How Ipsy accelerated creative velocity with Atria’s data-driven platform

“We made the switch because it became pretty clear pretty quickly that you get a lot more bang for your buck with Atria.” – Melissa Izbicki, Senior Manager, Growth Creative Strategy, Ipsy

Estimated Results:

~70% faster creative iteration cycles

2x creative volume with the same team and same budget

More objective decision-making with data-backed insights from Atria

Up to 20% lower CAC through more strategic and higher-performing creative

25% ROAS increase from insight-led creative

Ipsy is one of the biggest names in beauty subscriptions, delivering personalized products to millions of members each month. Behind its vibrant shopping experience is a lean, high-performing growth marketing team of 14 people who manage everything in-house. 

The team had deep experts on ad performance data and a solid pipeline for creative testing. But as the digital ad landscape evolved, their team began to feel the pressure. 

Meta's algorithm demanded creative volume & diversity. The tools couldn't keep up.

Meta's shift toward AI-driven ad delivery changed the game for performance marketers. For Ipsy, the implications were clear:

"We are now in the quantity over quality kind of space where I want as many ad codes, partnership codes as I possibly can get," explained Matt Seabrook, Senior Director of Performance Marketing at Ipsy. 

But their existing creative tech stack wasn't built for this new reality.

At the heart of their creative workflow were data and insights. The team relied on Motion for creative reporting, but the platform was costly and didn’t support the full creative workflow. “Motion is fine,” says Melissa Izbicki, Senior Manager of Growth Creative Strategy at Ipsy. “But we used it primarily for reporting. We've got a weekly deck that we put together, and so we'd report out the top performing ads, and we'd also use it to share data with the creative team.”

While Motion did make performance data easier to read than digging through Meta ads manager, the team still had to figure out how to act on the performance data, then manually create the static and video creatives to bring the insights to life. 

Motion also lacked the competitive research features that the team had been asking for, leaving the team doing manual research in Meta ads manager which took valuable time away from production: “Our creative team had been asking for a competitive research tool for a while,” Izbicki shared.  

They needed a solution that could fill these gaps, from coming up with ad ideas quickly and efficiently to executing on creative assets and measuring performance, all without breaking the bank. 

That’s when they found Atria.

Atria proved its value in two hours, combining reporting, research, and ideation in one platform

When a well-timed Instagram ad for a free trial with Atria crossed her feed, Izbicki took a closer look.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this looks interesting, I'll check it out,’ and then I went, ‘Oh, holy crap, this has everything,” Izbicki shared.

“We figured, ‘Well, we'll try it for a week, and if it does actually do all the things that it says it does, then we'll go ahead and cancel our subscription with Motion,” Izbicki continued. 

With flexible, beautiful reports complete with AI recommendations on what to test next, Atria had all the insights that the team needed to make data-driven creative decisions.

“We realized pretty quickly that it was going to do all the things that we needed. Within two hours of logging in, I was like, ‘Oh, Hallelujah!’” 

Real-time visibility into competitor performance 

Beyond creative reporting, Atria offered capabilities that reshaped Ipsy’s creative process, starting with competitive research. The team gained real-time visibility into other brands’ strategies, including their ad angles, hooks, landing pages, and even the personas they targeted, helping to challenge internal assumptions.

“A lot of folks internally will be like, ‘Oh, we love this brand. We want to be like them,’” said Seabrook. “And then you go in and look them up at Atria, and it's like, actually, they're just using the same sales and discount messaging that everyone uses.” 

Izbicki agreed, adding that the deeper competitive research tools reveal much more actionable insights for her team:

“It's really nice to get that kind of overarching picture of like, ‘Oh, you know, our competitors are 60% video, 20% static ads, and they're hitting this persona, and these value props, etc.’ It's a long-winded way of saying Atria has a lot more value.”

AI features accelerate creative ideation

The AI tools inside Atria also helped Ipsy streamline the ideation phase. Creative mockups, hook performance suggestions, and script analysis served as a starting point for the team to quickly build and align around creative briefs.

“I really like that we can extrapolate scripts from competitors and actually look at the breakdown of exactly what they're doing,” Izbicki shared. 

Seabrook found this especially useful for his team to visualize different branding and messaging opportunities: 

“You take a competitor ad, you run it through the AI tool with Ipsy's branding, and it will conceptualize different things and how they could look for us. It's pretty helpful,” explained Seabrook.

Greater creative velocity. Higher volume. Lower costs.

Atria transformed the pace and precision of Ipsy’s creative workflow, delivering faster insights, more output, and cost savings.

“Atria saves me a lot of time on research and briefing, and also just levels everything up,”  Izbicki said. 

“And that translates to increased quantity of briefs and output that the creative team can make, as well as higher quality, which then transfers over to decreased customer acquisition costs, and increased ROAS.”

This added value was clear to Izbicki and Seabrook from day one:

“We made the switch because it became pretty clear pretty quickly that you get a lot more value with Atria,” said Izbicki.  “A lot of Motion’s same functionality is there, except that you get all these research tools in addition to the visualization stuff.”

For Seabrook, Atria introduced a new level of objectivity to the team’s creative analysis.

“I almost never logged into Motion,” he said. “It was pretty infrequent. And now I'm in Atria fairly frequently, mainly because it's picking a lot of the subjective info and making it more objective with data.”

That operational impact led to bottom-line savings:

With more robust creative capabilities and faster execution, Ipsy was able to reallocate time and thousands in OpEx into working media.

A foundation for the future 

For Izbicki and Seabrook, Atria is a “no-brainer” that plays a central role in their day-to-day strategy, powering insights, streamlining ideation, and accelerating creative output. 

As Ipsy continues to navigate the increasingly complex ad landscape shaped by AI and rising content demands, Atria remains, in their words, “the underlying piece of our tech stack,” ready to scale with them.

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