Key Takeaways
- Brooks Running used Adora’s AI platform to generate more than 1,500 on-brand ad variations across 40 products, expanding its creative testing without growing its budget.
- The partnership delivered a 107% year-over-year increase in ROAS, a 53% drop in cost per acquisition and $1.8 million in incremental revenue on a flat budget.
For performance marketers, the math rarely works out cleanly. Growth targets climb. Budgets don’t. And the creative engine that’s supposed to fuel it all, generating fresh assets across dozens of products, campaigns and audience segments, moves at a pace that performance marketing long ago outgrew.
Brooks Running knows this tension well. The company has been building market-leading running footwear, apparel, sports bras and accessories since 1914, driven by a relentless curiosity about how humans move. It’s a brand with both the heritage and the ambition to compete at the highest level.
But ambition without budget flexibility creates a hard problem: how do you scale creative production and improve ROAS at the same time, when the two demands are pulling in opposite directions?
How Brooks Running Scaled Creative Without Increasing Budget
That’s exactly the position Brooks found itself in. The team had ambitious growth goals and a marketing budget that wasn’t growing to match them. They needed to dramatically improve return on ad spend while producing more creative, across more products and more audience segments, faster than ever before.
The deeper issue was creative variety. Brooks was operating on a single photograph of one shoe in one colorway, and that lone asset had to carry the weight across every audience and every channel. With so little to test, it was nearly impossible to identify what actually drove performance, let alone scale it.
Why Limited Creative Variety Was Holding Performance Back
To grow, Brooks executives turned to Adora, a performance marketing engine built for brand advertisers who want to show up authentically everywhere their customers are. Adora delivers creative variety without compromising brand standards, the velocity to capture market moments and clear visibility into what drives results.
Adora’s AI platform gave the Brooks marketing team the ability to generate on-brand ad variations across a wide range of products. The creative matched the look and feel of Brooks’ in-house work almost one-to-one, so quality never slipped as volume climbed.
The shift was immediate. Instead of leaning on one image of one shoe, Brooks could now showcase every colorway from multiple angles and place products in a nearly limitless range of settings. In total, the team generated more than 1,500 on-brand ad variations across 40 products, a dramatic expansion of its testing capabilities.
What Results Did Brooks Achieve With AI-Powered Creative Testing?
That volume mattered because it fed a smarter process. As campaigns ran, Adora’s platform continuously analyzed performance to pinpoint the specific creative elements driving results. The team tested variables that a traditional workflow could never explore at this scale, including:
- Gym-based backgrounds versus other environments to see where products resonated most
- Shoes shown off-foot to compare presentation styles
- One-shoe versus two-shoe compositions to identify the most effective layouts
Those insights fed straight back into live campaigns. Brooks could iterate in real time, cut what underperformed and scale what worked. The result was a personalized, data-driven approach that replaced the old one-size-fits-all model.
The Results
The partnership delivered clear business outcomes on a budget that never grew. Brooks achieved:
- A 107% increase in ROAS year over year
- A 53% reduction in cost per acquisition, or CPA
- $1.8 million in incremental revenue on a flat budget
Adora produced more than 1,500 ads across 40 products, helping Brooks scale creative output, speed up testing cycles and surface performance insights that traditional methods would have taken months to uncover.
How Brooks Turned Creative Automation Into a Growth Engine
Adora helped Brooks evolve from a one-size-fits-all creative strategy to a personalized, data-driven marketing engine. The platform freed the Brooks team to focus on higher-value creative and marketing work. Rather than spending months waiting on new assets, the team could showcase its full product catalog across many environments and audience segments while holding creative quality at a level nearly indistinguishable from in-house production.
By pairing AI-powered creative generation with performance intelligence, Adora became a strategic growth engine that improved efficiency, increased revenue, and empowered Brooks’ team to focus on higher-value creative and marketing initiatives.
