Decoding Creative Diversity
Why Ad Variety Equals Performance (And How To Harness It)
If creative is the last remaining lever in performance marketers’ control, then variety among ads—a.k.a. creative diversity—is the decisive factor between campaign success and stagnation.
Until now, measuring such an abstract concept was impossible. Optimizing for it? Total guessing game.
Not anymore.
This report unveils groundbreaking methods that transform creative diversity from abstract theory into tactical steps that supercharge exponential performance gains.
Creative Diversity | kree·AY·tiv di·VUR·suh·tee
(Noun)
The strategic use of varied ad formats, messaging, visual styles, and talent to optimize advertising relevance, reduce audience fatigue, and enhance campaign performance.
What is creative diversity and why does it matter?
Performance marketing has entered the era of volume. Algorithms powering the largest digital and social platforms are hungry beasts. They thrive on more—more content, more eyeballs, more engagement.
The same is true for advertising content. A significant portion of the equation to find winning ads is volume; more ads in play equals more chances one will take off.
But simply cranking out more creative isn’t enough
More ads alone does not equal better performance. More variety among ads does.
Lack of meaningful differentiation among your creative assets leads to accelerated ad fatigue; the declining success of an ad due to repeat exposures. This fatigue leads to declining click rates and rising costs per click, and ultimately stagnates overall performance. To truly excel, you need variety among your ads—strategically diverse formats, themes, and styles.
You need creative diversity
Deploying a creative strategy that emphasizes fresh ideas and variety among ads mitigates these issues:
1. Creative diversity improves campaign performance.
A Meta research report found using 3-10 ad creatives reduced cost per action (CPA) by 46% compared to using just one. Another study showed two visually distinct creatives lowered CPA by 4.6%. Our internal analysis of 15k+ client ads showed campaigns using multiple ad formats show higher click-through rates (CTR) and lower CPA.
2. Creative diversity also reduces ad fatigue.
One analysis of 8.7K ads revealed performance drops by ~30% without frequent creative refreshes, but multiple variants significantly reduce this decline. Our analysis of 1.5M+ client ads revealed ads require 30–45 days on average for performance metrics to stabilize.
Incorporating different formats and styles in creative assets also broadens audience appeal, maximizing reach and engagement. The powerful machine learning algorithms used by Meta, Google, TikTok, and others to put the right content in front of the right person at the right time—including advertiser content—are so highly advanced that they’re rendering manual targeting obsolete.
Now, the creative does the targeting
The more diverse and varied your ads are—in creative style, theme, and format—the more people it reaches. Digital advertising platforms are experimentation machines. Advertisers need to provide the required inputs (ads) for the machines to work optimally.
As Eric Seufert put it on a recent Ready Set webinar, you need to feed the beast.
How can I improve my creative diversity?
By using the methodologies inside this report.
Until now, creative diversity has been notoriously difficult to measure and optimize for. This report introduces two unique methods to visualize and quantify creative diversity, giving you a benchmark to improve variety among your ad portfolio, and, by extension, the overall performance of your digital advertising strategy.
Creative Map
An intuitive heat map to instantly identify gaps in creative strategy.
Creative Diversity Score
A definitive, comprehensive scoring system to benchmark your overall creative mix.
Before we do that, let’s first take a look at how we gathered the data to draw the conclusions that we did.
Methodology
To understand the impact of variety and diversity among creative assets on performance marketing campaigns, we assessed a comprehensive range of sources:
- Analyzed two years’ worth of performance data, totaling 1.5k ads and a cumulative $4M+ in spend across multiple social platforms to calculate the life span of an ad.
- Studied 17,000+ ads across 599 campaigns to determine the impact of creative diversity on key performance metrics.
- Manually scrutinized 465 ads from three brands to assess creative variety.
This research report focuses on paid social media advertising channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc.
Get Your Own Heat map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.
Dimensions of Creative Diversity
While creative diversity is vital to effective performance marketing, it is also an abstract concept. It’s subjective. And subjective things are hard to measure.
What is truly meant by the term “creative diversity”? What distinguishes one ad from another? How do I know if I have creative diversity in my ad portfolio? These are the questions this report sets out to answer, and provides frameworks and tools to break down, measure, and optimize for performance-enhancing variety.
