# Promote winners

URL: /workflows/plays/promote-winners · Id: `play:promote-winners`

> Promote winners moves a message that won on free placements to a paid Ad with a Hypothesis, a stop rule and the minimum budget.

Promote winners moves a message that won on free placements to a paid [Ad](/business/nouns/ad). It carries a [Hypothesis](/business/nouns/hypothesis), a stop rule and at least the minimum budget, so money buys confirmation instead of guesses.

## Ratings
| Dimension | Rating | Reads |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Scalability | 5 of 5 | very high: higher grows further with spend or automation |
| Cost | 3 of 5 | medium: lower costs less per Customer |
| Latency | 1 of 5 | very low: lower answers sooner |

## Budget
| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Tier | $1k |
| Minimum effective budget | $600 a month |

| Monthly spend | Yields |
| --- | --- |
| $600 | One well-powered confirmation of one winner on one paid placement. |
| $10,000 | Winners on several placements, each against a holdout. |
| $100,000 | Every placement at scale, cut when incrementality falls below threshold. |

## How it runs
A $1k budget buys one well-powered confirmation of one winner. From $10k each placement runs against a holdout, and collected revenue returns to the ad networks’ bidding with refunds as negatives. Launches and raises wait their delay window; pauses never wait.

## Processes
Runs as [Experimentation](/workflows/processes/experimentation), accountable to the [Marketing Team](/agents/marketing).

Also sold as a Service: [Demand generation](/systems/integrations/upstreams#demand-generation).

## Fits
| Fits | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Family | demand |
| Shelf | Compound: builds an engine that keeps growing (Grow) |
| Moves | [Acquisition payback](/agents/finance#cac-payback) |
| Motions | [b2b](/business/motions/b2b), [b2c](/business/motions/b2c) |
| Venues | [Google Search](/workflows/plays#google-search), [Bing](/workflows/plays#bing), [Facebook](/workflows/plays#facebook), [Instagram](/workflows/plays#instagram), [TikTok](/workflows/plays#tiktok), [YouTube](/workflows/plays#youtube), [Reddit](/workflows/plays#reddit), [LinkedIn](/workflows/plays#linkedin) |
| States | [Live](/business/lifecycle/states/live), [Repeatable](/business/lifecycle/states/repeatable), [Scale](/business/lifecycle/states/scale) |

## Loop
| Step | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Hypothesis | A message that won on free placements pays back faster as a paid Ad than a new message. |
| Measure | [Acquisition payback](/agents/finance#cac-payback) over 30d, at least 50 observations |
| Learn | The learn step reads the Readout, records Evidence and a Decision, and drafts the next Variant. |

## Example
A subject line that won a 2,000-send email test for a [Startup](/business/nouns/startup) selling grant-writing software becomes a search ad headline. At $600 it beats the control headline’s cost per trial by 31 percent.