Article

Unlocking Creative Diversity

Advertising Creative Marketing Testing

May 5, 2025

For this week’s issue, I want to talk about the most pervasive, insidious, silent killer of ad account performance: creative.

More specifically, it’s the creative echo chamber from which most brands can’t break free: the same overly generic static ads, the same 15- or 30-second “tv-spot” style video, the same offer-based retargeting creative. All recycled across every platform for months on end.

That’s the reality I find in 90%+ of the Google, Meta, Pinterest, LinkedIn and X ad accounts I review. On one hand, I understand how we got here – this is a system designed for predictability, compliance and simplicity vs. one intended to generate outsized performance. It’s easy to get legal or brand teams to approve using the same video they’re already running on TV for Meta. It’s trivial to take the same billboard creative and re-size it for Google Display. No-one objects to ads that mirror the ones your competitor has in-market. But, on the other hand, I am acutely aware that in an overloaded ad environment, sameness is a death sentence.

When you do the same things everyone else does, the best-case scenario is that you get what they got. If you want something different – if you want outsized performance, if you want market dominance, if you want something more – then you must be willing to do something fundamentally different. That’s a hard truth for a lot of marketers (and a lot of founders) to swallow: the playbook that got you to where you are today is unlikely to take you where you want to be tomorrow.

This isn’t just a DTC issue or a “performance marketing” problem. It’s endemic across the entire marketing landscape, from B2C, SaaS, marketplaces, even B2B. And it’s rooted in a strategic blind spot: confusing media execution with creative strategy.

The False Comfort of Consistency

At the surface level, the creative echo chamber makes sense. Brands want consistency. Agencies want scale. Everyone wants to believe that a “winning ad” exists – a creative so good that you can plug into whatever platform you want, throw a hefty budget behind it, and ride to stable, predictable returns.

At its best, this model only works in static environments. (Un)fortunately, we don’t live in a static environment (and any illusions of stability have been shattered post liberation-day). During their earnings call last week, both Meta & Google noted ad costs are accelerating. Tinuiti’s 2025 Q1 Ad Benchmark Report validated this:

Auction volatility is rising. CPMs on Meta are up 20–40% year-over-year in many categories, with more brands competing for the same eyeballs. The same is true for Google (search ad CPMs are up between 8.72% and 27.01% year-on-year in Q1). We’ve more or less reached the saturation point for North American audiences, in that most users simply can’t spend more time online than they already do – which means the only way for platforms to meet investor expectations is to continually drive more advertisers into each auction.
Signal loss continues post-ATT. Between signal loss, inferred data and less rigid ad targeting, marketers can no longer rely on micro-targeting to compensate for otherwise underperforming creative.
Consumer content diets have changed. The average user now scrolls through 6,000–10,000 ad impressions per day across platforms. On IG alone, a DAU will scroll about 300’ (that’s the length of a football field) in a day. Look no further than the progressively-more-insane stunts from Mr. Beast as proof that a 7+ year diet of algorithmically-generated content has desensitized most users to mundanity. Stopping the scroll is harder than ever – and it’s only getting more difficult.

Against this backdrop, running the same creative week after week is not just inefficient – it’s self-sabotage.

The Real Cost of Creative Repetition

This isn’t a philosophical debate – it’s a mathematical certainty. Here’s what happens when you run narrow, repetitive creative at scale:

1. Audience Fatigue Accelerates

Ad fatigue isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a quantifiable decay in performance. Meta, for example, penalizes high-frequency campaigns with rising CPMs and suppressed delivery. Users subconsciously ignore messages they’ve seen too often, especially if those messages aren’t resonating in the first place.

If you’re curious about your own campaigns, log into Meta Ads manager. If frequency is climbing and your CTR is dropping week-over-week, that’s a blinking red indicator that audience fatigue is climbing.

