Services / Ad creative
Creative is the largest lever left, because everything else has been automated away.
Targeting, bidding and placement are now decided by the platform. What remains under your control is the creative and the offer, which is why creative has quietly become the main variable rather than the decoration on top of one.
The canon
The principles this rests on, named.
Each with who established it, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on our word.
Mental availability is built by consistent distinctive assets, not by persuasion.
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Ehrenberg-Bass)
Most buyers are light buyers who are not in the market today. Recognisable assets across every ad do more than a clever argument seen once.
Roughly 60% long-term brand building to 40% short-term activation.
Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA)
The measured optimum across hundreds of IPA cases. Pure performance creative produces a curve that flattens and then costs more every quarter.
Creative diversity beats creative volume.
Platform-side fatigue behaviour and entity-clustering
Twenty variations of one concept fatigue as one concept. Four genuinely different concepts give the delivery system something to actually choose between.
Sound-off, thumb-speed, first frame.
Feed consumption behaviour across Meta and TikTok
Legibility in the first frame with no audio is the entry condition. Everything designed for a viewer who is watching attentively is designed for a viewer who does not exist.
Test the offer and the angle before the execution.
Direct-response hierarchy: list, offer, creative
A change of angle moves results by multiples; a change of button colour moves them by noise. Most creative testing tests the wrong layer.
Native format beats polished intrusion in feed placements.
Consistent placement-level performance differences
An ad that respects the visual grammar of where it appears gets watched. A television commercial cropped to nine by sixteen does not.
Method
What actually happens, in order.
Colour, mark placement, type treatment, a recurring device. Every ad carries them, so attention paid to any ad accrues to the brand rather than to nothing.
Five different reasons the product matters to five different states of mind. The execution comes after the angle is chosen.
The opening frame is judged in under a second, sound off, at thumbnail scale. It is designed separately and deliberately.
Concepts across, formats down. This produces diversity by construction instead of by hoping.
Every placement has different reserved areas. Text that sits under a caption bar or an interface control is text nobody reads.
Frequency and the trend in cost per result say when a concept is done. Rotating on a calendar retires winners and keeps losers.
What goes wrong
The failure modes nobody advertises.
Same idea, different crop. The platform sees them as one thing, fatigues them as one thing, and learns nothing from the test.
Discount, urgency, discount. It works, then it costs more, then it costs more again, because nothing was built that a buyer remembers.
Copy under the caption bar or behind the interface. Invisible in the actual placement, perfectly visible in the export.
A voiceover carrying the argument to an audience with sound off. Burned captions are not an accessibility extra, they are the medium.
Most viewers never reach it. The brand has to be present in the part that is actually seen.
What we refuse
A studio is defined as much by this list.
- We do not run false urgency or fabricated scarcity.
- We do not use before-and-after claims that the product cannot substantiate.
- We do not disguise an ad as a platform interface element.
- We do not count twenty crops of one concept as twenty creatives.
Measured, not felt
How anyone can tell whether it worked.
Cost per result by concept, not by ad, so the concept is what is judged.
Hold rate at three seconds as the first-frame test.
Frequency and the slope of cost per result, to time retirement.
Share of spend on brand-building versus activation, tracked against the 60/40 target.