A small finance company now makes new Facebook ads in 45 seconds

Lettuce, a financial platform for people who run one-person businesses, says it can now turn out a new Facebook and Instagram ad in about 45 seconds. Before, the same job took more than a week. The company credits a tool called Ads Engine, part of ElevenCreative from ElevenLabs. The story comes from the ElevenLabs blog, so it is a vendor's showcase of a customer.

What changed

Lettuce offers accounting, taxes, health benefits and retirement in one place. Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, is its most creative-heavy channel for finding customers. Each new ad used to start with a written brief. The creative director then came up with ideas, and a finished ad took over a week at best. Changing a live ad meant at least another week.

Now anyone on the team can describe a new ad, or a change to an existing one, in a prompt. The tool pulls in ads already running on Meta and sends the new version back out.

Humans still sign off

The tool does not publish on its own. A creative director and a performance marketer review every ad before it runs. The creative team's original assets are the starting point for each version, and the team checks each ad for brand consistency. Lettuce says that review is now the only step between an idea and a live ad.

The results Lettuce reports

• Creative costs fell by roughly 75%, according to Danny McCullough, head of performance marketing.
• Ads made with the tool cost 40% to 60% less per lead than other ads running in similar periods.
• Its current top Meta ad came from the 15th to 20th version of one original asset.
• A few hundred dollars is enough to test a new idea, and a hundred versions now fit in a week.

A lead is a person who shows interest in a product, such as by filling out a form. Cost per lead is what the company pays to get one.

What to keep in mind

These figures are estimates from one executive, published by the company that sells the tool. No outside check is given. The article also does not say what the generation credits cost, so the full price of each ad is unclear. McCullough describes the cost as 45 seconds and some credits.

The tool can also redub a winning ad into other languages using ElevenLabs. McCullough says top ads in English or Spanish become winners in other languages pretty quickly.

Why small businesses may care

Meta now handles most targeting itself. Advertisers set a budget and a goal, and the creative is the main thing they still control. More ad versions give the system more to learn from. For a small team, the old limit was how many ads it could afford to make. If that limit drops, testing more ideas gets cheaper, though Lettuce's results may not match yours.