Your Creative Is the Bottleneck (Not Your Ad Spend)

So, you doubled your budget and nothing changed?

The truth is, it’s not your media buying. It’s your creative.

At Fluency Firm, using our proprietary CreativeIQ tool, we analyze thousands of ads each month across DTC brands. 80% of the time, the issue isn’t targeting or budget allocation. It’s creative fatigue.

The audience is bored. The hook is weak. The message doesn’t resonate.

Creative fatigue kills 🔪 performance faster than any algorithm tweak can fix.
Even the best media buyers can’t scale bad ads.

It seems like creative is often the last thing brands prioritize, even though it’s the first thing customers see.

One of my favorite examples from last month - an iPhone-shot UGC ad in someone’s car that outperformed a beautifully produced studio video by 300%.

It wasn’t prettier, but it was real.

Authenticity, relatability, and thumb-stopping storytelling beats polished studio content almost every time.

If you’re hitting a wall, it’s probably not your spend… it’s your story.