Case Studies · 7 July 2026
Stop launching with one hero creative
A £40,000 hero asset and a launch date is not a media plan. What we do instead, drawn from three DTC launches in the last eighteen months.
Meera Iyer — VP, Paid Media · 6 min read
The standard launch plan looks like this: spend three months and a large sum of money producing one beautiful hero film, book a launch date, put the entire budget behind the film on day one, and find out in week three whether it works.
It is a single, unhedged bet on an untested creative hypothesis, and the odds are worse than most founders realise. Across the launches we have inherited after a bad first quarter, the pattern is consistent: the hero asset was not bad, it just answered the wrong objection.
What we do instead
**Weeks 1–2: message testing before production.** Five to eight message angles, each expressed as a cheap static or a 15-second creator clip, £150/day each. We are not measuring conversions yet; we are measuring hold rate, click-through and cost per landing page view. This costs about £6,000 and routinely eliminates three quarters of the angles the brand team was certain about.
**Weeks 3–5: production against the survivors.** Now produce properly, but produce against the two or three angles that survived contact with a real audience. This is also where the hero asset belongs, if you want one — built on evidence rather than instinct.
**Week 6: launch at 30% of planned budget.** Prove unit economics at a survivable spend level before opening the tap. If CAC holds at 30%, scale in 40% increments with a 72-hour observation window between steps.
**Ongoing: never fewer than nine live creatives.** A launch that depends on one asset has a single point of failure. Nine gives the algorithm room to find its own answer, which it frequently does — usually the angle the founder liked least.
The Bombay Batter Co. version
For a subscription bakery launch, message testing cost £5,800 and killed the brand's preferred positioning — artisan craft — in nine days. The angle that won was the least romantic option on the list: the specific, boring convenience of never having to plan a weekend breakfast. That launch hit its first-quarter subscriber target in seven weeks and never ran the artisan film.
The hero creative is not dead. It is just no longer allowed to go first.