Rosie Arrowsmith, Client Director, Vidsy · July 2026 · 5 min read
You made one ad twelve times
Six rounds of approval, one surviving idea, twelve aspect ratios, and a media plan paying full price to serve the same thirty seconds of your good taste to everyone alive.
What we call rangetwelve sizes
Twelve sizes is not twelve ideas.
27 films22 brands23 countries
01
Everyone knew
The algorithm stopped grading on a curve.
I spent Cannes week in the rooms where the industry argues with itself.
Meta and Google arrived with the same message, delivered politely: the biggest performance lever left is the one most brands still treat as a cost line.
$4.13
back for every $1 spent on Meta.
Up 25% since 2022, with creative quality cited as the key driver.
Meta, Cannes Lions 2026 announcement, drawn from more than one million campaigns
56%
of digital sales lift comes from the creative itself.
Against 30% for the media.
Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness (digital campaigns), cited by Meta
up to 70%
of ad performance is driven by the creative itself.
A broad estimate, not a measured constant.
Google Media Lab
Three numbers, three methods, one conclusion.
Behind Meta's number sits Andromeda, the ranking system that now evaluates thousands of ad variants in parallel to decide what each person sees.
It does not reward the ad you love most. It rewards having enough genuinely different ads to choose from.
Somewhere along the way, value has been replaced by volume. We have become incredibly efficient at creating things that people ignore.
Give the system two assets and you have made most of its decisions for it.
Give it fifteen genuinely different ones and it can do its job.
02
Nobody moved
Creative decides if you win or lose.
Media buying got automated.
Targeting, bidding and placement have converged, and every serious advertiser now runs roughly the same machine. What is left to compete on is the one thing the machine cannot buy for you: the ad itself.
Google Media Lab puts creative at up to 70% of ad performance. That is most of the game sitting outside the media plan.
When creative is weak
The media behind it is wasted
The system serves it less and charges more for the impressions it does get. Weak creative is not underperforming quietly. It is taxing every dollar in the plan.
When creative is strong
The same budget multiplies
Delivery gets cheaper, reach compounds and the identical media plan buys more outcomes. Strong creative does not add to media performance. It multiplies it.
"Creative decides if you win or lose" has been the line on our homepage for years, and I used to hear it as a slogan. The math caught up with it.
The work that wins has four things in common.
- Strategic insight and real motivations.
- Creative differentiation and volume.
- Authenticity.
- Platform-native craft.
Four things every brand agrees with. Ask how many of them survive round six.
Sameness is a tax on your media spend.
03
The reason
Great creative is hard. Really hard.
If diversity were easy, every brand would already have it. Three forces make it hard.
Infinite content.
AI is fueling infinite growth in online content. The volume of things competing for your customer keeps doubling. Your budget does not.
Shrinking attention.
Every second is harder to earn. The first frame now does the work a whole TV spot used to do, and it gets one chance.
AI-powered media.
The feed ranks and rewards the best creative in real time, ad by ad. There is nowhere for average work to hide.
Brands have to transform for this era. The winning ads are creator-led and platform-native, and AI-driven media rewards volume and variety.
One great ad is no longer a strategy.
There is a fourth force and it is structural, so nobody puts it on a slide. Most brands buy creative from a model built to produce one answer, beautifully, and then defend it through six rounds of approval.
A process designed to arrive at one film arrives at one film faster every year. It does not arrive at twelve.
1film, 15 times
Old operating model
Agree the idea, make it, then resize it.
Better operating model
Agree the territory, then let many people answer it.
04
The bill
So what is creative diversity?
It is not more of the same ad in more sizes. Resizing is an execution wearing a strategy's clothes.
Diversity is giving the system enough genuine variation to learn what works. It has three levers.
One brief
- Get
- people who have already scrolled past this category today
- Who
- think they know exactly how an ad like this goes
- To
- stop, watch it through and remember who made it
- By
- answering it twelve different ways
Lever 01
Format variety
Different formats, lengths and structures. Creator-led, product-led, presenter-led, animated. The feed decides which format earns the moment, so bring more than one.
Lever 02
Message and angle variation
Different hooks, different narrative structures, different feelings against the same brief. Each angle reaches a buyer the others miss. One message is one guess.
Lever 03
Volume
Enough genuinely different assets for the system to learn from, and to keep learning. Two assets is an answer. Fifteen is a conversation.
None of that means chaos. The brand stays exactly where it was.
Creative diversity is not ten versions of the same ad. It is ten genuinely different ways into your brand: different creators, different hooks, different feelings, one consistent brand.
Producing that is a set of habits, and they are less romantic than the argument.
- Write the territory, not the script.
- Go broad, then narrow with inspiration.
- Keep one wild card in every brief.
- Let creators sound like themselves.
- Judge the set, not the asset.
Four changes to how a brief is written. The fifth is to how the work is read.
The wild card is the deliverable where we state the direction and hand the execution entirely to the creator. It is the one clients ask me to cut, and it is regularly the asset they send round the team afterwards.
Strip the range out and the work goes what our creative leads call addy: technically correct, visibly an ad, scrolled past. The audience stops being the protagonist and the brand starts monologuing.
Creative has become the strategic lever unlocking billions in media value. Video everywhere, made in any way, from social and CTV and retail media to human-led, AI-augmented and GenAI production.
The billions are not a metaphor. Meta counts $4.13 back for every $1 in, with creative quality the key driver.
Sameness is not a taste problem.
It is a line on your media invoice.
Stop paying it.
Count your answers
