305 Care is a Direct-to-Consumer brand for active ingredient cosmetics. Its personalized skin care is individually tailored based on a scientifically founded questionnaire – without stock, freshly produced, and with a personalized label. Moreover, they also offer general care products.
The products are sold to a significant extent through Meta Ads. To be able to grow sustainably, the team relies on data-driven decisions, a clear ads strategy, and a well-organized process for idea collection.
In this case study interview, Felix (Co-Founder) provides insights on how 305 Care utilizes top ads to develop and test new ideas and creatives more quickly in order to continue growing through Meta Ads.
Challenge
Efficient creative process despite high frequency: The biggest challenge at 305 Care was to constantly develop new creatives that perform - without slipping into the copycat model or only adapting trends briefly.
Although the creative strategy was a central part of scaling, it often relied on subjective assessment of the ads in the market in the past:
Which creatives are currently performing in the market?
What messages, hooks, formats, and elements really work with the top DTC brands?
What learnings and hypotheses can we derive for our brand, target audience, and products?
Especially with increasing product expansion and rising ad spend, it became clear: the creative output must be scalable - both in quantity and in quality.
Other tools too superficial: Tools like the Meta Ad Library or Foreplay were only somewhat helpful because they provided little context and no objective relevance assessment. This led to high manual research effort and subjective assessment of what really constitutes good ad inspiration.
Application & Results
305 Care has been using top-ads as a fixed component in the creative workflow since mid-2024 – with clearly defined workflows and responsibilities.
Structured Inspiration Process: The team has introduced a regular creative sprint in which top-ads is an integral part:
Research sessions for top-performing ads based on views and tags in top-ads
Building and maintaining inspiration boards for specific products, messaging, personas, formats, or hooks
Shared team Slack channel #adinspiration to share boards, as well as inspiration from any other sources like the Instagram feed, news, Twitter, etc.
Weekly ideation meetings with clear thematic focuses and a look into the Slack channel + the inspiration boards
Adapt, not copy: Through targeted inspiration research and analysis of successful creatives, the team was able to systematically identify recurring patterns. One example is the ad formats:
Founder ads
iPhone notes-style ads
POV ads
Greenscreen
Advertorial
These patterns were abstracted and transferred to their own brand – not as a 1:1 copy, but as an adaptation. The learnings from this directly flowed into the creative briefings.
More efficient sprints & better results: Thanks to the data-driven research and structured implementation, the hit rate and success rate for best performer ads have been significantly increased. The creative output today is more targeted and faster, making the ad spend used measurably more effective.
Top-ads not only provides inspiration but also creates a valid data foundation for decisions in the creative sprints of 305 Care.
Conclusion & Outlook
For 305 Care, top-ads is indispensable in the creative process today. The platform enables data-driven work and helps the team make better decisions faster.
Especially in a growth phase, where more and more new product lines and target groups are added, the systematic approach to creative research and testing becomes even more important.
In the future, top-ads will also play a central role in the creative strategy of 305 Care – as a source of inspiration, analysis tool, and basis for decisions.
„top-ads ist das einzige Spy-Tool, das wirklich Sinn macht, weil es uns zeigt, welche Ads tatsächlich performen. Wer im Performance Marketing arbeitet, sollte es unbedingt nutzen.“
