84 Finished Ads for the Price of One Agency Video: A Real Competition Case Study
"Competition vs agency" gets debated in the abstract. Here''s one real engagement with the numbers attached.
The setup
Deel, the global HR platform, wanted short vertical ads. The classic route: pick an agency, receive 1–3 concepts after a few weeks, produce one, hope it performs.
What ran instead: a public brief on AdArena with a $5,000 prize pool split across 20 winners (first prize $1,200), an 11-day window, 30–60 seconds vertical, mostly-AI required.
What came back
- 84 finished videos. Not storyboards. Finished ads.
- Dozens of different creators, each with their own read on the brief
- 20 creators paid; the brand owns the winning ads
- ~$60 per finished video across the pool; $250 per winning video
What surprised us
The winning concepts looked nothing like what a strategy deck would have proposed. No agency pitches 84 directions; several winners came from angles no conference room would have generated.
Speed was the real product: brief to full creative library in under two weeks — the timeline agencies quote for a first draft.
What this does NOT replace
Nobody in a competition is running your media, building your brand system, or managing a six-month campaign arc. The model solves one specific thing extremely well: generating and pressure-testing many creative directions, fast and cheap.
The pattern across 8 competitions
Pools of $2,500–$10,000 returned 53–169 submissions each. Submission count tracks brief quality and prize spread more than pool size: a $10K pool with 50 small prizes out-pulls a $10K pool with 3 big ones. Breadth of winners is what motivates a crowd.
FAQ
Do competitions replace agencies? No — they replace the concepting and testing phase, not strategy or production management.
Who owns the ads? On AdArena, the brand owns winning submissions; non-winning creators keep their work.
Data source: AdArena competition database, verified August 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Tal Dahabani
Founder & CEO at AdArena
Tal is the founder of AdArena who believes in performance over ego. He built AdArena because he saw how the traditional agency model was broken — brands spending fortunes on content they couldn't test. His mission: help brands discover what actually works, faster than their competitors.
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