Performance marketing runs on volume. While a brand motion designer might spend weeks perfecting a single film, a performance marketing creative team is expected to produce hundreds of ads every week. Meta's own benchmarks keep raising the bar on how many creatives you should be testing at any given time, and falling behind that number means falling behind the competition. The instinctive answer is to hire more. But headcount is slow, expensive, and doesn't scale the way the algorithm does.
The goal was simple to state and relentless to pursue: produce more, without spending more time. Not as a one-time fix, but as an ongoing discipline. This became less of a project and more of a mindset: continuously identifying where time was being lost, and engineering it out.
Templater by Dataclay is a plugin for Adobe After Effects that automates the production of video creatives. It lets you design a template once, connect it to a spreadsheet or JSON file, and automatically render hundreds of variations by swapping out elements like copy, visuals, or localized content, without any manual editing.
The impact of using Templater was immediate. Where we previously produced packs of 3 to 5 variations, the plug-in allowed us to generate dozens in the same amount of time. Some campaigns scaled to over $400K in ad spend, with more than 8K purchases per variation and a 30% ROI. Others used it to test new headlines weekly, spinning up 10 variations of the top performing creatives (with ad spend higher than $100K) with minimal effort.
The learnings were just as valuable as the wins. Not all variations moved the needle equally. Meta's algorithm rewards more significant creative changes, making hook variation a priority over smaller cosmetic edits. Templater is also a sophisticated tool, and getting the most out of it requires motion designers who are senior, curious, and genuinely open to new workflows.
Templater solved one problem, but the mindset it created opened many more doors. To keep the momentum going, we established a small focus group of selected senior designers dedicated to one question: how do we keep getting faster without losing quality. Every week we meet to evaluate new tools, test plugins, and where nothing off the shelf fits, we build our own. Using vibe coding, we have developed custom tools tailored specifically to our workflows. A selection of them is showcased below.
"What really stands out about Sila is her ability to lead people in a way that feels both strong and supportive. She is highly organized, proactive, transparent in communication, and genuinely people-oriented. At the same time, she is very goal-driven and not afraid to take on challenges, even when the situation is complex or requires change.
Sila was leading a large team of 10+ designers and did a great job not only keeping things running, but also improving how the team worked. She took ownership of initiatives focused on boosting efficiency and optimizing production processes, while also helping strengthen team morale along the way."