The 10 Step Creative Audit Framework
Welcome back, Modern Marketers.
Today we’re talking about creative variety.
Which is kind of like talking about “team culture” or “healthy boundaries” or “just a quick Slack”—things we all pretend to understand until someone makes us define them in a meeting, and then we just start making up nouns and hoping no one notices.
We say we want creative variety. We ask for it. Budget for it. Blame its absence when the numbers fall apart.
But ask a room full of marketers what it actually means, and you’ll get five definitions, two blank stares, and one passive-aggressive Miro board.
And then we smile politely when we approve a fresh batch of Meta ads where the only real difference is that the model now has facial hair.
Mission accomplished.
Because most teams don’t build for variety. They build for plausible deniability.
They swap a color. Change the headline. Shave a few seconds off the end frame. And in fairness, that kind of difference feels creative. It feels testable. It feels safe.
But it’s got very little to do with how people actually encounter your ad.
Because people don’t live in vacuums. They live in moments.
A woman on her lunch break is not the same woman 6 hours later scrolling half-awake in bed. One version of her is tired. One is overstimulated. One has sound on. One doesn’t. One is ready to buy something. One wants to be left alone.
The algorithm sees all of this. The creative usually doesn’t.
This is what I mean by creative variety. Not surface-level edits. Functional range.
Uniformity isn’t brand safety. It’s creative paralysis. And I'm not asking you to be chaotic, I'm asking you to be expansive.
Give static. Give motion. Give 6-second bursts and 60-second stories. Give a product feature carousel and a totally silent reminder that our brand exists.
Because System 1 and System 2 aren’t just cognitive models from Daniel Kahneman. They’re how Meta decides what ad to serve, and when. If we want to play in that arena, we need tools for both attention spans.
We fear creative variety not because it’s ineffective, but because it’s revealing.
It exposes the limitations of our brief. The gaps in our brand story. The stubbornness of our internal politics.
But if you want breakthrough performance, you need more doors for people to walk through.
Some of those doors are 6 seconds wide. Some play without sound. Some just remind you the brand exists. Some ask you to feel something. Others ask nothing at all.
When clients bristle at our requests for creative variety, it’s usually for one of three reasons:
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They assume we just want to “throw spaghetti at the wall.”
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They’re afraid we’ll violate brand guidelines.
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They think creative variety means “slightly different versions of the same thing."
But that’s not what this is. You’re not just making “different” ads—you’re building a creative stack that knows how to show up differently depending on the moment. Because moments shift. People shift.
And if everything in your library feels like it came out of the same Tuesday morning brainstorm, the algorithm has nowhere to go. And neither does the person seeing it.
We built a Creative Audit Framework for Meta Ads. It’s how we figure out when your creative stack is full of assets but empty of options.
Just hit reply to this email and I'll send it straight to you!
See you on the other side,
Isaac Rudansky
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