The retainer says four videos. That is the client's sample size.

The quarterly review asks why CPA drifted.

The honest answer is that the account ran four creatives a month.

Roughly 5 to 8 percent of creatives carry spend, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.

Four attempts against a one-in-thirteen rate is a coin flip with the odds against you.

That is not a media buying failure, and yet media buying is what gets defended in the room.

Saying so is awkward, because the scope line was yours.

Asking for more creative budget mid-retainer reads as an admission that the original plan was wrong.

So the deliverable count stays. The performance conversation repeats every quarter.

Eventually the account moves for reasons nobody names correctly.

The incoming agency will inherit four videos a month, and in two quarters they will be in the same review.

Time-track a month of creative work and split it in two.

Deciding what the ad says. Assembling the file.

The first is why the client pays you.

The second is captions, resizing, re-cutting an opening, exporting, uploading and doing it again after feedback.

Assembly is the half that scales badly and the half nobody credits you for.

It also grows every time a client adds a channel.

An agency that keeps its strategy hours and cuts its assembly hours can raise deliverable counts without raising headcount.

That is the only version of this that improves margin.

Look at the last month of timesheets on your biggest account.

The hours logged against creative are mostly assembly, and the client is being invoiced for them as strategy.

Get the client on camera once for three minutes. That take is the raw material for the quarter.

Upload it and Cutroom transcribes the read, drafts the cut, places b-roll against the words and returns a finished 9:16 MP4 with captions burned in.

No project to assemble.

Then you direct on the transcript. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words.

Delete a line the legal team flagged and the cut rebuilds. Change the pace and it re-cuts.

Caption look is controllable across six packs, plus colour, weight, size and position.

A client with a strong text style gets it without a design round.

The client's own product footage goes into the workspace library once and lands under the words that describe it.

The practical shift is who does the work. Directing a cut this way is reading and deciding, so a strategist can do it between calls.

Creative stops queueing behind one production person, which is the constraint that set the scope line in the first place.

A finished thirty second ad is about 110 credits. Basic is $39.99 for 2,500 credits, roughly 22 ads.

Premium is $79.99 for 5,000, roughly 45. A $15 top-up adds 1,000.

Now the scope line can say something the client actually wants.

Twelve openings tested, losers switched off inside 48 hours, reporting on which opening held.

That is a better sale and a cheaper delivery at the same time, which is rare.

It also moves the quarterly review off targeting and onto creative, where the evidence is.

Bill for the thinking and the reporting.

The assembly stops being work you quietly fund out of margin.

Do the arithmetic on one client before rewriting anything.

Twelve openings at about 110 credits is roughly 1,320 credits a month, against a retainer line that currently buys four assembled videos.

The transcript is the interface, so each client puts a human on camera once.

Establish that in the pitch rather than at kickoff, and film three minutes while you have them.

If a client will not appear, the avatar module builds a lip-synced presenter from a photo and a voice-over.

That is 320 credits per minute of render and 70 per minute of generated voice, and it carries explanation rather than personal testimony.

Client product footage belongs in the workspace library, where it is one highlight away from any cut.

The free b-roll search covers everything around it, from millions of clips.

Exports are 9:16 MP4, which covers Reels, Stories, TikTok and Shorts.

Source takes cap at three minutes and one project produces one finished ad.

An agency that names those facts in a proposal is believed about the rest of the document, and it is quoting twelve openings where the incumbent quoted four videos.