Think of creative diversity like music. At first, it’s subjective—simply “good” or “bad” sound depending on the personal taste of the listener. Yet music can be broken down into measurable components: melody, rhythm, harmony, tempo, and instrumentation. Tweaking any of them changes the final outcome. Creative diversity works the same way. It too has clear, fundamental base components. We’ve identified six:
Creative Themes, Concepts, and Messaging
Creative Themes & Concepts
The variety of themes and concepts in your ads is the single most important factor in creative diversity.
- Themes define the overarching narrative or strategic angle of an ad.
- Concepts are the specific creative executions within those themes.
For example: An ad’s theme (idea) could be presenting an aspirational lifestyle, with the concept (execution) being a day-in-the-life story showing someone using the product or service in their daily routine.
True creative diversity is achieved when a brand consistently explores multiple themes and regularly introduces fresh concepts, ensuring ads always feel engaging, distinct, and effective.
To better measure variety among creative themes and concepts, ads may be grouped into the following broad categories.
Product-Centric
Highlights the product itself, focusing on features, benefits, and use cases. Concepts within this theme may include hands-on product demos, close-up feature showcases, or comparison videos.
Lifestyle & Aspirational
Positions the product within an ideal lifestyle, evoking emotions and aspirations. Concepts might include day-in-the-life storytelling, cinematic brand films, or aspirational creator collaborations.
Testimonial & Social Proof
Builds trust through customer experiences, expert endorsements, or user-generated content (UGC). Common concepts include before-and-after stories, unboxing videos, or expert reviews.
Educational & Explainer
Provides useful information or guidance about the product or service. Concepts may include step-by-step tutorials, myth-busting videos, FAQs, or animated explainers.
Promotional & Offer-Based
Drives urgency with discounts, seasonal events, or product launches. Concepts often include limited-time flash sale ads, countdown timers, or exclusive member deals.
Humor & Entertainment
Uses comedy, satire, or engaging storytelling to capture attention. Concepts might include parody ads, meme-based content, or exaggerated situational humor.
Brand Story & Mission-Driven
Focuses on the company’s values, mission, or broader impact. Concepts can include founder stories, behind-the-scenes brand narratives, and production breakdowns or warehouse tours.
Trend-Based & Reactive
Taps into cultural moments, viral trends, or social conversations to stay relevant and timely. Concepts might include real-time reactive ads, collaborations with trending creators, or event-driven content.
Creative Production & Format
Format & Production Style
The variety of themes and concepts in your ads is the single most important factor in creative diversity.
- Audiences respond differently based on context, preferences, and browsing behavior on various social platforms.
- Algorithms have more to work with. Providing the platforms with more ads enables them to identify and serve the most effective creative for each unique audience segment.
- It’s a forcing function to produce iterations of concepts. Producing multiple versions of one creative concept into different formats—think taking a screenshot of a video ad to create a static image ad, or multiple images to take a carousel—is key to testing and identifying the highest-performing format.
The number of format and production styles is vast, but they can be refined into the following categories.
Static Image
Single-image ad formats including photographs, infographics, or meme-style graphics. Effective for quick communication, capturing immediate attention, and easily testing visual hooks or messaging without extensive production overhead.
Carousel
Multi-image or multi-panel formats that users swipe through sequentially, ideal for progressive storytelling, highlighting multiple products or features, or building a narrative that engages audiences step-by-step.
Native Video
Typically lo-fi, user-generated content (UGC), or talking head videos that are created specifically for social platforms. Designed to blend seamlessly with native content feeds, enhancing authenticity, relatability, and engagement.
High-Production Video
Professionally produced videos with studio-quality visuals, cinematic storytelling, and polished production values. Ideal for strong brand storytelling, aspirational messaging, and building brand credibility through high-impact visuals.
Animation & Motion Graphics
Visually engaging creative utilizing 2D/3D animation, stop-motion, or AI-generated graphics. These formats excel at simplifying complex messages, demonstrating product functionality, or adding visual interest to storytelling.
