Their team ran the ads. Our creative booked 29 calls at $82 each.
Deal Fuel handled media buying in-house. We handled the creative. Fifteen angles later, one of ours was carrying the account — and their media buyer is the one who said so.
A clean split — which is what makes the result readable.
We didn't touch the ad account. Same buyer, same budgets, same targeting discipline throughout. The variable that changed was the creative, which is why the performance gap between angles is worth reading at all.
| Client | Deal Fuel and Deal Floor |
| Deal Fuel | Sales training company |
| Deal Floor | Sales staffing company |
| Our scope | Funnel audit, landing page videos, landing page revamp, video ad creatives |
| Creative ownership | Strategy, copywriting and execution |
| Media buying | Handled in-house by Deal Fuel's team |
| Offers covered | B2B (Deal Floor) and B2C (Deal Fuel) |
| Creative constraint | No face of the brand available — built with AI |
| Creative production | Four batches, August through March |
| Conversion goal | Booked calls |
A media problem that wasn't a media problem
The account was being run competently. It just had nothing worth running.
A good offer running on the weakest possible assets.
The offer itself was working, and the media side was already in competent hands. The problem was everything the media was carrying. Deal Fuel were running static creatives only — no video anywhere in the funnel — and pointing that traffic at a landing page that was underbuilt and had no video on it at all.
So the two places where a prospect decides whether to care, the ad and the page it lands on, were both doing the least possible work. No amount of buying skill fixes that. It's a supply problem, not a spend problem.
We don't have a verified cost per call from the static-creative period, so we're not going to invent one. What we can show is what happened inside the account once our batch was running: a blended $313.28 per result while the creatives were still in learning, and $82 on the angle that separated.
Same buyer, same account, same month. The difference is which creative the budget found.
What we built
Audit the funnel first. Build the video second. Write the ad angles last — from what the video taught us.
The order mattered more than any single deliverable. Each step produced the understanding the next one needed.
No face of the brand. So we built one.
There was no founder, presenter or spokesperson available to put on camera. For a video-led funnel, that normally kills the whole approach before it starts.
We used AI to carry the on-screen presence, and built the entire creative structure around that decision rather than treating it as a workaround. It runs through the landing page videos and the ad creatives alike.
The creative that booked 29 calls at $82 each has no human presenter in it at all.
Fifteen angles, one winner
You don't find the angle by having an opinion. You find it by building enough of them that the account can tell you.
Each opens in Frame.io.
- This is Alim
- WHO ARE WE ???
- What if I told you
- UGC Stitch
- Painful — the winner
- Recruitment offer
- Case Study Ad
- Animation Style Hook
- Cluely stitch video
- Animation Style Hook 2
- #1 hire sales reps
- Jack
- Struggling
- Bad Sales Hire
- 3 Truths
One creative produced every result in the batch.
This is their account data, not ours — and it's the clearest argument we have for shipping angles in volume rather than betting on one idea.
| Ad | Results | Reach | Freq | Cost / result | Spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dracula A1 9x16 | 5 | 3,719 | 1.21 | $57.14 | $285.68 |
| Dracula A2 9x16 | — | 661 | 1.13 | — | $63.81 |
| Dracula B1 9x16 | — | 234 | 1.12 | — | $18.33 |
| Dracula B2 9x16 | — | 222 | 1.06 | — | $17.12 |
| SaaS/Tech Startup Focused v2 | — | 205 | 1.17 | — | $16.43 |
| Funding 9x16 | — | 181 | 1.12 | — | $13.36 |
| SaaS 9x16 | — | 66 | 1.06 | — | $3.35 |
| Dracula A3 9x16 | — | 56 | 1.11 | — | $4.31 |
| Recruitment 9x16 — Copy | — | 19 | 1.21 | — | $1.79 |
| Case Study AD V1 | — | 10 | 1.10 | — | $0.36 |
| Cluely 9x16 — Copy | — | — | — | — | $0.00 |
| Results from 11 ads | 5 | 4,733 | 1.34 | $84.91 | $424.54 |
Their numbers, not ours
Every figure below came from Deal Fuel's own media buyer in the shared channel — reporting on an account we had no control over.
$313.28 is the blended cost per result across three ad sets while the batch was still in learning. $104.25 is the CBO campaign over a three-day window. $82 is the lifetime cost per call on the winning creative.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Blended cost per result, 3 ad sets | $313.28 | Ads Manager, Sep 13 |
| Total spent, those ad sets | $1,566.39 | Ads Manager, Sep 13 |
| Reach, those ad sets | 22,631 | Ads Manager, Sep 13 |
| CPM | $55.07 | Ads Manager, Sep 13 |
| CTR, CBO campaign | 0.91% | Ads Manager, 3-day view |
| CPC, link clicks | $6.18 | Ads Manager, 3-day view |
| Website appointments, 3 days | 16 | Ads Manager, 3-day view |
| Cost per appointment, 3 days | $104.25 | Ads Manager, 3-day view |
| Calls booked by "Painful" | 29 | Media buyer, Slack |
| Cost per call, "Painful" | $82 | Media buyer, Slack |
| Calls booked, last 14 days | 47 | Media buyer, Slack |
| Views on the ads | ~1,000,000 | Media buyer, Slack |
Why it worked
The landing page video was the research. Every ad angle came out of it.
It started with the landing page video.
Building that first video forced us to go deep into Deal Fuel's brand — how they operate, what their audience actually struggles with, and which messaging angle would hit their ICP directly.
That understanding is what drove the ad angles. We weren't guessing at hooks from the outside; we already knew the argument. So when their team put the batch live, one of them separated fast.
Building the landing page video is what produced the brand understanding. The ad angles were a by-product of doing that work properly, not a separate exercise.
No face of the brand would normally end a video-led funnel. Building the presence with AI turned the constraint into the creative structure — and the winner has no human in it.
Eleven creatives in rotation, one produced every result. Fifteen angles across four batches, one carried the account. A good media buyer can only allocate budget to what exists — creative volume is what gives them something to find.
Deal Fuel's team handled every spend and targeting decision, before and after. The account didn't change hands. The creative did.
Once you find a winning creative angle for one client, it's replicable. We've taken the same framework and applied it across completely different niches — and it drops into whatever media setup a client already has, in-house or agency.
Keep your media buyer. Change what they're running.
We build the landing page video first, because that's what produces the understanding every ad angle runs on. Then we ship angles in volume for your team to test.