How Karaca Produced 10,000 Branded Black Friday Creatives in 2 Hours — and Lifted CTR 25%

The Client

Karaca is one of Turkey's best-known homeware brands — kitchenware, tableware, small appliances, coffee equipment. Thousands of SKUs, a strong retail identity, and the kind of catalogue where the product itself is the appeal.

Which is exactly what made their catalog ads a problem.

The Problem: Default Images All Look the Same

Meta catalog ads pull images straight from your product feed. For most retailers that means the standard e-commerce product shot: the item cut out, centred, on a plain white background.

That image is right for a product listing page. On a social feed it is close to invisible.

A white-background French press looks like every other white-background French press. There's no brand, no campaign, no price context, no reason to stop scrolling. In a paid social environment where you are competing for attention against organic content people actually chose to see, a bare product cutout is the weakest possible asset.

Black Friday makes this worse in three ways at once.

Auction pressure peaks — every retailer in the category is bidding, so CPMs rise and you pay more for each impression that fails to land. Simultaneously, every one of those competitors is running the same kind of catalog ad with the same kind of white-background image, so differentiation collapses precisely when it matters most. And the campaign has a hard identity — Karaca's was "Kasımda Karaca Başkadır" — that lived in the brand's above-the-line work but could not reach the catalog ads, because catalog ads render whatever is in the feed.

The obvious fix is to design branded creatives. The obvious problem is arithmetic: thousands of products, a campaign window measured in days, and a design team that would need months. Under those constraints, "brand the catalog ads" isn't a creative decision — it's an impossibility, and most retailers simply accept the default images and bid harder.

The Solution

Karaca's team built a product visual template in Creative Suite designed specifically for their brand and campaign — not a generic overlay, but a layout carrying Karaca's Black Friday identity: the "Kasımda Karaca Başkadır" campaign header, a framed presentation of the product, and a styled background replacing the plain white.

The template mapped to feed fields, so it populated itself. Each product's own image, name and price flowed into the layout automatically. One design, applied across the catalogue, produced a distinct branded creative for every single SKU.

Ten thousand banners were ad-ready in two hours.

That number is worth sitting with. A designer producing one polished creative every ten minutes, working without breaks, would need over 1,600 hours — roughly ten months of full-time work — to produce the same volume. It isn't a matter of working faster; it's a task no design team can be resourced to do. Which is why, before automation, the honest answer for a catalogue this size was always "use the default images."

Before and after

Before: a French press cut out on white, floating in the feed. Accurate, professional, and indistinguishable from any other listing.

After: the same product, framed and lit, on a dark styled background, under the Black Friday campaign lockup. Recognisably Karaca before the viewer reads a single word.

Same product. Same feed. Same channel. The only variable that changed was the image — which is what makes the result unusually clean to attribute.

The Results

Across Meta catalog ads during the Black Friday period:

• 10,000 ad-ready banners in 2 hours
• 25% increase in click-through rate
• 15% uplift in conversion rate

The CTR gain is the direct effect: a branded, styled creative earns attention that a bare cutout does not. The conversion gain is the more interesting one, because it suggests the improvement wasn't only about stopping the scroll. A creative that communicates brand and campaign context sets a clearer expectation before the click — so the traffic arriving on the product page is better qualified, not just more numerous.

In The Client's Words

"We completed our visual production processes for thousands of products in just a few hours with the product visual template function designed specifically for our brand and needs. With proper creative optimization, we achieved a 25% increase in CTR in our campaigns during the Black Friday period."

— Şevval Sürmeli, Digital Marketing Professional, Karaca

What other retailers can take from this

Your catalog ads are probably running on default images. Most are. It's the path of least resistance, and it's invisible as a problem because nothing is broken — the ads run, they just underperform quietly. Look at your live catalog ads next to a competitor's. If you can't tell whose is whose with the logo covered, that's the finding.

Creative volume is a template problem, not a headcount problem. The instinct when creative is the bottleneck is to add designers. But the constraint isn't design capacity — it's the assumption that each asset must be made individually. Once the layout is templated and mapped to feed fields, the marginal cost of the ten-thousandth creative is effectively zero.

Peak season rewards differentiation more than budget. When every competitor raises bids simultaneously, incremental spend buys progressively less. Creative differentiation compounds in the opposite direction: it costs the same whether CPMs are high or low, and it matters more when they're high.

Test the whole catalogue, not a sample. Automated creative production changes what's worth testing. Manual production forces you to test on a handful of hero products and extrapolate. When the template propagates instantly, you can change creative direction across the entire catalogue and read a real result.