Alternative Formats
Formats that encourage audience interaction, such as shoppable ads, dynamic creative personalization (tailored content based on user data), polls, quizzes, and gamified experiences. These enhance user involvement, leading to deeper engagement and improved conversion rates.
Audience & Funnel Strategy
Audience & Funnel Strategy
Creative variety isn’t just determined by an ad’s content or format—it’s also about how it speaks to different audiences based on their unique relationship with your brand.
Tailoring creative assets to specific audience segments, their position in the marketing funnel, and your campaign objectives ensures the right ads resonate with the right audience.
Key factors influencing creative diversity in this dimension include:
Audience Diversity
Crafting tailored ads for distinct audience groups: cold prospects, warm retargeting segments, loyal customers, lookalikes, and geographic targets. Precise audience matching enhances relevance and performance.
Funnel Stage Alignment
Strategically designing creative concepts to align with the stages of customer awareness, as made famous by Eugene Schwartz in Breakthrough Advertising: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. Effective alignment ensures incremental progression towards desired outcomes.
Campaign Objective
Creative assets specifically aligned with a campaign’s objective, such as awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, or sales. This allows for more precise measurement and better optimization, and also ensures ads directly support your strategic goals.
Channel & Distribution
Platform & Placement
In this regard, digital advertising is a lot like investing: it pays to be diversified. While it’s tempting to be everywhere at once, or default to the largest platforms, smart marketers understand where their audience is and meets them there.
Deploying ads in the right channels that make sense for your product or service (and where you know your ideal buyers are likely to be) is key to both smart performance marketing and creative diversity.
Platform
Diversifying across platforms like Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, to name a few, lets you meet your audience precisely where they spend their time online.
Placement
Going one level deeper, ads that are optimized for specific placements within channels (in-feed, stories, Reels, in-stream video, etc.) ensure content resonates within that context and maximizes performance.
Talent & Representation
Talent & Representation
This dimension is critical to creative diversity because it shapes how authentically and broadly ads resonate with the audience. Featuring a wide range of people in ads helps brands establish meaningful and authentic connections with audiences and builds trust across niche communities.
Talent Types
These are simply the people featured in ads. Creators, actors, experts, influencers, customers—variety among the voices promoting a brand expands overall reach and relevance.
Demographic Representation
People resonate most deeply with content (ads included) that reflects who they are.
Featuring diverse representation across demographics like age, gender, ethnicity, and language signals clearly to audiences: this is for you.
By mirroring the identities of the people brands aim to reach, ads become more relatable, inclusive, and effective.
Creative Refresh Rate
Creative Refresh Rate
The final dimension of creative diversity refers to how frequently new ads are introduced into rotation and fatigued creative phased out.
An effective refresh strategy involves maintaining a healthy pipeline of new creative while also giving ads time to shine—our analysis of 1,500+ ads found ads require 30 to 45 days on average for performance to stabilize.
In other words, finding the sweet spot between introducing new ads, scaling high-performers, responding to shifting audience behaviors, adhering to platform changes, and adapting to broader market & cultural trends. Easy, right?
Refresh Frequency
The cadence at which new creative assets or updated variations are introduced. This ranges from daily to weekly updates for aggressive testing, to monthly or quarterly cycles for more stable campaigns.
Type of Refresh
The scope and scale of creative changes. These changes could be minor tweaks, major iterations of existing ads, or entirely new creative concepts.
Trigger Mechanism
What prompts creative updates. Triggers can include scheduled rotations, fluctuations in performance signals like CPA or CTR drops, or significant events like product launches, sales events, or holidays.
Volume of New Creative per Cycle
The number of new or significantly updated creative assets introduced per refresh cycle. Conservative approaches may introduce 1–2 new concepts per cycle, while aggressive, high-velocity strategies can mean 10+ new ads rotated in.
Get Your CREATIVE map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.
Measuring Creative Diversity
With the foundational elements of creative diversity clearly defined, we can now explore practical methods to visualize and quantify this crucial dimension of performance marketing. Creative diversity, while inherently abstract, becomes powerful when it can be objectively measured, transforming subjective judgments into actionable insights.
