Simon Hanlon.
Creative strategist · Performance · UK

Vibes Don't scale. Data does.

Creative strategist for paid media. Every brief ships with the data behind it. Every hypothesis gets graded against real numbers when they land. The wins compound. The losses teach the next round.

"I was fed up of pushing pixels on a marketing manager's hunch. No data behind the direction, no hypothesis to test, no way to learn. So I made data the brief."

California Pizza KitchenEuropean Wax CenterAsprey RaleighHaibikeSky ZoneTommy John LovepopBeallsPrimo BrandsPhaidon Toca FootballKilo Health20+ brands · plans over $7.5M/yr California Pizza KitchenEuropean Wax CenterAsprey RaleighHaibikeSky ZoneTommy John LovepopBeallsPrimo BrandsPhaidon Toca FootballKilo Health20+ brands · plans over $7.5M/yr
20+
Brands across US and UK agency roles
$7.5M+
Largest annual brand plan worked to, paid + retail media
+18%
Leads per 1,000 impressions, Jan→Jul, while market CPMs rose 68%
24h
Concept to client-ready animated film, AI-assisted production
The work

The wall.

Paid social for household names, luxury houses and local heroes: UGC and creator-led video, brand film, statics. Hover the videos to play them. The tall one is "Margaret": concept to client-ready animated film inside 24 hours, in a category running on price offers.

The Denture Practice · AI animation
Presscription · UGC
▶
Sizzix
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Primo Brands
▶
Asprey
▶
California Pizza Kitchen
▶
Haibike
▶
Mundial · chef creators
▶
Presscription · UGC concept
▶
The Denture Practice
▶

Also in the folder: Sky Zone, Tommy John, Lovepop, Bealls, Raleigh, Bloobloom, Phaidon, Kilo Health, Tramontina, Pike Nurseries and more. Ask for the full deck.

Selected results

Three scales. Same discipline.

US agency · household names

Strategist across 15+ national brands

Performance creative strategy for US consumer brands: full-funnel roadmaps, creative testing frameworks, UGC pipelines, reporting the growth team actually used. Paid social, Amazon and retail media.

Brands includedCPK · EWC · Sky Zone
Largest annual plan worked to$7.5M+ / year
Years in seat2023–2026
UK agency · built from zero

Built a creative-strategy offering from nothing

Hired for motion graphics at a Chester agency. Taught myself performance creative, then built and led the agency's creative-strategy service: something it had never sold before. Clients from Raleigh to Asprey.

Started asMotion designer
Left asService lead
ClientsRaleigh · Asprey · Phaidon
AdCreator · founder · 2026

Graded predictions in a market up 68%

A two-location clinic in a market where CPMs rose 68% in seven months. Every ad ships with a written hypothesis, every hypothesis gets graded against the next month's numbers, and the account bent the curve: July was the first month-on-month CPL improvement of the year, on rising spend.

H1 20265,000+ leads
Market CPMs, Jan→Jul+68%
July CPLFirst m/m improvement of the year ▼
Method

A loop, not a pipeline.

Each month starts from what the last one proved. That's the whole trick: the system compounds.

Listen first

Reviews, comments, forums, competitor ads. Customers write better hooks than I do. I just find them.

Brief with data

Persona, angle, format, hypothesis, and the signal it'll be judged on. No data, no ship.

Name for analysis

Concept codes in every ad name, so performance rolls up by strategy, not by file.

Grade predictions

Proven, invalidated or needs-more-time. In writing. Being wrong is fine; not recording it isn't.

Compound

Durable lessons go in the playbook. The system gets smarter every month. So do I.

On AI, plainly: I build with it, deliberately, and I say so. Research sweeps, reporting pipelines, animated production: machinery does the heavy lifting so judgement gets more of my week. The judgement, the taste and the client trust stay human. That split is the job now.

The story

Twenty years of making things that have to earn attention.

Age 13

Gaming-team logos from a bedroom in Chester

Dodgy Photoshop, real clients. First lesson in making things people actually wanted.

Esports years

Team shirts at European LANs

Designed and sold competitive kit for Counter-Strike teams across Europe. First paid job: £250 for an esports org in Denmark. Badly undersold, though I couldn't see it then. The cheapest expensive lesson in what creative work is worth.

In-house

From B2B print to live shopping

Joined as a web-and-print designer; left running the full spectrum: shoots, video, animation, live shopping broadcasts. The generalist years that made the strategist.

Agency

Motion designer → service builder

Taught myself performance creative and built a Chester agency's creative-strategy offering from nothing, for clients from Raleigh to Asprey.

2023–2026

US brands, real budgets

Creative strategist on 15+ US brands from the North Wales coast: CPK, European Wax Center, Sky Zone, Tommy John, Lovepop, Bealls. Scoped a $4M plan myself and worked to plans over $7.5M. Learned what scale demands from creative.

May 2026

AdCreator

Founded my own practice and built an AI operating system around it, so one strategist ships agency output: strategy, production, reporting, research.

Off the clock

I live on the North Wales coast with my wife and two kids. Chester born; the family line runs from Kenmare in Ireland to Newton Heath in Manchester, so United was never optional.

Still playing football, still reading the stats afterwards. Winters are for skiing, the best thing I do all year. And I've been gaming since the bedroom-logo days, which is where this whole story started.

Want the receipts?

Prediction logs, briefs, reports, the full work deck. I'd rather show the working than a showreel, though I keep both.

simon@adcreator.co LinkedIn adcreator.co