Why Creative Volume Is Killing Your Ad Performance (And What to Do Instead)

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There's this massive push right now for more creative and cheaper creative. Everyone's talking about volume like it's the holy grail of advertising success.

But here's the thing.

We're completely missing the point.

Think about basketball for a second.

If you spend 1,000 hours practicing your shot incorrectly, you don't get better at making baskets. You just get really, really good at missing them.

The idea that "practice makes perfect" is fundamentally flawed because you could be practicing something wrong and actually reinforcing bad habits.

The same thing is happening with your ads.

The Cop-Out Problem

There's this convenient cop-out happening in advertising right now. When ads don't work, instead of acknowledging that the creative might just be bad, teams hide behind the "we need more ads" excuse. "Oh, this didn't work? We just need to test more variations."

This mentality is dangerous because it's incentivizing thoughtless ad creation instead of brand-forward advertising. And I'm not talking about style guides with specific colors and fonts. I'm talking about how you want to present yourself as a brand. What you want to be known for.

Goodo Studios does make ads that do not work.

We have to own that. And we do.

It is not enough to chalk it up to “not enough volume.”

If you're just hacking your way through thousands of iterations without pausing to think strategically, you're creating thousands of ads that don't move the needle.

What’s worse is if you're not learning anything from the process.

The Real Driver: Creative Diversity

Here's what people don't understand: when you see an ad account with thousands of successful ads, it's not because they have a thousand of the same ad. It's because they have diversity of content.

Different messages.

Different formats.

Different ways of communicating with different types of people.

Nobody falls in love with brands because they have thousands of ads.

They fall in love because that brand has a point of view.

The brands you admire aren't just pumping out volume. They're creating diverse content across different mediums and channels with genuine variety of ideas. The volume is a second-order effect of pursuing diversity, not the primary goal.

When teams focus solely on volume, they're trying to correlate numbers to success without looking at what's actually driving performance: strategy and diversity.

How to Build Real Creative Diversity

Here's your action plan to escape the volume trap:

1. Audit Your Current Account

Open your Facebook Ads Library right now.

Scroll through your recent ads. What do you see?

If everything looks similar, you've found your problem.

What style of content do you have? What content do you not have in your account?

2. Reimagine Your Top Performers

Take your top 10 performing ads and ask: "How can we recreate these in completely different ways?"

You already know the messaging works, now make it look and feel different.

This alone could give you 10+ new ad concepts that are "same but different."

3. Explore Different Formats

Think beyond your usual approach:

• Could your top performer work as a podcast-style ad?

• What about a high-end brand shoot version?

• How would this look as an organic social style video?

• Is there a trending format you could adapt?

Take 4-5 different styles and apply them to your top 10 performers. Suddenly you have 50 strategic ad briefs instead of 50 random concepts.

4. Think Beyond the Obvious

The first three steps are there to help you bridge the gap of not feeling creative.

Everyone feels stuck when starting to do something new in the ad account.

But once you do this exercise, you probably will have a lot of other ideas that you could start working on and really create amazing content.

The Bottom Line

Creative diversity and volume are connected, but they're not isolated metrics. When you focus on diversity first, you naturally get the volume you need. But volume without strategy is just noise.

The brands that scale successfully aren't counting ads.

They're counting the different ways they can authentically connect with their audience.

Stop hiding behind volume metrics.

Start building a brand people actually want to pay attention to.

I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you want me to address anything in the future for you. Just reply and I can write about it.

Make sure to check out the podcast.

Until then, keep creating!

Matthew Gattozzi

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