2. Algorithms Can’t Parse Signal From Noise

Digital ad networks like Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. differ from their traditional predecessors in a few critical ways. The most relevant is that they’re not just insertion engines trying to optimize revenue from a set number of ad units; to the contrary, they’re (essentially) gigantic machine learning engines. Their objective isn’t merely to optimize ad revenue; it’s to optimize ad interaction (i.e. the actions that generate ad revenue) while maximizing time on platform. Ergo, each of these ad platforms requires creative signal diversity in order to optimize effectively. They need multiple data points to find what works and scale it intelligently.

When you run a narrow creative set, you’re feeding the algorithm a limited data stream. That restricts the ad network’s ability to:

Identify audience-creative fit
Optimize placement and pacing
Auto-adjust bids based on performance clusters

Platforms respond to limited data in exactly the way you’d expect: charging a premium and suppressing delivery. Meta, YouTube & TikTok have no shortage of willing buyers for every impression available, so there’s no reason for any of them to compromise user satisfaction / experience.

3. Messaging Misses Buyer Nuance

Modern buyers aren’t monolithic. They respond to different triggers: logic, emotion, urgency, social proof, status, utility. Yet many brands run one message, often centered on product features or service quality, and expect it to resonate with everyone.

The reality is far more complex:

The logical buyer wants the “how” and the business case
The emotional buyer needs the “why” and the story
The status-driven buyer is looking for affiliation
The skeptical buyer wants proof, not promises

And each of these potential customers likely has a different communication style, different creative preferences and different pain points/triggers. Some will connect with an emotive video sales letter or a founder message; others want to see the product/service in action, still others will only be swayed by the “proof” (i.e. a case study, a testimonial, a before-and-after), and others still want social proof / reviews / ratings.

Just this (admittedly simplistic) breakdown has revealed 16 different buyer type / communication style preferences – so why would one (or two, or three) ads be sufficient to appeal to your entire audience?

If the echo chamber is bad (and it is), then how in the world did it come to be? The answer, like the answer to so many other questions, is wonderfully simple: misaligned incentives and outdated models.

Agencies prioritize predictable volume and velocity, not variation. The structure of most agencies naturally lends itself to process, templates and repeatable, good-enough outcomes. End result? When an agency finds a “winning” creative concept for one client, it adds it to the “standard” list of creative produced for all (or, at least, most) clients. And each time it’s re-created for another client, the marginal value of that creative declines just a little bit more.
In-house teams fear resource strain. Producing multiple ad types sounds expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale. Tack on ever-present challenges with other teams (legal, compliance, brand), plus a lack of incentives to take on the challenge (spending hours on Zooms with legal to get new creative concepts approved is about as enjoyable as running headlong into a brick wall over and over again).
Media teams silo off from creative. This disconnect leads to asset libraries optimized for brand aesthetics, not platform performance. The reality? Not every “winning” ad is going to be pretty, or “on-brand” – I’d venture to say that most of them won’t be. The reason is simple: ads must resonate with the people who are seeing them in the environment in which they are being served. Your meticulously-crafted brand ad likely doesn’t have what it takes to stand up to the visual onslaught that is the IG or YouTube feed.

But the most dangerous belief underpinning it all? The idea that media is the leverand creative is the input. In reality, creative is the lever. The most impactful performance gains in 2025 won’t come from bid tweaks or audience reshuffles, they’ll come from structural changes to creative strategy.

This Isn’t The Algorithm’s Fault (So Stop Blaming Zuck)

Every time a campaign underperforms, the standard response from marketing teams is to point fingers at the platform. Meta’s delivery is inconsistent. YouTube’s targeting is wonky. TikTok users just won’t buy. Google is full of fraudulent clicks or hiding search terms. We’ve all heard these excuses.

Allow me to challenge those excuses with this: I believe most “platform issues” arecreative issues in disguise.

If your ROAS tanks after two weeks, it’s not that the audience changed; it’s that your message got stale (or was never fresh in the first place).
If your CAC spikes as you scale up your budget, it’s not the algorithm punishing you; it’s the algorithm losing confidence in your creative’s ability to resonate with a progressively larger segment of your audience.
If your click-through rate drops campaign after campaign, it’s not the platform – it’s the hook, the message, the story, the offer. Something’s not clicking (pun intended).

