Stefanie DiGianvincenzo and Rita Do.
Creative fatigue is a growing concern for many advertisers - but, with a little creative ingenuity, it can be overcome. Here are three easy-to-implement strategies from Meta’s Stefanie DiGianvincenzo, Creative Lead, and Rita Do, Marketing Science Lead, to help advertisers boost their sales and reach new customers by avoiding bombarding audiences with the same tired assets.
If you’ve ever gorged yourself on chocolate or listened to a favourite song so many times you start to hate it - you know you can have too much of a good thing.
Unfortunately, ads aren’t immune to this phenomenon either.
Even the most creative ad runs the risk of annoying an audience if shown too many times - eventually transitioning from being something entertaining and enjoyable to something an audience would rather ignore or avoid.
This is creative fatigue - the effect that occurs when audiences see the same ad repeatedly.
Research has shown that there is a 45% average drop in associated likelihood to conversion after four repeated exposures to an ad1. Given the frequency that most campaigns run at, that means there’s a fair chance your brand is inducing creative fatigue among its audience.
At this stage, you may be feeling fatigued yourself - thinking this is yet another problem you have to solve. But creative fatigue is thankfully not an indecipherable issue - and the better news is that it won’t break your budget to fix it. Creative diversification, rotation and AI-driven solutions are three key ways in which you help your creative stretch further than ever.
When in doubt, switch it up
Creative diversification should be your first port of call in tackling creative fatigue. Studies have shown that ads with diversified creatives can show up to 32% improvement in performance and 9% improvement in incremental reach2.
There are three ways you can diversify your creative - let’s go through them using a hypothetical example of the fictional “Uptown Bank” and its latest campaign.
First, consider changing the design. Look into different colours, fonts, animations and even mnemonics to help catch your audience’s attention. In the example below, you can see how different colours and formats have been utilised to reimagine the same creative.
Secondly, there are a variety of different ad formats you can utilise where you can specifically customise your creative in order to differentiate effectively. Each format will have different styles and audience expectations. For example, a short-form video should lean more heavily into what’s trending, while an ad shown on Stories should be visually strong with a clear call-to-action. These different formats are also useful because audiences like to consume content in different ways. Some may prefer to spend time in Reels, while others prefer to scroll through Stories. By creating for separate formats, you can reach new audiences whilst differentiating at the same time.
Thirdly, look into what motivates your audience. This can help develop more persuasive creative, geared towards generating action. Building around consumer motivations can also help reach different segments of your audience more effectively, such as in the following example where a single campaign is targeting consumers based on the themes of context, gifting and travel benefits.
If you are interested in creative differentiation, consider implementing a rigorous test-and-learn phase to understand what will work best for your business. Meta Ads Manager currently provides an Experiments tool which allows marketers to trial these approaches to see which best delivers the desired results.
Keep your assets on rotation
Having your creatives frequently rotated is all about balance. Brands need to refresh their assets, but they also need to allow enough time for audiences to become familiar with the business and product.
Creative rotation requires some forethought so you’re not taken unaware when creative fatigue sets in. If you’re building a campaign with the intention of running it over many months, consider rolling out your assets in phases instead of all at once. It’s also a good idea too, if you are working with creative agencies or production studios, to brief them to deliver more creative sets than you think in order to plan for refreshes.
We also know that it’s more common for the highest-performing assets to be those with the most fatigued creative - so when you rotate your creatives, make sure to rotate out those that are low performing and keep the one or two of those assets that are high performing in your campaign.
Consider implementing AI-driven solutions
When it comes to beating creative fatigue, there are a number of AI-driven solutions that can help provide much of the groundwork, such as Meta’s Advantage+ creative.
Advantage+ creative utilises AI to automatically optimise creative and maximise performance, delivering creative that’s most likely to drive performance whilst saving marketers precious time and resources. Our tests have shown Standard enhancements can provide 14% more incremental purchases per dollar spent.
Advantage+ creative works specifically to enhance ad elements like visual creative, audio and animation. For example, Advantage+ creative can automatically improve brightness or contrast in an image, provide 3D animation to add motion and depth, or select a song from Meta’s royalty free library that is most likely to resonate with your audience.
When it comes to creative fatigue, proactivity is key. Businesses that prepare for the onset of fatigue by using their own creative better will be able to not only avoid fatiguing their assets, but will be able to boost ad performance significantly. With these easy-to-implement strategies, your business will be much better placed to avoid creative fatigue for good.
Sources:
1. Regression analysis conducted on conversion likelihood impact based on repeated creative exposures, Analytics @ Meta, May 2023
2. These results were derived from a scaled backend test comparing the performance of two identical vs two non-identical (creatively diverse) creatives in 2703 ad sets across verticals in April 2021. Internal research by Meta.
3. Results based on 2-weeks of experiment data on 118k global advertisers in Q3 2022 where the ads included used link clicks, offsite conversions, and landing page view optimisations.
Credit to Shuttlerock, producer of the Uptown Bank Fictional examples.
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