Remember “lower my bills” (.com) 15-20 years ago, with dancing elephants and weirdo animation in their display ads, all over the internet? I do, which makes me old for this industry, but we’ll move past that. I not only miss the days of frenetic creative iteration, I miss the data that came with it. I miss finding a win out of nowhere, quantifiably doing more with a set budget.

I wish more clients would lend more iterations of their ad creative; slight changes to an offer or CTA, button text/color, different background images, that sort of stuff. It doesn’t matter what works best – which is not solely based on CTR – it only matters that we know what works best. Cut the loser, run the winner, consider the next iteration. Test, learn, optimize, repeat. There’s a limit to the pace at which you test, of course, but there’s also value in keeping your creative fresh.

Whether for testing purposes or just to keep creative fresh, consider new AI tools that might quickly and easily make those slight changes to the creative. Ideally, someone just keeps this in mind when developing the client’s creative. It takes 30 seconds to alter the text of a CTA or change a button color, and save various “versions” of an image asset. Done after the fact though, it seems like an effort.