Your Ad Will Start to Get Stale in Just Five Days. Then What?

4 Min Read

Ads, like anything else you consume, have a shelf life—and it’s not long. Even the best, most entertaining advertisement starts to wear thin for audiences after a long enough time—and if you’re not refreshing your creative, you risk either negative campaign performance, wasting media budget, or even alienating your audience.  But what makes for an effective creative refresh, and is it difficult to undergo one?

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.

CTV Popularity Shortens Ad Shelf Life

People are watching more CTV content than ever before—213.7 million viewers a month, watching an average of 80 minutes a day. At the same time, ad-supported streaming channels are on the rise: a 2021 TiVO study found that 79% of viewers prefer a free ad-supported channel over another paid subscription without commercials. That means today’s audience sees a lot of ads.

And that influx of ads means that creative doesn’t stay fresh for long. A QuickFrame by MNTN study found that video ad completion rates max out at five days; after that mark, delivery decreases by 5% day-over-day. Worse, the ramifications continue from there:

By day 8:

• 64% of users only watch 25% of a video
• Only 1.5% will complete an entire ad

By day 14:

• Viewership declines by a rate of 3% every day
• Sales and conversions drop exponentially
• Average CPA jumps to 18%

Warning Signs of Creative Fatigue on CTV

With so many different media outlets and ads competing for attention, brands face an uphill battle getting noticed. That’s what makes creative fatigue—when a viewer either gets sick of seeing the same ad or learns to ignore it—so dangerous. On Connected TV, viewers can’t scroll past an ad and can rarely bypass it, which makes creative fatigue a very problematic issue for brands. Creative fatigue can result in everything from negative campaign performance to wasted media budget—or even cause an audience to turn on a brand. Think about an ad you can’t stand: after you saw it multiple times, did it make you want to buy from the brand?

Thankfully, while the ad delivery method of CTV can lead to creative fatigue quickly, it also features the tools to combat it—real-time performance metrics. By letting performance measurement be the guide, brands can watch out for the tell-tale warning signs of creative fatigue, including downward performance trends and missing performance goals. Completion rates are another good indicator of creative fatigue—since CTV advertising can’t be skipped, an ad not being served in full means a viewer took the extraordinary step of backing out of their program to avoid your ad. There is perhaps no greater red flag for creative fatigue than people choosing to inconvenience themselves over being subjected to your ads.

By taking performance metrics to determine when a creative refresh is needed, then measuring the performance of that new creative, brands can create an endless data-driven feedback loop to ensure their ads are always engaging and enticing for their target audience.

Best Times to Refresh Creative

While performance metrics play a crucial role in refreshing evergreen campaigns, your brand can also stay one step ahead by planning in advance for when creative will need to be refreshed. A great example of these kinds of times is the holiday season. Thanks to a few key factors (e.g., colder weather driving people indoors, more time spent with family, timely festive content launching on streaming platforms) the holiday season always drives up CTV viewership.

With that increase in viewership comes more exposure to ads—and a higher risk of ad fatigue. It’s a high-risk/high reward situation for brands, many of whom can benefit from the increased exposure but aren’t prepared to roll out fresh creative to keep fatigue from setting in. By planning ahead and having a library of creative to pull from, your brand can avoid creative fatigue before it even starts—keeping a larger-than-usual audience engaged and driving those crucial Q4 conversions.

We’re Just Scratching the Surface

Join us for Data-Driven Refreshes: How to Stop Video and CTV Ad Fatigue to learn even more, including best practices for creative refreshes, how to spot ad fatigue, and what tools you should use. RSVP now.