When you strip away the excuses, the finger-pointing, the noise and the rest of the BS, the truth is beautifully simple: performance degradation almost always maps back to creative homogeneity.

The Cost of Creative Underinvestment

Let’s quantify it.

Assume you’re spending $250K/month on Meta. If your CTR drops from 1.5% to 0.8% due to fatigue, you’re paying 87% more per click. That means:

Fewer site visits
Fewer conversions
Higher CAC
Lower LTV:CAC ratio

Now scale that across months and platforms. The compounding impact of creative decay isn’t just felt in your media efficiency—it shows up in your P&L, your cash burn, and ultimately, your valuation.

Bottom Line: Brands don’t need better targeting. They need better creative systems. The echo chamber must be broken—not with more content, but with more types of content. Creative diversity is no longer a tactic. It’s a growth mandate.

What Creative Diversity Actually Means

Most teams misunderstand creative diversity as simply “more content.” More versions. More colors. More edits. But creative diversity is not a volume play – it’s a strategy play. It’s not about cosmetic iteration. It’s about structural variation.

Let’s redefine it clearly:

Creative diversity is the intentional use of multiple formats, message angles, and funnel-aligned constructs to maximize platform performance, reduce audience fatigue, and speak to multiple buyer types simultaneously

This isn’t a “test and learn” thing – it’s table stakes. The brands that scale sustainably in 2025 aren’t the ones spending more – they’re the ones who are scaling smarter. More angles. More varied creative formats. Better-researched angles. More compelling offers. All executed within a single ad account.

Making the transition from “old-school” ad accounts (the ones with limited creative diversity and declining performance) to modern ones is difficult without a roadmap. That’s why we developed the 3-Lens Framework:

The 3-Lens Framework for Creative Diversity

Think of creative diversity as a matrix. Every ad you run should be designed and analyzed through three distinct lenses:

Lens 1: Format Diversity

Format is the fundamental structural input. It’s how the message is presented. For platforms (like Meta/YouTube), format is the most obvious diversity signal. The outcome? Platform algorithms optimize differently based on asset type, and user behavior shifts based on creative presentation.

Here are the seven essential formats every performance brand should have in rotation:

1. Static Image Ads

Use case: Retargeting, evergreen offers, rapid testing
Strength: Cost-efficient, scroll-stopping with sharp copy
Watch out: Easy to overuse. Saturates quickly if not refreshed biweekly.

2. Short-Form UGC Videos (iPhone + ring-light recorded):

Use case: TOF awareness, MOF testimonials, BOF social proof
Strength: High authenticity; mirrors organic platform content
Best practice: Script lightly for structure, but keep tone casual

3. Long-Form Explainers or VSLs

Use case: High-ticket products, SaaS, storytelling-led DTC, anything personal/emotional
Strength: Builds trust and narrative depth; converts intent-rich audiences
Critical hook: First 3 seconds must solve for attention, so use a bold claim or direct pain point.

4. Carousel or Slideshow Tutorials

Use case: Complex products, education-heavy offers
Strength: Step-by-step visuals reduce cognitive load; ideal for apps, SaaS, finance
Format tip: Design for swiping behavior; use progression and payoff formats

5. Meme-Style & Text-Only Creatives

Use case: Pattern interrupt, brand personality, scroll-stoppers
Strength: Rapid creation, high engagement, cultural resonance
Caution: Must evolve weekly—meme formats fatigue fast

6. Transformation Content (Before/After)

Use case: Beauty, wellness, fitness, SaaS metrics
Strength: Visual proof of benefit, emotional immediacy
Example: Side-by-side screenshots showing dashboard performance pre/post product adoption

6. Third Party Credibility (Media/Reviews)

Use case: Anything where building trust or credibility is paramount
Strength: Provides credibility and allows you to imbue your brand/product with trust from a third party.
Warning: Know your audience + who they trust (SparkToro is great for this). Showing quotes/awards from an unknown or un-trusted source is counterproductive. One example: if you have a right-leaning audience (i.e. former military), don’t tout your NYT best-seller status.

