How do marketing agencies keep up with the new pace of digital advertising? For Favoured, a full-service performance marketing agency based in the UK, the answer lies in being boldly strategic and leveraging new tools to unlock results. With a suite of clients ranging from start-ups to legacy brands, like teapigs, Avon, and Kodak, Favoured provide expert digital marketing services with their highly specialised fully integrated team.
They turned to HeyGen to scale content creation efforts, resulting in more rigorous creative testing and reduced creative fatigue amongst viewers. With HeyGen, Favoured have found a volume play that strikes the right balance between AI technology and human creativity to deliver high-quality marketing campaigns for clients.
Tackling creative fatigue and limited resources
Before HeyGen, Favoured faced two main bottlenecks: resource-intensive content creation and accelerating creative fatigue. Their high-touch workflow customised to each individual client delivered results but required extensive human resources. The traditional UGC production process, which involved pre-production setup and shipment of products, was time-consuming, not to mention restrictive with the number of actors they could film.
To maintain a competitive advantage, Favoured understand the strategic value of producing content at scale, as even successful creatives are up against audience fatigue. Andy Willers, Co-Founder at Favoured, explains: 'If we have scaled spend on a platform, there are some platforms, like TikTok, where creatives simply fatigue faster. That means the more times a user has seen a creative, the worse a campaign performs.' Refreshing UGC content became critical to maintaining campaign performance, creating never-ending demands that its manual process could not efficiently meet.
'Before HeyGen, this process was much more manual, requiring more human resources to achieve the same output,' said Andy. 'You’d have to write a script, send it to a creator, ship the product, and wait 5 to 10 days for one UGC video.'
They had turned to Runway for its video generation, but when George Gossland, UGC Director at Favoured, heard about HeyGen, he knew it would transform their workflows. Andy adds, "We had used other tools to try and do similar things in avatar creation, but HeyGen seemed to do it the best."
The more, the merrier with HeyGen’s avatar solution
Favoured now use HeyGen’s AI avatar generation as a cornerstone of their rigorous creative testing strategy. ‘What HeyGen have allowed us to do is generate avatars for UGC ads very quickly, ultimately allowing us to test far more script variants,’ explains Andy. With HeyGen, the agency have significantly expanded their testing capabilities, scaling from 10–15 different UGC variants in a month to 50 to 100, enabling them to find the most effective creative more quickly and ultimately improving the performance of their campaigns through increased testing and optimisation.
‘Eight months ago I could make about 20 videos in a day,’ George said. ‘Today, I made 100 this morning.’
Andy added, ‘Now we can get an AI avatar to realistically read 20 scripts at a time and hand them straight to an editor. We can create so many more variants so much more quickly.’
The team highly value HeyGen’s realistic avatars. ‘With HeyGen, we have recorded the same person in multiple different contexts. Having the ability to change the shot or perspective for variation helps establish more realism for the consumer,’ Andy adds. To maximise impact, Favoured integrate HeyGen with other AI tools—enhancing voiceovers with ElevenLabs, creating product images with Ideogram, and developing b-roll with Kling.
The numbers speak for themselves
HeyGen enables Favoured to focus even more on what they do best: delivering performance-driven marketing campaigns.
‘HeyGen unlocks performance essentially at its most basic level,’ Andy explains. ‘The more we can test, the more we can see what resonates with audiences, what generates a better click-through rate, what reduces cost-per-click—all of which have a knock-on effect on the other downstream metrics of any campaign.’
Efficiency gains could not be more obvious. Previously, it would take someone 20 minutes to read ten different hooks. Now, Favoured can produce 50 different hooks almost instantly. For Favoured, performance is the foundation of their business model. Client satisfaction hinges on key performance indicators, such as return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost of acquisition. With HeyGen’s AI avatars, they can achieve KPIs faster, scale campaign spend more effectively, and boost client satisfaction compared to traditional methods. In a digital landscape where standing out requires doing more, HeyGen have evolved into an indispensable tool in Favoured’s marketing approach.
Andy summarised it simply: ‘HeyGen have been a real step change. We can turn around a production-ready creative in a couple of hours, and it used to take weeks.’
‘It’s honestly less stressful than filming real video. You can use 50 different creators and produce 100 pieces in a week without hiring anyone,’ said George.
