To keep a campaign healthy and avoid ad fatigue, you need to refresh creative weekly, sometimes even daily. Most ad platforms recommend a 3-5 variations per ad set or group, and you need creative ready to go when performance dips. It can take anything from a few hours to several months to procure new ads – getting the timing wrong can cause performance to degrade by 30-60% over a matter of weeks. One finance client had me clear every new ad with legal, who gave me 1 hour every 6 weeks, billing my client $500 for the privilege. When you’re running an operation, and a bottleneck appears ahead of a capital-intensive part of the process, you must overwhelm the bottleneck. That means never turning up to a creative approval meeting empty handed.
The solution is to disconnect production from publishing: build up a ‘Creative lake’ of approved ad variations you can draw from when needed. If your campaigns call for 4 new variations per week, overproduce until you have 8 in reserve – now you have a 2 week buffer before performance starts to suffer. To really scale this strategy, build modular components that can be combined to create thousands of variations. What value propositions, key phrases, video footage, stock images or illustrations do you have at your disposal? How can they be remixed and recombined to make new variations? If you can work together to define what types of changes that need approval, and build up an arsenal of pre-approved assets, your campaigns will never be left wanting again.
| Name | Link | Type |
|---|---|---|
Container Ports thread, Ryan Petersen | Social | |
Growth Through Localization, Uber | Presentation |