Lens 2: Message Angle Diversity

While format dictates the structure, the angle controls the psychological interaction. This is the advertising equivalent of the famous Hitch monologue: what you’re saying matters less than how you’re saying it. Great creatives balance emotion, logic, urgency, and proof to break through the feed clutter and connect with their target audience.

Here are the six high-leverage message angles to add to your account:

1. Pain Point

Hook: “Still spending 6 hours a week on manual reporting?”
Why it works: Buyers resonate with friction before they seek solutions

2. Product Benefit

Hook: “Automate your month-end close in 5 minutes.”
Why it works: Direct value proposition, especially strong mid-funnel

3. Emotional Story

Hook: “I built this for my dad after he was misdiagnosed.”
Why it works: Human connection → brand affinity → trust

4. Urgency or Offer

Hook: “Our drop of 92 hand-made, individually-numbered soccer balls is live – and when they’re gone, they’re gone.” (h/t to 12 Pentagons for the inspo on this one)
Why it works: Creates time pressure and decision-making urgency

5. Social Proof

Hook: “Trusted by 14,325 freelancers in 42 countries” (note: be specific)
Why it works: De-risks action; crowd logic drives trust

6. Competitive Positioning

Hook: “3 reasons users are leaving [Competitor] for [Your Brand]”
Why it works: Captures demand already in motion; ideal for switcher campaigns

Pro tip: You don’t need 30 new scripts. You need 3–5 strong core messages and a way to deploy each across multiple formats and tones.

Lens 3: Funnel Intent Alignment

More often than not, creative teams (in-house and agency alike) build ads in isolation from the actual journey their target audience is going through. Part of this is natural – marketers tend to have considerably more knowledge about their product than their audience. Part of this is a lack of research and investigation – most marketers don’t spend a meaningful amount of time talking to customers or asking people who didn’t buy why they chose an alternative. The end result? Creative that over-indexes toward one particular “journey stage” over others.

The most successful creative systems align format + angle + intent:

Top of Funnel (TOF)

Objective: Interrupt patterns, generate intrigue, introduce the problem
Formats: Meme ads, UGC hooks, founder stories
Angles: Pain point, brand/founder story, humor
Example: “Still paying for 8 subscriptions you don’t use? We were, too – until we found this app that helped us save $234 every month”

Mid-Funnel (MOF)

Objective: Educate, differentiate, overcome objections
Formats: Carousel tutorials, side-by-side comparisons, mashup reels, third-party credibility, case studies
Angles: Benefit, proof, competitive differentiation
Example: “See how [brand] reduced reporting time by 83% and saved $256,285 in 2024”

Bottom of Funnel (BOF)

Objective: Convert with urgency, reinforce trust, reduce friction
Formats: Offer statics, retargeting testimonials, personalized CTAs
Angles: Urgency, proof, exclusivity
Example: “Still thinking it over? Here’s what first-time users say after 7 days on the [brand] system”

The key insight to take from this is that performance comes from matching the right message in the right format to the right stage of intent. It’s almost as if all of these changes to ad platforms are forcing digital marketers to become marketers again. What’s old is new again.

Avoiding Faux Diversity

The one other issue I see (often, repeatedly) in ad account audits is what I’ll call faux diversity. It’s an ad account with dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of ads – but little true diversity. The hallmarks are often things like:

10 variants of the same static with different color overlays = cosmetic variety
Cropping one video into different aspect ratios = formatting optimization, not diversity
Running five UGC videos that follow the same script = repetition in disguise

Remember, the goal of creative diversity is strategic difference, not surface-level variation. We’re not trying to test the 42 shades of blue, we’re trying to create a critical mass of ads that resonate with the sub-segments of your target audience. The same tired message in a shiny new color is the creative equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.

