Running paid social across four e-commerce accounts, somewhere around $80K to $120K in monthly spend depending on season. I have burned so much client money on reshoots that never fixed the actual issue.
The pattern is always the same. CPA creeps up for three days and someone in the Slack thread goes "creative fatigue, we need fresh assets." Half the time the real problem was a frequency spike from under-broadened audiences. Or a CPM jump because Meta decided to juice auction prices that week. Or some iOS black box nonsense that made attribution look worse than delivery actually was. But the directive comes down: new shoot, new models, new invoice. Six weeks later the assets land and the numbers look identical because the fundamentals never changed.
About four months ago I stopped letting every dip trigger a production cycle. I needed a way to test hooks and angles faster than a shoot calendar could allow, without pretending a static graphic was going to carry a UGC-style account. I had been using Midjourney for background and lifestyle stills for a while, but getting a real product believably into a model's hands was the blocker. You can generate a person holding something generic. Try getting your actual SKU with correct proportions, branding, and lighting to not look like a collage job. It always needed Photoshop surgery that ate the time savings.
I ended up testing APOB AI for exactly this: taking one consistent AI-generated model and getting my real product into her hands for a batch of UGC-style stills. Same face, different angles, different hooks, product actually readable at scroll speed. For video I tried their image-to-video on a couple of those stills, then cut in CapCut. The stills held up fine. The video took several regeneration passes, there were frames where the product warped or her fingers did something impossible, and I had to be brutal about killing clips that weren't clean enough. It is not a shoot replacement for anything motion-heavy yet, not for my accounts anyway.
I went from testing maybe four new creative concepts in a month to pushing through twelve to sixteen variations some weeks, all built off one base shoot that happened back in January. The model is flagged as AI-generated in copy, not presented as real talent. When a hook flops I kill it in two days instead of waiting for production. When something works I iterate on the angle immediately. That velocity, and actually testing hooks instead of guessing, is the only lever I still trust.
Meta's auction is still a fucking dumpster fire. But I have stopped lighting money on fire chasing "fresh creative" as the default diagnosis for every dip. Sometimes the creative was fine. I just needed more shots at the same hook to find the winner.