Sync & freshness

How Catalog Video keeps videos current as your catalog changes — surgical re-renders, cost quotes before spend, refresh budgets, and fatigue rotation.

Last updated July 2, 2026

Stale creative is the silent killer of catalog advertising. Catalog Video treats freshness as an engineered guarantee — and treats your budget the same way.

Only what changed re-renders

Every variant stores a fingerprint of exactly the data it consumed — the resolved slot values and the assets that were bound. On each sync:

  • A change in a column no template uses (a warehouse code, a shipping class) re-renders nothing.
  • An availability flip re-renders nothing — the item just drops from (or returns to) the feed instantly, at zero cost.
  • A price change re-renders only the variants whose slots actually show or speak that price.
  • A new product image re-renders only variants bound to that image.
  • A spoken price change re-voices one line and re-mixes — not the whole video.

You’ll see this as a plain-language diff before anything runs: “214 variants re-render, 1 line re-voices — 47 credits.” Changes are auto-approved under a threshold you configure; larger ones queue for your approval.

Cost governance

  • Coalescing — however many times a price moves within a sync window, each variant re-renders at most once per window.
  • Refresh budgets — a per-period credit cap on automatic refresh spend. When a volatile catalog exceeds it, the highest-revenue items re-render first and the rest queue with a notification — never silent, never unbounded.
  • New items follow your chosen policy: materialize automatically under the budget cap (true set-and-forget), queue for approval, or ignore.

Sync cadence

Catalog sizeDefault
Boutique (≤50)Manual re-scrape button (+ optional weekly)
Growth (≤5,000)Daily
EnterpriseHourly available

Because feeds embed versioned URLs, platforms pick up refreshed videos on their next scheduled fetch — a price change is typically live within the hour on an hourly-sync setup.

Fatigue-driven rotation

Beyond data freshness, creative wears out. Catalog Video watches per-creative performance and applies configurable fatigue rules (falling CTR vs. baseline, rising frequency, rising CPM). When a rule fires, the action ladder runs:

  1. Rotate the hook — swap to a pre-staged alternate opening (instant, no new generation).
  2. Swap the template version — e.g. move to the seasonal variant.
  3. Propose a new master — a fresh Template Studio concept for your approval.

On Meta, template swaps don’t reset the ad’s learning phase — so rotation is safe to automate.

The seasonal calendar

Author holiday/BFCM/summer template versions ahead of time and schedule them: the entire delivered catalog changes wardrobe on a date, automatically, and swaps back after. What agencies sell as manual “seasonal overlay work” is a calendar entry here.