Putting This Into Practice

I’m well aware that creative diversity can feel abstract – so let’s make it real. Imagine you’re marketing a productivity app for freelancers. Here’s how you could build creative diversity using the 3-lens model:

This is a simplified example, but it highlights how this system can take 1 product and generate 9 unique creative angles. That’s creative diversity. This type of variation gives Meta (or YouTube, or TikTok) the signal necessary to improve relevance, reach new audiences and ultimately drive incremental revenue.

Forget chasing the next hack. The most successful brands aren’t simply producing more ads – they’re optimizing for more kinds of ads. When I look at a high performing Meta account, almost invariably, I see that they’ve stopped treating creative as a one-time deliverable and started treating it as a dynamic, evolving system.

Candidly, that is the biggest blocker for most brands: it isn’t a lack of knowledge or will – it’s a lack of system. The pressure/challenge of trying to create 10, 20, 50+ new ads in a week is immense, especially if it feels like each one must be made from whole cloth. Fortunately, that’s not the case – you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time. There are plenty of tools out there (CreativeOS, Canva, Meta Ads Library, Google Ads Library, etc.) that allow you to identify high-performing creative concepts already in market.

Aside: I love CreativeOS – it has been a game-changer. I think I’ve tested every ad creation tool out there, and this one is – by far – my favorite for finding ad inspiration AND building new creatives.

Back to the system:

Step 1: Audit What You’re Really Running

Start by pulling your last 90 days of ad creative. Label each asset across three lenses:

Format (e.g., video, static, carousel, meme)
Message Angle (e.g., pain point, proof, urgency)
Funnel Intent (TOF, MOF, BOF)
Performance Trend (improving, declining, flat)

Now ask:

Are you over-indexing on static or UGC?
Are all assets pushing the same angle or same benefit?
Are TOF creatives actually running at the top of the funnel, or being recycled as BOF?
Do you have sufficient “discovery” and “educational” creatives running, or is it all offer-driven?

You’ll likely uncover gaps in your current creative. Most brands find their media is supported by only 2–3 creative types in practice, no matter how many assets they’ve “tested.” This is how those brands end up in “echo-chamber optimization” loops.

Step 2: Deploy the 15 Ad Archetypes to Maximize Variation

Developing creative diversity requires pushing boundaries, trying new things and breaking out of your comfort zone. The following 15 creative archetypes are field-tested, high-leverage formats used by top-performing brands. Some will work for you, others might not be the best fit – but it gives you a starting point (and maybe some inspiration) as you start to branch out your creative:

How to Use Them:

Assign at least 3 to each journey stage
Rotate formats regularly – weekly to monthly – to avoid fatigue
Mix emotional and rational angles across formats

Think of this like building a financial portfolio: diversification lowers risk, increases yield, and smooths volatility. The same principle applies to performance creative. If your account relies on (for example) UGC, and Meta (for whatever reason) decides to restrict delivery of UGC, your account (and your client’s business) could be in a world of hurt. But, if you have a diverse portfolio of creative, the impact of Meta’ hair-brained decision on UGC is blunted – you’ll have plenty of other assets that are primed to break out, and you’ll be able to take share from your now-struggling competitors.

Step 3: Build a Quarterly Creative Blueprint

One of the most striking things I find in under-performing accounts is the night-and-day difference between media plans and creative strategies. Virtually every account I’m asked to audit has a fancy-schmancy media plan – excel, powerpoint, pretty visuals, the works. I’ve yet to come across one that has a corresponding creative system. Maybe that’s coincidental.

My contention is that every brand should treat creative blueprints with the same level of commitment, dedication and resourcing that they treat media plans. After all, creative is the single-most-impactful optimization lever for most campaigns – so why aren’t we treating it as such?

