One idea, four ratios
A creative brief does not end at the idea. It ends when the idea exists in every shape the platforms will actually serve — and that is where most in-house teams run out of week.
PlaceholderAyer is pre-launch and so is this blog. This post is written as a stand-in for the one that will replace it — the argument is real, the byline and the results are not.
A single campaign idea has to survive being a square in a feed, a vertical in Stories, a 9:16 that plays on mute and a 16:9 that plays before something else. Four crops is the floor. Four crops times three messages times two audiences is twenty-four assets, and that is one campaign in one month.
Why resizing is not the job
The naive version of this is to design once and resize. It fails for a reason anyone who has done it knows: the crop changes what the composition is. A headline that breaks over two lines in a square breaks over four in a vertical. A product shot with air around it in 16:9 is a close-up in 1:1. Resizing gives you four assets that are each slightly wrong.
The unit of creative work is not the asset. It is the idea, rebuilt correctly in each shape it has to live in.
What Ayer actually produces
Ayer treats the idea as the thing it holds on to, and the layout as something it re-solves per ratio — type re-broken, focal point re-placed, safe areas respected per platform. What comes out is four finished assets, not one asset and three crops, and all four stay editable in the studio if the answer is wrong.
The counting rule on the pricing page follows from this: one finished asset in one ratio is one creative. A single idea built as a 1:1, a 4:5, a 9:16 and a 16:9 counts as four, because it was four pieces of work.