In this section, we introduce two methodologies that enable you to pinpoint gaps, establish benchmarks, and systematically improve the variety of creative assets within your ad portfolio. By applying these frameworks, marketers gain clarity on precisely where their creative strategy excels—and where there’s room for growth.
Creative Map
This intuitive visual tool reveals the hidden strengths and critical gaps in your creative strategy. By mapping ads across two essential dimensions—Creative Theme & Style and Production & Format—the Creative Map delivers an instant snapshot of an ad account’s creative diversity. It highlights oversaturated areas and illuminates untapped opportunities, offering a clear diagnosis and a path toward smarter creative investments. It also serves as a reliable benchmark for tracking and measuring creative evolution over time.
Creative Diversity Score
This a single, clear metric that reflects the breadth and balance of your creative strategy.
Unlike one-dimensional metrics, it evaluates multiple key dimensions to precisely measure variety within a creative portfolio. It not only benchmarks creative mix against best practices, but also acts as a diagnostic tool to highlight strategic gaps and inform smarter creative decisions to combat ad fatigue and drive sustainable performance.
Calculate your Creative Diversity Score
Ready to see how you stack up? Use the calculator below to calculate your Creative Diversity Score and discover where your creative mix stands, and where there’s room to grow. Simply select the option that best describes your level of proficiency across the six dimensions of creative diversity and your score will be automatically calculated.
Note: Some dimensions are weighted more heavily than others due to their outsized impact on overall creative diversity and strategic effectiveness. Weights are noted in each dimension.
Interpreting Your Creative Diversity Score
81–100: Excellent Creative Diversity
All dimensions are robust and well-balanced, reflecting a highly diversified and effective creative strategy.
61–80: High Creative Diversity
Most dimensions are performing well. Minor gaps might exist, but overall, the creative strategy is strong and balanced.
41–60: Moderate Creative Diversity
Reflects a mixed performance. While some dimensions may be solid, a few lagging areas are pulling the score down. There’s clear room for improvement to achieve a more balanced approach.
21–40: Low Creative Diversity
Shows that several key areas are lagging. One or more weak dimensions may be dragging down the overall score, signaling the need for focused improvements.
0–20: Very Low Creative Diversity
Indicates that most or all dimensions are significantly underperforming. Immediate improvements are needed across the board.
💡The Impact of a Lagging Dimension
As the Creative Diversity Score is the weighted average of six dimensions, a single low score can significantly impact the overall score. For example, if the Format & Production Style scored considerably lower than the others, it will pull the overall average (and also the final score) down. This underscores the importance of not just excelling in one or two areas, but maintaining consistently high performance across all dimensions. One lagging area can act as a bottleneck that limits the potential of an otherwise strong creative strategy.
Get Your CREATIVE map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.
Brand Analysis: Hims
Hims is a modern telehealth company providing accessible, personalized care for men across weight loss, hair loss, sexual health, and mental health. With digital-first treatments and a mission to empower men through better health, it’s a consumer-centric brand with a sophisticated performance marketing function.
What’s Working
- On review of Hims ad portfolio on the Meta Ads Library, it’s clear they run a sophisticated and disciplined testing framework. By systematically varying intros with different talent, voiceovers, and text overlays, they can learn what’s resonating with their audience to isolate winning creative and optimize performance.
- Their ads reveal impressive variety both in the angles of creative messaging and the people featured. Hims features a wide range of diverse talent across age, ethnicity, gender, and background to speak authentically to specific audience segments. They leverage this wide spectrum of different voices to let their creative do the targeting. For example, instead of manually targeting men in their 50s, they’ll run ads featuring someone saying “I’m a 52-year-old man…”, using these identifiers to allow ads to act as precise targeting mechanisms.
- Hims also excels at performance creative and direct response fundamentals. While varied in style, video ads adhere to a proven structure: scroll-stopping hook, clear body messaging, and a compelling CTA. Static ads keep the messaging straightforward and highlight one core benefit without unnecessary complexity. Although there are some identifiable gaps in their creative mix, their overall library reveals a strong range of themes, formats, and styles.
