How a DTC Skincare Brand 3× Their ROAS by Scaling Ad Variations with Steve AI

Company:

A DTC skincare brand with a 12-person team and $180K/month ad spend used AI-powered video creation to break through creative bottlenecks and accelerate ad performance.

Challenges:

Before utilising AI video generation, the performance marketing team had a series of compounding problems:
  • Limited creative volume: The agency was able to produce only 4 creatives in a month.
  • Costly production: Each video costs them $800-$1,200, totalling $12K/month.
  • Ad fatigue: Ads exhausted in 7-10 days, driving CPMs up 30-50%.
  • Slow turnaround time: A 7-10 days of Agency timeline made faster A/B testing near impossible as they couldn’t test the ads sooner to experiment with what works.
  • No agility: The team wasn’t quick enough to jump on trending hooks or competitor ads.

Solution:

Using the Steve AI text-to-video feature, the team eliminated agency dependency. They were able to adapt a daily sprint workflow that did not shunt their creativity. What did that look like in practice?
  • They tried 15 different opening hooks on the same product demo every week.
  • The landing page copy was then converted into 30-second ads.
  • In minutes, platform-ready variants were generated — 9:16 for TikTok/Reels, 1:1 for Meta feed.
  • The best performing ad was turned into 5 variants within 2 hours.
  • Agency spend went from $12K/month to $1.2K/month. Savings were re-invested into media.

Results:

The results were rapid and measurable:
3.2× 72% 40+
ROAS improvement vs baseline Cost per video creative Ad variants per week
44% 38% $0
CTR on best-performing hooks CPA reduction in 60 days Agency dependency

Conclusion

This case shows exactly what can happen when the bottleneck is no longer the creative volume. Going from 4 ads a month to 40+ a week made testing faster, cheaper, and made a massive improvement in ROAS.

The team was able to stay ahead of ad fatigue and competitor trends by iterating on hooks and formats quickly. This was accomplished without adding headcount or burning budget on agencies.

Use Case:
Performance Marketing Ads and Creative Testing
Industry:
DTC / E-commerce
Country:
United States
Category:
AI Video Generator Use Cases