SESSION NOTES #004. There's no formula for creative performance. There's just a feedback process.

Back when I was leading social strategy at Sparro, I started pushing creative workshops with clients. Insights on what was working, ideas on what to try next, competitor examples - the works. Then something unexpected happened…

Absolutely nothing.

I'd check back a few months later. Similar creatives. Similar performance. Why?

The workshops failed to drive change because the conversations never left the room. Strong insights, good ideas - but no clear process to guarantee follow-through.

In last week's issue, I mentioned polish doesn't equal performance. So what does?

I wish I could say there's a neat little formula for creative success. There isn't.

There is however a process that high-performing social ad teams follow - and it requires complete collaboration between the people making the ads and the people running them.

Fix the process, fix the creative. Here's what the ideal feedback loop looks like:

Run ads → identify what works → generate new ideas → feed both back to the Creative Team → Creative Team produce new insight-led ads → repeat forever.

It's so simple I almost didn't want to type it out. But simple doesn't mean easy.

Here's the usual break points in the loop and how to fix it:

The right person isn't in the room. Your feedback goes to the DMM, who passes it to the content producer or graphic designer. On the way there it gets diluted, twisted, or forgotten. Get the content producer and graphic designer into the monthly meetings where feedback can be given directly and questions can be asked.

The media buyer or agency is giving bad feedback, or none at all. Work with them on what good feedback actually looks like (see: next section).

The business structure doesn't allow for feedback to be actioned. The creative team sits far from digital, has full control of output, and has no desire to take commercial feedback. Go up the chain and ask for more collaboration between teams. If the answer is still no, everyone needs to understand that the ads will never reach their full potential.

All creative conversations can be reduced to these 3 buckets:

Not all feedback is created equal. Here are three examples, rated.

"We need more video to diversify our assets."

“We need more BTS videos of sweaters as they perform well on CTR.”

“Our v neck sweater content is driving the highest CTRs right now. Based on what we’ve seen work, we need more studio BTS content - single outfit, mix of mid-length and close-up shots so the product details can be showcased”

Because of data privacy I obviously can’t show you the REAL REPORT but here is an AI tweaked version of it. The images are a little uncanny valley and the numbers don’t make sense but hopefully you can still appreciate its superpowers:

I use this monthly and quarterly to build actionable insights around what consistently works and what doesn’t.

Running your data through an LLM like Claude can help drive more insight by giving estimated weightings on how a variable impacts performance. It can also tell you the best and worst at each level, which can help steer future creative executions and conversations.

My hot tip is to label the ad names up with these variables rather than to focus on visual analysis alone, AI can still get it wrong and in some cases couldn’t tell the difference between a model sitting and standing.

There isn’t an equation to creative performance but there is a process to help drive it.

If the person running your Meta ads isn’t influencing the creative execution (bad insights or creative is siloed) then I’m not at all sorry to say you shouldn’t be paying them so much. Train up someone in your in-house social team to load ads instead. Don’t pay for strategy you’re not getting or can’t use.

Disagree? Hit reply and tell me the creative for formula that I’ve been missing.

Cheers,

Sarah Arvela Webb

_{Brought to you by what got cut from last week’s issue.}