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 provides expert digital marketing services with its highly specialised, fully integrated team.
They turned to HeyGen to scale up their content creation efforts, leading to more rigorous creative testing and less creative fatigue for viewers. With HeyGen, Favoured has discovered a volume-led approach that strikes the right balance between AI technology and human creativity, enabling them to deliver top-tier marketing campaigns for their clients.
Tackling creative fatigue and limited resources
Before HeyGen, Favoured faced two main bottlenecks: resource-intensive content creation and rapidly increasing creative fatigue. Their high-touch workflow, customised for each individual client, delivered results but required extensive human resources. The traditional UGC production process, which involved pre-production setup and shipping of products, was time-consuming and also limited the number of actors they could film.
To maintain a competitive edge, Favoured recognises the strategic value of producing content at scale, as even top-performing 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." Regularly refreshing UGC content became essential for sustaining campaign performance, creating constant demands that its manual process could not efficiently meet.
"Before HeyGen, this process was far more manual, requiring many more human resources to achieve the same output," said Andy. "You would have to write a script, send it to a creator, ship the product, and then wait 5 to 10 days for a single 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 uses HeyGen’s AI avatar generation as a cornerstone of its rigorous creative testing strategy. “What HeyGen has enabled us to do is generate avatars for UGC ads very quickly, ultimately allowing us to test many more script variants,” explains Andy. With HeyGen, the agency has significantly expanded its testing capabilities, scaling from 10–15 different UGC variants in a month to 50–100, enabling them to identify the winning creative faster 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 just this morning.”
Andy added, “Now we can get an AI avatar to realistically read 20 scripts at a time and pass them directly to an editor. We can create so many more variants, so much faster.”
The team highly values 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 maximize impact, Favoured integrates 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 it does 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.”
The efficiency gains could not be clearer. Earlier, it would take someone 20 minutes to read ten different hooks. Now, Favoured can create 50 different hooks almost instantly. For Favoured, performance is the bedrock of their business model. Client satisfaction depends on key performance indicators such as return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost of acquisition. With HeyGen’s AI avatars, they can hit KPIs faster, scale campaign spend more efficiently, and improve client satisfaction compared to traditional methods. In a digital landscape where standing out means doing more, HeyGen has become an essential tool in Favoured’s marketing strategy.
Andy summed it up simply: “HeyGen has been a game changer. We can turn around a production-ready creative in a couple of hours, and earlier it used to take weeks.”
“It is honestly less stressful than shooting real video. You can use 50 different creators and produce 100 pieces in a week without hiring anyone,” said George.
