Your Weekly Pencil - September 2, 2021

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Just one big thing to share this week - Pencil's Free Creative Dashboard is LIVE and ready to try here

• We wanted to create something that was free forever, instant sign up, which helps teams see the performance of their ads inside their Facebook Ad account, let them learn from their past FB ads, and advise them which ads to run next
• The new dashboard is part of a full Creative AI system, which can now audit all previous ads,  generate new batches of high-performance video ads, track their performance and then optimize them to drive more sales

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How the new Creative Dashboard works

• First up, the new creative dashboard will be free forever, and automatically analyses a Facebook account, and then groups all of a brand’s previous ads into “winners” and “losers.”
• Winners are ads that are performing above a threshold (e.g. the average, top 10%, or top 25%) on a particular metric, and they can be used to generate new strong ideas, with a “More like this” feature.
• Losing ads can be switched out and improved in a few clicks using the “Replace” feature, and there’s also indicators to identify “Fatiguing” and “Scaling” ideas.
• Great insight from Tye DeGrange, founder of Round Barn Labs: “The new creative AI dashboard is going to significantly improve the way we build and run ads on Facebook and Instagram, We already know that creative quality and variety is driving more than 50% of our performance for us on Facebook, but identifying winners and losers with the speed and scale we want is often difficult. We estimate this  tool will change the game for our team, improving our vision, speed, creativity, and results.”

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How the new Instant Predictive Audit (IPA) works

• For Pencil’s customers the new IPA can audit thousands of ads to provide “Day Zero” new ideas and predictions, enabling brands to use their best creative to make their next creative.
• Previously, users needed to run sufficient Pencil ads and media investment before gathering enough data to see any predictions, which might take several weeks.
• Now with the IPA, Pencil already knows on Day Zero what has worked before and what didn’t, and users get predictions built on all their past Facebook ad tests.
• More on this and other updates in Pencil's monthly platform update

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New data shows that 3 out of 4 Pencil users find "winners" -  

• Today we also revealed that 3 out of 4 Pencil users successfully find ad “winners” which outperform their average performance benchmarks. On average these winning ads beat their baselines by 79% (ROAS, return on advertising spend) and 48% (CPA, cost per acquisition).
• The new data was published in the Q3’2021 edition of “Creative AI Works”, based on an analysis of over 650 Pencil ads that ran between November 2020 and July 2021.
• The report also found that teams which ran 10 or more Pencil ads were typically able to find “winners” that performed 100% higher than ROAS baselines and 50% lower than CPA baselines.
• The full report can be downloaded here.

Under the hood - How does Pencil do all this?

• These new features would not be possible without the outstanding partnership and performance of CLIP.
• IPA utilizes OpenAI's CLIP neural network, which is trained across 400 million image-language data points to learn the presence of concepts in the images automatically.
• Earlier in the year, Pencil upgraded from OpenAI’s GPT-2 to GPT-3 to drive its ad copy generation, and saw its success rates jump from ~65% to over 95%.

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