Areas of Improvement
Hims could benefit from stronger diversification across Format & Production Styles. There is a notable lack of both Carousel and Alternative Formats, two ad types that can differentiate a portfolio and boost performance. While they exhibit a strong range of Creative Themes & Concepts, there is a concentration around Educational & Explainer and Lifestyle & Aspiration ads, indicating that experimenting with different angles may unlock new audience segments.
However, there is also a simple explanation for why Hims isn’t prioritizing these formats and angles: the nature of their products and brand. Their products are complex pharmaceuticals that require some explaining, and distinct product lines don’t lend themselves well to carousel ads which feature multiple products. The Hims brand promises a better, healthier life which is best demonstrated through lifestyle ads, making that creative theme a natural priority.
Methodology
The analysis was conducted using Hims’ Meta Ads Library, which contained approximately 320 live ads running between December 10, 2024 and March 5, 2025. Of these, 238 unique ads were included in the Creative Map visualization; duplicates and minor iterations of the same concept were excluded to avoid redundancy. Scores were normalized to a 100-point scale to facilitate clear, comparative analysis.
Get Your CREATIVE map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.
Brand Analysis: AG1
AG1 is a supplement company promoting a healthier lifestyle through their single product—a daily drink packed with nutrients. A performance marketing powerhouse, AG1 is one of the most well-known brands among marketers for their massive digital advertising presence.
What’s Working
- AG1 taps into a broad network of creators, athletes, celebrities, and paid talent to bring its health-forward, active lifestyle brand to life. Ads run from both the brand’s official account and various influencer handles, adding credibility and reach across audiences.
- A review of ad publish dates reveals they’re launching new creative nearly every day—suggesting a strong creative refresh cadence and an ongoing test-and-learn strategy. We see evidence of controlled variant testing, including different intro hooks and offer formats (e.g., % off vs. $ off), indicating a disciplined approach to optimizing both creative and conversion levers.
- AG1’s creative library spans multiple formats and themes despite being a single-product company. Static ads are frequently used to promote their high-value welcome offer, while video (both lo-fi and high-production) is leveraged to explain product benefits and reinforce credibility through testimonials. Their creative mix balances product-centric, educational, and lifestyle-driven content—highlighting the versatility of their narrative strategy.
Areas of Improvement
AG1’s creative portfolio is impressive, but there are notable gaps in both theme and format diversity. Humorous, trend-based, and brand story-driven content is largely absent, missing an opportunity to connect with younger, health-conscious audiences who respond well to culturally relevant content. Similarly, the lack of mission-driven storytelling feels like a missed chance to build brand equity by sharing the “why” behind AG1—especially with a comprehensive page on their impact initiatives on their website.
There’s also room to expand format diversity. The absence of carousels, alternative formats, and motion-based assets (like animation) limits experimentation and variety in the feed. Incorporating carousels, in particular, could provide a low-effort way to boost engagement and performance—whether for highlighting ingredients, bundling benefits, or stacking social proof. Broadening both creative themes and formats could unlock new audiences and performance wins.
Methodology
The AG1 analysis comprised approximately 430 live ads in Meta Ads Library running between September 11, 2024 and March 5, 2025. 157 unique ads were included in the Creative Map visualization as duplicates and iterations were excluded. Scores were normalized to a 100-point scale for clear analysis.
Brand Analysis: Lemonade
Lemonade is a tech-driven insurance company that offers homeowners, renters, pet, car, and life insurance. Built on transparency and user experience, Lemonade stands out in the stuffy, legacy insurance industry with an online-first approach, modern brand, and impressive performance marketing.
What’s Working
- Lemonade stands out as a challenger brand in a traditionally rigid, highly regulated industry. Despite Meta’s strict ad policies for financial products and services, they’ve built a playful, irreverent creative identity that cuts through the noise. Their ads often leverage memes, culturally relevant references, and clever copy—proving that even insurance can be engaging and fun.
- Their marketing is finely tuned to a younger demographic. Lemonade clearly understands their audience—millennials and Gen Z buying insurance for the first time—who are digital-first, skeptical of legacy brands, and highly fluent in internet culture. They meet them where they are with trend-driven, native video content, often featuring young, diverse talent in relatable, everyday scenarios.
