The previous chapter covered how to brief for BFCM - modular hooks, bodies, and CTAs. This chapter gets a little more technical, and answers the question underneath that: how much of it do you actually need to produce?
Most teams answer this on gut feel (and that often ends up as "let's do more than last year") which either leaves spend on the table because the account is creative-starved, or burns budget and production time on volume the account was never going to absorb.
During BFCM, both mistakes are expensive.
This chapter walks through a repeatable model that replaces the guesswork.
By the end, you'll have a number: input your account's real data, output the creative volume required to sustain or grow your spend through peak season.
🎙️ If you want the full walkthrough before diving in, we covered this model in detail on D2C Diaries.
In the Creative Forecasting Masterclass, Olly breaks down the process we've validated across brands spending anywhere from £100K to £5M a month on Meta. It answers one question: how many new creatives do you need to produce each month to hit your spend target?
The episode covers each step. You pull your last 90 days of ad inventory, classify what counts as a winner, and track cohorts to see how many winners survive from one month to the next. From that you get your churn rate, win rate and half-life. Those numbers feed a simple calculation: how many winners your spend target needs, how many you'll carry over, how many new ones you need, and how many ads you have to launch to find them, plus a buffer.
Olly also covers what can skew the numbers, like tight CPA targets, high churn, and too much volume sitting at the bottom of the funnel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCq-ki8ZDw4&t=1s
Lets’s get into it…
Launches Needed = (Replacement Demand + Growth Demand) / Win Rate × Buffer
Where:
Replacement Demand = Winner Pool Size × Monthly Churn Rate
Growth Demand = max(0, Target Winners - Current Winners)
Expanded:
Launches Needed = ((Winners × Churn) + Growth Deficit) / Win Rate × 1.2