Static Social Ad Sets for Feed, Stories and Reels

A static social ad has one job the brief rarely states: hold the scroll long enough for the first line of copy to be read. That is a decision about crop, contrast and the four or five words inside the frame. The feature list, the trust badges and the second product belong on the page the click leads to, and putting them in the frame is the most common reason a set underperforms. How a set is put together: One argument, three or four visual routes, each composed natively at 4:5 for feed at 1080x1350 and 9:16 for Stories and Reels at 1080x1920, with 1:1 only where a placement still demands it. On Reels roughly the top eighth and the bottom third of the frame sit beneath interface, so the subject and any burned-in words are placed inside what remains rather than centred and hoped for. LinkedIn single image at 1200x627 is written separately; an ad tuned for the Meta feed reads as shouting in a LinkedIn one. On variants: I will not produce forty permutations so the algorithm can find a winner. Variation without a stated question is spend, not testing. Each route answers something you can act on afterwards: whether the price beats the guarantee, whether the empty room beats the styled room, whether a face beats a building. Three routes with a clean read teach you more than thirty with none, and cost less to judge. Photography: In interiors and property work the honest answer is often that the imagery is the problem and no layout repairs it. Cutouts with hard shadows, agent photography shot at 8mm, hotel stock with nobody in it. I will say so at briefing and then either art-direct a session with your photographer or build a type-and-colour route around what exists, while telling you plainly that the second option is a compromise. Copy: In-frame words and primary text are written together. They are one sentence split across two places, and briefing them to different people is why so many ads repeat themselves in the first two lines. Delivery: A working Figma file with routes as components and each placement as a variant, exports at platform resolution, filenames matching your Ads Manager taxonomy, and a one-page note stating what each route tests so whoever reads the numbers in three weeks knows what they are reading. Not included: Video, animation and Reels edits. Media buying, budgets and audience setup. Community management and reply handling. Landing page design. Copy in languages other than English and Dutch; a four-word line is rewritten, not translated, and I will not approve one I cannot judge. Who this is not for: Teams still deciding the offer. This is the shortest form the argument takes, and if the price, guarantee or proof point moves after briefing, everything is redrawn. Also not for anyone who measures a creative partner by assets delivered per month. That number is available from production studios at a third of this price, and they will hit it reliably. Where this sits in a plan: This is the cheapest place to find out which argument the market accepts, which is why most of my clients run it before commissioning film or building a carousel on top of an untested claim. When a route wins clearly, it becomes the brief for everything downstream; when nothing wins, that is also an answer, and it arrives for the cost of one set rather than one production.