Are you the one of many who are afraid of Creative fatigue? It seems such a scary big thing that almost all marketers fear.
Luckily – we’ll walk you through it, get to the base of the issue, and unravel what a skeleton is when it comes to ads.
It may sound complicated & confusing, but trust me, it’s not. The most important thing is to understand the problem in its full capacity first, be ahead of the game, and be prepared for the inescapable.
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Phase 1 - There's no escaping, with success comes the challenge
In reality, Creative fatigue is something that is inevitable and bad news – you will be experiencing it just by having a successful ad on YouTube. As it can be seen on VidTao, and possibly from your own experience, every successful ad is on the inevitable road to ending up with 0 daily adspend sooner or later. No matter how successful, that winning ad in its original form will have to be outlived by other ads, most likely by the iterations of that same ad. But you will still always have to deal with Creative fatigue, and there’s absolutely no way around it.
That being said, it’s very important to distinguish what is and what isn’t creative fatigue, and it’s closely tied to the topic of what is an actual winning video and what isn’t.
Phase 2 - Is it Creative fatigue or Creative underperformance
Creative fatigue isn’t your video spending a few hundred dollars and performing closely to your target, only to just drop off then. Your video has to be spending thousands of dollars across different targeting options in order to attribute its inevitable demise to creative fatigue.
As a logical result of that, the actual definition of your creative experiencing fatigue is:
Spending hundreds or tens of thousands of dollars on one video against various audiences which underperforms across different campaigns after an extended period of good performance.
You’ll notice the silver lining in this – in order to experience creative fatigue, you have to have been doing something right, as you have a winner that can become fatigued. So, in a way, it’s a champion’s disease.
Have you really tried everything?
The third and the most complicated step that will make or break your case has all to do with the time when you started screaming: “My creative has burnt out!”. There are a lot of reasons why an ad starts underperforming, and you have to look around you and notice if everything about your account apart from your winning video is ‘business as usual’ or if you are experiencing a bigger, broader issue. If all of the signs are pointing to a hopeless case of a past winner that can no longer deliver, you can seal the case.
This is, as we’ve said, the fate of every successful creative. It’s just a matter of how long it will take for you to reach this particular situation. Whether it’s gonna be a few weeks or a few months it depends on different platforms. What’s specific on YouTube is that it usually takes a longer time for a winning video to experience creative fatigue, but once you see it, you’ll know it. And the biggest sign is that no matter what you try, your big winner won’t work anymore, no matter what you do, against all odds.
But the question persists: what next?
The answer sounds quite simple – you have to have a strategy for your creative process. And that goes for any move that you make in your account. You’re creating your first batch of creatives, and you have to think about how you will make decisions based on the performance that you see for these videos, and therefore, you have to have. Just like the skeleton from the beginning, your ads have their core elements that you have to be aware of and intentionally pick or detect with every new ad.
The biggest reason why you need it is that every video can become a winner, and therefore, you have to prepare to utilize it to the highest level. This winner becomes more than that; it becomes a key to the very core of your success, and by being aware of what your ad elements are, you will become resilient to Creative fatigue.
This will also help you to understand what the elements of your creative are, and to put them in a functioning system. The backbone of your skeleton is always the Angle, the combination of the problem you’re addressing, the audience or segment of the audience you’re addressing, the way that you approach the segment of your audience in doing so, bringing specific elements of the product as the solution to their problems.
From this backbone, the most important bones are your copy elements, which you should be able to divide into a Hook and Core section.
From there, you’ll notice a system of different smaller characteristics like presenters, UGC footage, visual elements, effects & animations, and other unique pieces of your creative that make up your unique ad. It’s a complex system, just like a skeleton, but knowing what it looks like and how it’s all connected will make you able to work on this.
How? By knowing the elements of your ad, you will start by changing all of the small pieces that you haven’t in the past while testing iterations of your winner, and you’ll work your way up to the backbone, the angle. Because once you find a winning angle, you know that inevitably, another winner will pop up, you just have to know how to look for it. The main idea is there, the audience is there – you just need a fresh way of putting it all together in a package that your desired audience will resonate with.
By looking at the problem of Creative fatigue from this perspective, you will be able to stay within that same winning ad frame but find new and fresh ways to communicate to your audience in a way that’s going to be appealing to them.
Not to mention that once you know your ad’s skeleton, ad creation becomes a challenging, fun game of never-ending exploration and creativity in the way you present your key point. From endless shooting in the dark to a structured system of exploration and constant testing of your hypotheses in a controlled environment.
It’s all about the discipline and setting up a structured system of creative testing and production, which is what we do here at Inceptly. One of the main pillars of helping clients scale and sustain that scale has to do with figuring out.
And you really won’t have anything to be afraid of, apart from holding yourself accountable for every creative decision you make, being fully aware of how every change and test you make plays into the bigger picture of your process.
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Alex Simic, Creative Director
Alex is the person responsible for all creative work that stands behind Inceptly since stepping into his role in 2022. He comes from the role of the Media Buying Team Lead and Strategist behind some of Inceptly’s biggest successes. He has collaborated with the biggest names in the Direct Response industry, whether as a Senior Account Manager & Media Buyer or Creative Director. His main goal is bridging the gap between Media Buying and Creative, ensuring that the videos Inceptly produces are data-based and giving our clients the best chance at achieving success.
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