: we'll go through your account and tell you what we'd make for you this Q4.
Talk soon,
Simon