At Calming Co, I was the in-house Head of Creative Strategy, tasked with leading the Creative Strategy efforts at Calming Co! I worked with a team of 3 strategists to come up with some great concepts that scaled in the account. I’m not permitted to share the exact results with you on these creatives, but nearly every creative scaled at least into the 5 figures efficiently, with most scaling well into the six figures, driving new customer acquisition into the account. The biggest challenge for us on this account was all of the FDA / FTC regulations around supplements and language we had to use. You’ll notice some of it isn’t like the absolute best practice copywriting, but we did as best as we could with the restrictions we had in place and I think we figured out a good balance.
“My Wife Dared Me
For this one, we took two winning insights: (1) Mentioning a spouse seems to improve Hook rate performance (2) The 30 day journey ad format seemed to have better hold and better click through rate than average and combined them into this once concept where we have the talent mention that his wife dared him to stop drinking on the weekend. This ad generated six figures of ad spend. We handed this script to a few more creators and we had 2 additional creators have ads that scaled into the five figures. An overwhelming success in the ad account.
“This Drink Helped Me Stay Sober” Iterative Ad
So this was interesting, the original ad was made before I got here, it spent in the four figures. As I analyzed the ad I noticed the Hold Rate was lower than average, so I ordered iterations that cut out some of the problem agitation as I felt like we could do half of that and get to the solution sooner. The result? This iteration spent six figures and became one of the top ads in the account for several months, showing the importance of not disregarding ads that show signal but don’t scale.
Doctor “Three Myths”
At Hims, we did a Barber concept that scaled into the millions of dollars of ad spend across all of its versions. So I thought a slam dunk for Calming Co would be do a concept featuring a doctor. We utilized an established DTC ad format “Three Myths” to communicate the concept. We had success with this one scaling into the five figures, but had trouble replicating it with other doctors. We tested a dozen other doctors after this and had 2 more of them scale to a reasonable amount, but not to the level that we thought it was worth purusing this angle any further. I’m still proud of the fact that we tested this.
BTS “Bad Review”
I was really inspired by the BTS work that Oats Overnight did, and so I thought it would be cool if we did a concept with one of our team - Jack - talking candidly about a Bad Review we got with one of our chief objections - price and what we’re doing about it. In this case, he presents our introductory offer at the time. Up to 49% off your first bag of Ü Relax to try it. This ad did extremely well, it scaled WELL into the 5 figures, becoming one of our top scaling ads of the quarter.
Comparison Static
Last Fall, we introduced a comparison static that broke down Ü Relax vs. Alcohol. It was intended as an upper middle of funnel ad. What was so interesting about this ad, which was the top spending ad of Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 and as of Q3 2026, scaling into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, is still the ad with the most engagement in the account, is that it had a 90% New Customer rate, which is crazy. What makes this ad work so well at the top of funnel is that it presents the benefits of replacing alcohol with Ü Relax in a very clear and easy to understand why it’s beneficial.
