A creative launches, performs, and three weeks later it's dead. Every brand experiences this. And everyone then calls it creative fatigue.

But what’s really going on underneath the curtain. That's the deep-dive this week.

One more thing before we get into it. New Com Summit in Munich is in three weeks and I'll be on stage. If you want to come, brands can get a free ticket.

In three weeks, New Com Summit takes place in Munich.

October 21 - 800+ people from eCom and marketing, 20+ speakers from Holy, Glow25, Teveo, Everdrop, Sassy Classy, masterclasses during the day and an afterparty at night. I think this is going to be a pretty good one, and it’d be great to see many of you there.

If you run a brand, you can get a free ticket through me. Just use the code newcom-partner at checkout: Get your New Com Ticket.

If you run paid social, you certainly have asked yourself this question many times. Why do my creatives fatigue so quickly?

You might have a massive target audience. Millions and millions of people. But after two or three weeks, the creatives that used to perform insanely well suddenly stop working, and you need to bring in new ones.

You haven't reached all the people in the market yet, you were not even close. So why do your creatives fatigue…

I think the reason is that the target market for that specific creative is a lot smaller than you think.

Yes, there might be 10 million people in Germany who suffer from back pain. But how many of those people respond to this exact person saying these exact things, this messaging, this visual identity, this storytelling style?

All of these factors layer on top of each other and determine if someone is going to respond to your creative.

So the total addressable market of a creative isn't determined by how many people have the problem. It's determined by how many people who have that problem actually react to your creative at a ROAS you are willing to accept.

Of course, Meta could just keep pushing the creative out to more and more people. But that would mean your ROAS goes down, and that's obviously not something you want.

So while there might be 10 million people with back pain, maybe only 250,000 of them can be converted within your target ROAS with the way you are communicating in this creative. So for that particular creative, the total addressable market is 2.5% of the total market.

Why more budget doesn't fix it

The intuitive response when a creative wins is to scale it. And scaling budget on a winner is definitely not wrong. It's just not the lever anymore once the audience is saturated.

Meta scales a winning creative inside the audience it was validated in. Those 250,000 people. Once that pool is exhausted, more budget doesn't push the creative into new audiences. It recirculates it inside the same one. The thing that feels like scaling is what accelerates the decay.

This is where the importance of diversity comes in.

What creative diversity actually means

I don't think creative diversity always means coming up with completely new ideas to sell your product.

Finding one or two angles that successfully sell your product is already hard enough.

Creative diversity therefore means identifying tens, twenties, or even hundreds of different ways to tell that same story to different people in different ways.

Because different people react differently to the same story, depending on how it's told. Some respond to a founder ad, some to a meme ad, some to a medical ad, some to an AI ad. It's the same story told four ways to four different pools.

With every new creative type, you might add another 2.5% of your total addressable market. And by continuing to add creative types, you eventually get closer to reaching the full 10 million people who have the problem you're solving.

Bottom line is the following: