Prose needed to know which creative actually works.

Spend without a system

Prose is a considered, quiz-driven purchase: customers answer detailed questions about their hair and lifestyle before ever seeing a product. That's a brand story built for a slower, more deliberate decision, which sits awkwardly in a fast, native, gaming-adjacent feed like AppLovin Ads.

Prose was already scaling spend on AppLovin Ads, but without dedicated creative testing built for the channel. What existed was organic UGC and agency guesses, largely repurposed from the brand's Meta assets. Flixr came in to build out more creative and real testing on AppLovin Ads specifically, with new actors, new end cards, and real attention to the channel itself, including its gaming-skewing audience.

Six bets, one round

Six concepts, each built on a different hypothesis about why someone stops scrolling: product mechanism, personalization, problem recognition, damage urgency, root cause and external factors. All six ran in the same round, so the readout compares like with like instead of comparing this month against last month.

Real people, wired to the test

• Casting, talent and filming were produced for this test and built to serve specific hypotheses. The personalized bottle shot works as visual proof of Prose's core differentiator, deployed inside a native format built for the AppLovin Ads feed. Real human production stays wired into the testing framework throughout, which is how a result traces back to the reason a concept worked.
• Format matters here as much as casting. Prose's creative on AppLovin Ads plays as a full-screen, non-skippable video, the same forced-view format gaming placements have used for years. The click-through comes from an interactive quiz that plays as the end card once the video finishes, the same personalization mechanic Prose already uses on its own site, repurposed as the creative's actual conversion moment.

When the conversion mechanic moves into the ad

Prose sells a considered purchase. A customer answers a long quiz about hair type, lifestyle and environment before a product is ever formulated, which is a slow decision dropped into a fast, gaming-adjacent feed. The obvious fix is to make the ad shorter. The better one was to move the quiz itself into the end card, so the video no longer has to sell a bottle, it only has to earn the first question. That is the part that transfers: on a placement this native, the page you send people to is part of the creative, and treating the two as one unit is what makes a slow-decision brand viable in a fast feed.

About Prose

A direct-to-consumer haircare brand built on personalization. A detailed quiz covering hair type, lifestyle, and environment feeds an algorithm that formulates a custom shampoo, conditioner, or treatment for each customer, made to order.