Creative that stops the scroll and still feels unmistakably yours.

A creative design agency develops the ideas and visual work that represent your brand across marketing channels. At Vertical that includes creative strategy, campaign concepts, paid social and display ads, organic social content, email design, motion and video, and landing page design. We combine creative craft with performance insight, because our team also runs paid media, email and CRM. That means the creative we make is designed not only to look right for your brand but to achieve clear commercial goals. Every piece is reviewed by our team before it goes live.

Performance creative is advertising creative designed and tested with measurable results in mind, such as clicks, sign-ups or sales. It typically involves producing multiple variations of messages, hooks, visuals and formats, then using platform data to see which perform best. Winning elements are developed further and weaker ones are retired. Done well, it still respects the brand and tells a coherent story. Done badly, it becomes a stream of disconnected ads. We aim for the former, with strong ideas tested rigorously. Every test teaches us something we carry into the next brief.

There is no fixed rule, because it depends on your spend, audience size and platforms. As a general principle, ads that run to the same people repeatedly lose impact over time, which shows up as rising costs and falling engagement. Brands spending steadily on paid social usually benefit from a regular flow of new concepts and variations. We monitor creative fatigue continuously and plan refreshes before performance drops, rather than waiting for results to slide. We also keep a pipeline of new concepts ready, so fresh creative can go live as soon as the current set starts to tire.

Yes. We create short-form video for paid social and organic channels, product videos, animated ads, motion graphics and edits of existing footage. Video is often the strongest format on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, so we design it around how people watch, with strong opening moments, clear messages and captions for sound-off viewing. For creator-led content, we also run UGC programmes that bring real customers and creators into your advertising. We can also turn existing photography and footage into new video assets, which is often a cost-effective way to increase variety without a full shoot.

Everything starts from your brand identity and guidelines, which we turn into practical templates, components and rules for each format. That lets us move quickly without reinventing the brand every time. Our AI agent also checks work against your guidelines, flagging off-palette colours, wrong type or tone of voice issues. Every piece is then reviewed by our designers before it goes live. The combination gives you speed and volume without the brand gradually drifting. Over time the templates and rules are refined based on what performs, so the system gets stronger and faster with every campaign.

We use AI to speed up the parts of creative work that benefit from it, such as generating variations, resizing assets for different placements, exploring early visual directions, drafting copy options and analysing which elements perform best. The ideas, the craft and the final decisions stay with our creative team. AI is a tool that lets us test more and spend more time on the thinking that matters. Every asset is reviewed by a person before it is published. That keeps quality and brand standards high.

Yes. Many clients have in-house designers who handle day-to-day brand work, and we add capacity, performance expertise or campaign thinking alongside them. We can share templates and systems, align on processes and tools, and divide work in whatever way makes sense. Some teams use us for big campaign concepts and paid creative, while they handle organic content and internal materials. We aim to make your team stronger, not to replace it. We agree clear responsibilities, shared files and review steps at the start, so collaboration stays smooth and nobody is unsure who owns what.

For paid media we look at metrics such as hook rate, watch time, click-through rate, cost per acquisition and return on ad spend, broken down by concept, angle and format. For email and organic content we look at engagement and conversions. We group results by creative theme, not just individual ads, so the insight is useful for future work. Reports explain what worked, why we think it worked and what we are making next. We also look at qualitative signals such as comments and customer feedback, which often explain why a particular concept resonated.

Your brand guidelines and assets, access to existing performance data where available, product information and any upcoming launches or priorities. A briefing conversation helps us understand your audience, goals and what has or has not worked before. If you do not have a fully developed identity yet, our brand team can help with that first. From there we agree a creative plan, production rhythm and review process that fits your team. We keep the process light, so you can start seeing new creative quickly without a long onboarding period getting in the way.

No. While creative works best when it is connected to the media and channels it runs on, we also produce creative for brands that manage their own paid media or work with other agencies. In those cases we make sure we have access to performance data so we can keep learning and improving. Many clients start with creative only and later bring paid, email or CRM to Vertical so everything runs as one connected system. Either way, the creative is built to the same standard and reviewed by our team before delivery.