Your Audience Might Be Sick of Your Ads. Here’s How to Fix It.

4 Min Read

“Ungh, this ad again?” Let’s be honest: even as advertisers, we’ve all muttered it at some point after seeing the same ad multiple times. While video content is the most compelling ad format, proven to drive consumer action through powerful storytelling, it’s at the mercy of a very real threat: ad fatigue.

A recent Conviva poll found that 59% of consumers think there are too many repeated ads on Connected TV. That burnout can lead to real consequences, including a disengaged or even a disgruntled audience. So what’s a brand to do? How can you keep your creative fresh—and keep generating results?

Join MNTN’s Brittany Haskins, Director of Customer Success, and QuickFrame’s Alex Villa, Associate VP of Customer Success, as they reveal the science behind refreshing video and CTV creative. Brittany and Alex will discuss with Digiday crucial topics including timing, the importance of testing, and how to monitor the right kinds of performance data. Discover how to implement a data-driven creative approach that unlocks creative refreshes when they’re needed most—and keep producing powerful campaign results. RSVP now to save your seat.

What is a Creative Refresh – and Why Do I Need It?

A creative refresh is when a brand creates their ads, then updates them after they run for a while to ensure performance stays high, and ad fatigue stays low. 

The process starts when a brand creates an ad or multiple versions of an ad. These ads are then served to various targeted audiences to drive brand awareness, engagement, and conversions. By using the audience insights and real-time performance marketing metrics that CTV ads provide, advertisers can get the data they need to make creative decisions and optimize their ads—from adjusting visuals, updating audio, or implementing new messaging. 

After the creative refresh has been deployed, advertisers can then take that performance data to evaluate its effectiveness and continue updating—creating a continuous, data-driven feedback loop that creates compelling ads. This process ensures that marketers are always delivering the most relevant ads to their target audiences and combats ad fatigue by keeping the messaging and storytelling compelling and fresh.

How Creative Refresh Battles Ad Blindness and Ad Fatigue

Ad blindness, sometimes called banner blindness, is when a viewer selectively pays attention to a section of a website—often ignoring banner ads. Think about some of your most visited websites—you probably (either consciously or unconsciously) don’t look at most of the ads at the top or left-hand size unless they’re particularly compelling or applicable to your tastes. The same applies to social media video—because of the scrollable nature of the platform, it can be easy for a viewer to move right past the ad. Even if they do watch, they might quickly forget what they saw as the next piece of content or ad grabs their attention and they move on.

Meanwhile, ad fatigue is more common on CTV. Because viewers can’t scroll past an ad and can rarely skip one, they can’t move past it. The good news about this is that CTV advertising results in higher ad recall; the bad news is that high ad recall can lead to ad fatigue if the viewer watches it multiple times in a short period of time. The fact they remember your ad can be a double edged sword.

It’s hard enough in today’s competitive landscape to get the ideal customer’s attention, which is why brands can’t afford to bore or frustrate the viewer. Creative refreshes battle both ad fatigue and ad blindness by creating compelling, unique content that doesn’t annoy the viewer but engages them. If your brand is running a campaign over a longer period of time or has an audience that’s either niche or staying the same, creative refreshes are even more critical to combat both ad fatigue and ad blindness.

How Creative Refresh is Being Applied to Channels Beyond CTV

While brands are learning that creative refreshes keep CTV ad performance high, savvy advertisers are taking it one step further and employing their data-driven discoveries to ad channels beyond CTV. CTV’s ability to test creative, supply real-time data, and optimize ads in a quick and less costly manner means that it becomes the perfect laboratory for advertisers to experiment on making “the perfect ad” before deploying to less nimble, and more expensive, platforms like linear television.

CTV can also be used to cut down an existing ad into multiple variations that can be run across various paid and organic channels. This strategy saves advertisers time, money, and headaches. CTV’s data-driven approach to advertising means advertisers can be confident their creative refresh is successful before they deploy the same strategy to linear TV to drive similar performance.  

We’re Just Getting Started

With something as complex and important as creative refreshes, there is a lot more ground to cover. Join us for Data-Driven Refreshes: How to Stop Video and CTV Ad Fatigue to learn insider knowledge, next steps, and creative strategies for implementing a creative refresh at the right time. RSVP now.