I often see marketing leaders respond with insufficient urgency to creative performance degradation. I view any meaningful drop in creative performance as an all-hands-on-deck emergency that needs to be addressed aggressively.
A few years ago, in one of the most popular posts on Mobile Dev Memo, I proposed the idea of a « creative performance half-life »: the point after which creative performance degrades precipitously because of saturation.
That half-life is essentially a replacement timeline. If the creative production process requires two weeks from concept to deliverable into testing, then any significant decline in creative performance means that the creative production process either malfunctioned or became misaligned with market conditions *two weeks ago*.
That’s a catastrophe. The team should respond accordingly by dramatically increasing production output. This is why I advocate for working with a large number of agencies and freelancers, since their output can be flexibly scaled at a moment’s notice.
But the broader point is that a considerable drop in creative performance reveals a process problem in the past that will have accumulated over the half-life of the advertiser’s creatives. Fixing it now requires a deliberate expansion of creative output and diversity.