The Best Facebook Ad Creative Strategy for 2026

In this video, I'll be breaking down the single best creative ad strategy for 2026 [music] so that you can make killer high-erforming ad creatives in Facebook ads. This is the exact creative strategy that we're deploying over our 100 plus brands at the Moonlighters and the same exact creative strategy that I've shared within my school community [music] to nearly 300 brands right now. And this will 100% work no matter what category in. Whether you're in fashion, beauty, wellness, you name it. The old school way of creating ads would be a very simple workflow. You would think of an ad idea or your media buyer would say, "Hey, we need new ads. Maybe here's what's working." Then you would go and create new ads that look similar to the ones you've created before. Or if you had a new concept, something you thought might work well, you would go ahead and create it. Then you'd come into the Facebook ads manager. You'd upload it all as a single image or video. and you'd sit here writing painfully your primary text, your headlines, your descriptions. So, what we want to do instead is creating a system that increases the likelihood of finding winning ads. You can go ahead and pump out a,000 ads in an hour. You can go ahead and make a bunch of fake UGC or hire a bunch of creators or make a bunch of videos for yourself, but in reality, your win rate is going to be very low. The ads we're going to focus on today are going to have very high win rates. So instead of duplicating your best performing ads, we're going to be way more focused on a combination of new concepts, iterations, and variations, which are all very different things in the newest Andromeda updates and gem algorithmic changes to meta. So let's talk through the new way of doing this. So to start our system, what we're going to be building is a creative flywheel. This is going to be a predictable system that pumps out winning ads. So of course, at the top of every single creative machine or creative flywheel are new ads. And to source those new ads, they're going to come from two different places. And we're going to start from the single most important place. And that of course is going to be your competitors. Now, there's a free way to do this and there's a paid way to do this. I'm going to use the paid way. You could use the free way. I'm going to show you both really simply. First, the free way. We go into Facebook ads library. We click all ads and you go ahead and search one by one each of the competitors that are most relevant to your business. So, in this example, I'm just going to pretend that I'm the brand Vori. They're a sportsware kind of athleisure brand. One of their main competitors is Lululemon. So, what I would do if I was Viori is I would type in Lululemon. We're then going to select their page and we're able to see every single ad that Lululemon is currently running. And as you can see right here, they have hundreds of active ads in their account right now. So, I'm trying to think and clock what of these can I use as inspiration. What you really want to do is look at what ads have either been live the longest or spent the most. So, obvious things you could look out for are anything that says low impression count. You could very well and easily know that that is not a high performing ad. Or you could scroll all the way down to the bottom, which might take a minute depending on what brand you're looking at and look for ads that have been spending for the longest period of time. Now, what I like to do is use a program called Magic Brief. This is a paid platform. We're not sponsored by them, but it's the easiest way to show you everything. And we can see Lululemon right here is running 2382 active ads. We can see a quick overview of all the ads that they're running. And I could scroll through everything really easy. And I could download all of this imagery if I want to. Now, you might notice this looked a little bit different than Facebook ads library. And that's because they're running ads from different pages. So on the ad library, you might have to search through a variety of different pages from Lululemon and you might have to change the active status to all available ads because some of their ads might be paused after certain periods of time. And I want to give you a pro tip here. If you're a small brand and you're in the athletic leisure space, do not compare yourself to Lululemon. Don't compare yourself to Nike. Think about brands that are a step or two above you. If you're doing a million dollars in revenue, think of a brand that's doing 10 million. find and strike that balance between brands that are not too big. I'm never going to take inspiration from Nike, but not too small where they're not driving any sales, of course. So, once we find the brand and the creative that we are interested in, what we're looking for are the ads that have run the longest. We're looking for ads that have been most active for this brand. And I'm looking for real concepts here. Now, let's use this ad concept by Lululemon, which has run for 469 days. is they launched this in October of 2024. I am able to now take this ad, this carousel that they've developed here and use this as inspiration. We can recreate this very easily if I was Viori. So now in this example here, I'm just adding inspiration from competitive ads. You should be taking their videos, their statics, their gifts, their carousels, and build a true collection of concepts that you can identify. Each of these three are completely different concepts. You should be able to note and expand that each of these can be heavily expanded on. You should extrapolate out dozens of different iterations of this. You can make this exact ad if I was VRE versus Lululemon for every single product if I know it's a winning concept. But keep in mind, this is just scratching the surface. You can do this for every single one of your competitors. Identify trends and find common threads of creative that generally work in your category. Then take those threads, take those concepts and build them for yourself. Once you've created the concepts from your competitors, you've built them for yourselves. You've then launched your own new ads. What do you do next? This part is going to sound a little too easy. You wait. But it's not just about waiting. You have to make sure things are set up properly with those new ads to be able to have that luxury to actually wait and be patient. Now, we like to launch all of our new ads inside of a prospecting CBO campaign. The idea here is pretty simple. We want competition within our own ad account. And that works in a very simple way. Every time we have new creatives, they get launched into a new ad set. It could be anywhere from two creatives, one creative, 10 creatives, 15 creatives. Generally, four to eight creatives is the sweet spot. But don't over complicate it. Every time new ads get launched, they get launched into a new ad set. When those ads get launched into a new adset, over time, you're going to have a lot of new adets. And as you can see on my lefth hand side here, we're up to Broadpack 76. That means we have over 76 adsets that we've launched and tested for this brand. You're going to wonder, how on earth do any of these new ads get any sort of spend? Because the old ads are going to hog all the spend. I hear this all the time, even for brands that are just starting out. So, what we've done to basically counteract this is when we go into the adset, we