How Relay Made 30 Ad Creatives in 3 Days Without an Agency

Quarter-end pipeline pushes come with a familiar problem: the decision to accelerate demand generation is made too late to run a proper creative production cycle. Relay's growth team solved this by cutting the agency out of the process entirely — and used an AI image creator to produce 30 ad creatives in three days.

Relay is a B2B workflow automation tool. Alex Morgan, Head of Growth, had a two-week window to run a concentrated paid push on LinkedIn and Google Display before the quarter closed. No agency on retainer. No in-house designer available. A brief that required at least five visual directions to make the test statistically useful.

The previous quarter's campaign had used externally produced creative that took three weeks to deliver. The creative was fine. The timeline wasn't.

An AI image creator can produce five campaign directions and all associated format variants in the same time a typical agency takes to schedule the kickoff call. The question isn't whether the quality is comparable to agency output — it's whether the speed changes what's possible at the end of a quarter.

The result. Alex Morgan at Relay used Playyy's AI image generator, Image Expander, and Visual Enhancer to produce 30 ad creatives across five campaign directions in three days, without an agency. The campaign ran for 12 days before quarter close and delivered a 40% CTR lift over the previous quarter's externally produced creative, with the top-performing direction being one the team had not expected to win.

The Quarter-End Creative Problem for SaaS Growth Teams

The timing of quarter-end paid pushes creates a structural creative problem. The decision to accelerate pipeline is made when the quarter is already two-thirds over. A standard agency creative cycle — brief, concepting, review, revision, production, export — takes two to three weeks minimum. By the time assets are ready, the push window has closed.

According to a 2025 Gartner survey, 67% of B2B marketing teams report that creative production timelines are their primary constraint in executing reactive campaign strategies. For SaaS brands that run quarterly business cycles, this means the most time-sensitive moments in the revenue calendar are also the moments when creative production is least responsive.

The alternative most teams fall back on is reusing existing creative from previous campaigns. The problem is that ad fatigue accumulates. LinkedIn's algorithm measures engagement quality, and audiences who've seen the same creative for three quarters don't click on it.

For the broader workflow behind this approach, see Campaign Visual Creation From Brief to Every Channel.

Five Directions From One Afternoon

B2B advertising creative fatigue sets in faster than most growth teams expect. Research into paid social behavior consistently shows that audiences in professional contexts — particularly on LinkedIn — disengage from repeated creative more quickly than consumers on entertainment-oriented platforms. For SaaS brands that run ongoing campaigns to the same addressable market, rotating creative direction every four to six weeks is not a best practice but a practical requirement for maintaining CTR above baseline. The constraint has always been production speed, not creative strategy.

Alex started by writing five campaign angles in plain language — each targeting a different pain point Relay addresses. Not "product features" — specific problems: a broken handoff process, a status update meeting that shouldn't exist, a tool integration that takes too long.

For each angle, he used Playyy's AI image generator to produce three visual treatments: a product UI-forward image showing the tool in context, a conceptual image illustrating the problem being solved, and a lifestyle-in-office image showing the professional who experiences the problem.

That's 15 base images, produced in a single afternoon.

In our experience with SaaS creative testing, the conceptual direction — images that visualize the problem rather than the product — consistently outperforms in early-funnel LinkedIn placements. The AI image creator handles this type of image particularly well because it's generating original compositions rather than adapting an existing product photo.

Expanding to 30 Creatives Across Two Channels

LinkedIn and Google Display have different technical and aesthetic requirements. LinkedIn favors 1200 × 627 px horizontal images with clear subject-object contrast and minimal visual complexity. Google Display spans dozens of format sizes, with the most common being 300 × 250, 728 × 90, and 160 × 600.

Alex used the campaign direction selection to choose one winning image per angle — five images total — and then used Image Expander to adapt each to the required format set. For LinkedIn: single format. For Google Display: three standard formats per image. That produced 20 Google Display variants plus 5 LinkedIn variants — 25 total. Visual Enhancer ran on all 25 to optimize sharpness and contrast for digital delivery.

According to Google's own creative effectiveness research, campaigns with three or more format variants in rotation outperform single-format campaigns by an average of 17% on impression-weighted CTR. Running five directions × multiple formats gave Relay the creative depth their testing required.

The additional five creatives came from combining the two strongest directions with alternate headline treatments — made possible because the AI image generator produced assets with clean, text-free compositions that allowed headline text to be overlaid without competing with the visual.

What the Test Showed

The campaign ran for 12 days before the quarter closed. CTR on the new creative was 40% higher than the previous quarter's externally produced campaign. The top-performing direction was the conceptual problem-visualization approach — specifically, an image representing the broken handoff problem. The team had rated it their third most likely winner before the test.

According to LinkedIn's 2025 B2B Creative Playbook, problem-centric visuals outperform product-feature visuals by 23% on CTR for software categories at the awareness stage. Relay's test results tracked closely with that benchmark.

The quarter-end push hit its pipeline target. More practically, Relay now has a creative production process that doesn't require an agency relationship for campaign work. The agency engagement that previously handled all ad creative is now reserved for brand-level production — the one type of work where the craft and oversight justify the lead time. For more on building a repeatable AI-driven ad creative workflow, see Marketing Creatives.