- There’s strong creative diversity across both approach and representation. Lemonade experiments freely with different visual styles, tones, and formats—from skits to testimonials to reactive memes. Their creative ecosystem reflects variety not only in concept, but in who’s featured and how the message is delivered, helping the brand stay dynamic and relevant.
Areas of Improvement
While Lemonade excels at delivering humorous, educational content in native, trend-savvy formats, there are some clear gaps in their digital advertising strategy. Most notably, ad volume appears relatively low, limiting their ability to fully capitalize on creative diversity across formats, themes, and targeting.
Additionally, while it makes sense that they don’t lean heavily on promotional or offer-based content, the lack of brand story and mission-driven ads is a missed opportunity. Lemonade has a distinct and compelling social impact angle through its “giveback” program. Incorporating this more directly into their creative mix could strengthen emotional resonance and deepen loyalty among values-driven consumers.
Methodology
Lemonade’s Meta Ad Library consisted of approximately 140 live ads at the time of analysis, running between January 7, 2025 to March 5, 2025. 70 ads were included in the Creative Map—duplicates and iterations were excluded—and scores were normalized to a 100-point scale.
Get Your CREATIVE map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.
How to Make the Case For More Creative Investment
Effective performance marketing is about volume AND variety among your creative assets.
But securing more budget for ad creative development and testing—a feat only a small fraction of marketing leaders feel comfortable doing—from budget conscious CEOs and CFOs requires cold hard numbers. The kinds of numbers that marketers couldn’t produce, because they didn’t exist—until now.
Here’s a step-by-step process for building a strong case for more creative investment.
1. Calculate your Creative Diversity Score
If you haven’t already done so, use our nifty calculator to determine your score. This will give you a benchmark from which to compare future performance gains.
Bonus points if you scrutinize your two biggest competitors ad libraries to run their scores, too.
2. Request your personalized Creative Map
This will equip you with a visual snapshot of the variety of your creative strategy. You’ll understand where your strategy is oversaturated and also identify gaps to prioritize.
Request yours here. Note: We are a small team and while we will do our best, we unfortunately cannot guarantee that we can fulfill every request for a Creative Map.
3. Prioritize low-hanging fruit
Several quick wins should become apparent after going through the above exercises. Create a clear strategic plan to tackle both some easy wins, like repurposing stills from video ads into static ads, and long-term strategic visions, like working with more creators to produce native-style UGC content.
4. Speak their language
Numbers are a CFOs love language. Infuse your proposal with as many as you can find to bolster your request. Here’s some important stats, as a reminder:
- Ad performance begins to decline after 30–45 days. Regular creative refresh is essential to continued performance. (Source: Ready Set analysis of 1.5M+ ads)
- Using 3–10 ad creatives can reduce CPA by 46% compared to using just one. (Source: Meta research analysis.)
- Analysis of 15,000+ ads showed using multiple ad formats resulted in a statistically significant increase in CTR and reduction in CPA.
5. Plan quarterly snapshots
Bookmark this page and set a reminder to come back next quarter (and the one after that) to run your Creative Diversity Score again to gauge improvement.
6. Make your case
Equipped with your Creative Diversity Score, Creative Map, a clear plan of attack, and the numbers to back up why creative diversification is essential, present your findings to your CEO/CFO.
The performance marketing game is hard. Things change fast and the goalposts are always moving. But the one thing that will always be in marketers control is creative. If you prioritize creative excellence, you’ll always be two steps ahead.
Good luck.
The Bottom Line
If there’s one thing you take away from this report, let it be this…
Everyone preaches “more creative.” But more of the same won’t cut it. The real unlock is radically varied creative concepts—multiple formats, different themes, fresh talent—pushed live before anyone gets bored.
If that sounds expensive, consider the cost of stagnation: overpriced clicks, ignored ads, and zero growth.
So stop treading water with safe, cookie-cutter concepts. Step up, shake things up, and let creative diversity be a key driver of your performance. Because the biggest risk now is playing it safe.
Get Your CREATIVE map
Maximizing creative diversity begins with knowing where you stand.
Instantly identify gaps in your creative strategy with a custom Creative Map.