go down to the budget and schedule section, and we click ads set spending limits. From here, we click set a minimum or maximum. We change the percent value to dollar value and we enter an average daily minimum equal to 1x the cost per acquisition target. If your cost per acquisition target is 50, you put this to 50. It is literally as simple as that. There's one point of tracking that you need to do on your side. Set a calendar invite. Set an alarm. I don't care what you have to do. Just make sure you get back to this in seven days. These never stay on for more than seven days at a time. Now, you might ask, why do we even do this? The problem is most ads just take too much time to get the adequate levels of spend and be tested. This keeps you in a non-stop waiting cycle where your ad account doesn't grow fast enough. Instead of waiting all of this time, this giant section here, and then eventually the ad scales or the ad dies because it's not good, we want to shortline this. And the way that we shortline this is we set that ad set budget minimum equal to 1x the cost per acquisition, which instead only forces the spend for a few days. And then if the ad's a winner, it scales quicker. If it's a loser, it stays at that set spend. Now, the beauty of this is you're going to look back within that 7-day window and decide, am I willing to spend more on this ad, or should we just remove the adset minimum? If you remove the minimum, the ad's going to spend less. If you keep the minimum, it will continue to spend at the same, which is most likely what you do not want to do. And in most cases, if it's above, it's a winning ad. If you remove the minimum, it's still going to spend above the threshold. So, it's a win-win scenario. Okay. So, we've developed new ads. We set ads set minimum budgets. We've waited. We've removed those adset minimum budgets. And now, it's time to take some more action. Now, this is where the flywheel really begins. It is in the analysis. So, what we want to do is go back into our ad account, make sure we're in our prospecting campaign. We're going to go to our column set, compare attribution settings, and select incremental attribution. Then, sort your entire ad account by highest spending to lowest spending. In most cases, I like to look at all my ads at once, but it's also important to break things down into different groupings depending on products, categories, whatever else is going on within your business. Know that there are nuances to everything I am talking about. Looking through all of our ads to keep this as fundamentally simple as possible. In this case, last 14 days, we spent $97,000 at a 1.42 return on ad spend. Our incremental return on ad spend is 1.23. What I am looking for here are highspending ads, outsized results on high-spending ads and above our threshold for return on ad spend. And we can see we have one very clear standout, followed by a few others that I'm very interested in. Now, the incremental return on ad spend for new customers that this brand cares about is around a 1.1 return on ad spend, which I know sounds crazy to many people, but that is just what this brand functions at. For these guys, we need to be above that 1.1. And we can see in this case we're well above at scale $26,000 in spend which represents over 25% of the total spend in this campaign at a 1.46 way above our threshold. We can also see there's a few that are just at the threshold 1.13 1.16. We're not going to touch those for now. And then we have a few more that are actually high spending, well above the threshold here, a 1.5, 1.38, and a 1.43. Our duty now is to take the best performing ads that have high spend and are above our threshold and recreate and iterate off of these ads. And this is where the flywheel makes its way full circle. The analysis that we just did is going to provide and yield clear concepts. These concepts are going to be winning ads. We then are taking these winning ads just like we did for our competitors and we are creating duplicates, variants, iterations of these winning ads. Eventually, what this does for us is it solidifies core concepts in our ad account. Now, you can see you literally just do the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. But don't forget, as you're creating these new concepts, as your ad account is growing, you need to make sure you're upping your spend along the way. It doesn't mean you have to increase your spend. It just means that you should not be afraid of things like the learning phase or increasing spend in general. The goal here is to grow accounts. This is not a system for maintaining your account. This is a system for growth. So when you run this flywheel for weeks and weeks and months and you're consistent, this is an example of the result that you will get. You will find winning concepts. Those concepts will be matched to audiences and each of these concepts is going to perform at a different rate. For example, let's say your target is 2x return on ad spend. Concept number one might return at that 2x and might spend 10k. Concept number two might return at a 3x but only be able to spend 3K. Concept number four might return at a ridiculous 10x but guess what? It could only spend 500 bucks. And then finally, concept number four might spend at a 2.2, but it does so at 50k spend. Old school Facebook would want you to only run the 10x, right? Just keep smashing the 10x. New school Facebook, Andromeda Facebook wants you to focus on all of these concepts. All of these add profit to your business. Now, you should care way more about your bank account, your actual profit. And that is exactly what we want to be doing in the sense of creating concepts and matching those concepts to audiences. And don't care as much about an ad that runs a 5x versus a 2x. As long as 2x is profitable, we want to run both. So, this flywheel usually starts to produce winning clear concepts. And you can see here, this is a concept from the brand Talentless that they can continue to build out. They can make variants around the same exact thing and they already have. We have another talentless example here. Now, they've been using this exact concept for literally a year. They take different products, different model shots, and they group it together with these semi in between shots, like these trio shots almost with just a very simple headline. We then have another concept that they've merged. So, they started with concept A and concept B and then they duped in. So they merged two concepts which are concept up here, concept number two and concept number one to create concept number three. We then have another concept by them and you can see they've created variants of this for all of their collections. You will stack concepts if you do this over and over and over again. And that right there is how you create a creative machine. One of the most important things when you're running Facebook ads is having that creative machine to fuel your account and scale. Now, if this has been helpful and you like this style of content and you want to access my entire system, tutorials, SOPs, literally the internal trainings that we use at the Moonlighters to service over a 100 brands as well as live Q&As, then click the link down in the description or go to school.com/fas where we have a massive community, the fastest growing Facebook ads community on school right now with literally nothing held back. That's all for today's video. I hope you got a ton of value out of this and I will see you in the next