Here’s an example of how this could look:

Weeks 1–2: Test across 5 archetypes at TOF (e.g., meme ads, VSLs, UGC, problem-aware explainers, carousel tutorials)
Weeks 3–6: Expand on winners, deploy MOF variations (e.g., mashups, user story compilations, benefit-led statics)
Weeks 7–10: Scale BOF conversion assets (e.g., offer statics, demos, testimonial carousels)
Weeks 11–12: Push LTV with retention creatives (e.g., feature callouts, upsell prompts, re-engagement videos)

This structured cadence creates velocity and learning. You’re not just building ads; you’re building performance signals.

Step 4: Use the “3x3x3” Matrix to Multiply Yield

The #1 objection I hear to implementing this framework is resources. Most marketing teams are already stretched thin. Production budgets are tight. Media teams are unyielding in their desire to launch on-schedule. What that objection misses is that creative diversity doesn’t have to be complex, time-consuming or expensive. It can (and should) be done on a budget and in a way that avoids burdening your team. The solution is to systematize idea expansion with this simple framework:

3 Formats × 3 Angles × 3 Funnel Stages = 27 unique creative variants

Start with a core message or product value. Then apply:

3 different formats (e.g., UGC video, carousel, text-only)
3 different angles (e.g., pain point, benefit, proof)
3 different calls to action mapped to funnel intent (e.g., discover, try, buy)

Voila! You now have 27 combinations from a single idea seed, all without breaking the bank, scheduling way too many shoots, and without significant incremental work. In fact, you can probably accomplish all of this in one shoot – simply because the bulk of the time on every shoot is spent setting up. Once everyone is there, the lighting is set, the cameras are rolling, it doesn’t take long at all to give your talent alternative scripts to read.

Step 5: Build the Creative Ops Stack

Creative output only scales with infrastructure. Here’s a minimum viable ops system:

1. Naming Taxonomy

Structure every asset with [Format]|[Angle]|[Funnel]|[Version]

Example: UGC | Proof | MOF | V2
This enables fast performance analysis and knowledge transfer. Using |pipes| makes breaking out columns easier in excel (since no-one else uses them), allowing for faster analysis.

2. Taggable Asset Library

Use Notion, Airtable, or Google Drive with fields for:

Format
Angle
Funnel Stage
Launch Date
Status (Live, Paused, Iterating)
Performance Notes

This allows your creative library to become a living database of learnings, which saves time in the future and allows your understanding of your audience to compound.

3. Feedback Loop Reporting

Track weekly performance across:

Hook rate (3s views ÷ impressions)
Hold rate (15s ÷ 3s views)
CTR for static, meme, and text creatives
Conversion rate (1DC)
Conversion value
Cost/Creative
Contribution Margin / Cost

Don’t just look at ROAS. Identify what type of creative is driving it.

Bonus points if you color-code results:

Green = Top 10% (scale)
Yellow = Middle 80% (watch or iterate)
Red = Bottom 10% (cut immediately)

Step 6: Develop a Creator Flywheel

High-growth brands are no longer just producing creative – they’re orchestrating creators – whether in-house, independent, agency-affiliated or even AI-powered. But, in order to get the most from your creators AND maintain diversity, you need a system:

Develop a modular brief that calls for multiple angles (e.g., “Tell the story of your first use,” “Explain what surprised you,” “What’s your favorite part of the experience/service/product” “when did you know this was the perfect [solution] for [problem], etc.). The goal of this is to prompt varied, natural, authentic responses from creators, while avoiding the overly-scripted creator content that tends to clog up most accounts.
Source 5–10 creators per month with varied tones
Launch creator content within 72 hours of receipt
Build a feedback loop from performance to future briefs

This is the most scalable way to inject message diversity, maintain freshness, and feed the system new signals continuously.

Better Creative Systems = Better Ad Account Performance

Most brands hit performance plateaus not because of budget constraints, but because of creative repetition. More money behind the same message just accelerates fatigue. If your ad accounts are stagnating, then it might be time to re-examine your creative diversity. It sounds cliche, but creative really is one of the most powerful levers you have to pull – so don’t be afraid to use it.

That’s it for this week!

Cheers,

Sam

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