What is Creative Fatigue?
Creative fatigue causes people to stop paying attention to ads. It happens when your target audience has seen your ad too many times and can have a big impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Brands often strive to add an element of novelty to their campaigns. We know that humans crave novelty and scientists have found that areas of the brain linked to memory and learning light up when people see novel images.
People pay attention to new things because they need to investigate if they present a threat or a reward. A novel stimulus provides opportunities for learning and encourages people to explore it.
As a result, novelty makes ad campaigns more memorable. New ideas capture attention and have a better chance of being remembered when people are in market for a product down the track.
Think about why the “Red Bull Gives You Wings” tagline is so memorable. Every time Red Bull runs a new advertising campaign, sponsorship, or activation, they show you how “Red Bull Gives You Wings” in a fresh and engaging way.
They have ventured into Formula 1 racing and even helped a skydiver execute the largest freefall in history, from a stratospheric height of 128,100 feet. In each campaign, Red Bull taps into our humanity’s innate drive to push the limits by showcasing a novel human experience.
Red Bull combats ad fatigue by constantly having a new stunt or activation on show. However, novelty can wear off over time. When an audience is exposed to a campaign too many times, creative fatigue can set in and they might stop paying attention to the ad.
What is creative fatigue?
Creative fatigue occurs when an audience is exposed to the same or similar creative content repeatedly. This often occurs in digital marketing and social media advertising campaigns, leading to a decline in attention, engagement, and responsiveness from the audience.
It tends to set in if an audience has seen the same ad too many times in too short of a time frame. There is no novelty left in the advertising campaign and overexposure results in diminishing returns over time.
What is the impact of creative fatigue?
Creative fatigue can have negative impacts on your marketing efforts. When your audience sees the same content repeatedly, they are more likely to tune out and scroll past it. The content stops capturing their attention and if left unchecked, ad fatigue could make your brand irrelevant to them.
The content could also start to annoy them and they may develop a negative perception of your brand before clicking unfollow or unsubscribe.
How to identify creative fatigue:
There are several metrics that you can track to determine if creative fatigue is impacting your digital marketing campaigns.
Click-Through Rate: If your click-through rate is decreasing, it means that fewer people are clicking on your ad to learn more about your brand or offer.
Conversion Rate: If your conversion rate is decreasing, fewer people are inclined to follow your call to action after viewing your ad. If this is occurring, you might also notice your cost-per-acquisition going up.
Cost Per Result: If your cost per result is going up, then you are having to spend more money for your ad to deliver the same impact. Your audience needs to see your ad more times to take the action you desire.
Frequency: You can check the frequency of your ad campaigns to monitor the number of times your audience has been exposed to your ad in a particular time frame. If your audience is continuously exposed to the same ad and you have a high frequency, it’s likely that they will experience creative fatigue.
How to solve creative fatigue:
There are multiple tools and workflows that you can set up to avoid ad fatigue.
Set Up a Reporting Dashboard: A reporting dashboard that includes click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per result, and frequency results from your ad campaigns will help you identify if creative fatigue is setting in. At a glance, you will be able to determine if your audience is being exposed to your ad too frequently and your campaign performance is dropping.
Use a Creative Feedback Loop: You can also review your top-performing creative assets within your advertising platform. Monitor your data to determine which creative assets are generating the best engagement with your audience and use any insights to create great assets again in the future. You should also communicate any low-performing creative assets to your team so that they can stop producing them or improve them in the future.
Give Your Campaigns a Variety of Creatives to Work With From Launch: If you utilise a range of creative formats, your ad platform has more options to work with and can immediately show another variation when creative fatigue sets in.
Regularly Update Your Ad Creative: By monitoring your results, you will start to develop an understanding of how often you should update your creative assets. You can use dynamic ads so that the platform has text, image, and product options and can present the creative asset that is most likely to deliver engagement to your audience. Small updates to background colours and text overlay on your ads can also help reduce creative fatigue. Ultimately, having an original idea in every campaign and sparking curiosity is the best way to avoid creative fatigue.
Set an Ad Frequency Cap: Advertising platforms give you the option to control how frequently your audience will see your campaign. If you notice that creative fatigue is setting in, then consider reducing your frequency.
Exclude Overexposed Audiences: Identify and exclude audiences who have been heavily exposed to a piece of creative content. You can also use the digital marketing funnel to regularly identify new audiences who you want to generate brand awareness with.
Spark curiosity.
The most effective advertising campaigns are attention-grabbing, memorable, and influential. They use novelty to spark curiosity and invite people to learn more about a brand and its offer. However, if you run the same campaign for too long, the novelty will eventually wear off. That’s why it’s so important to identify and reduce ad fatigue.