NORTHLINE
Outrunning creative fatigue at scale
A high-volume e-commerce advertiser in Southern Europe and LatAm losing performance faster than it could produce creative.
Challenge
Every winning creative decayed within two to three weeks, and production could not keep pace. Performance became a cycle of panic launches followed by budget cuts.
Strategy
We rebuilt production as a system: batch cadence tied to observed fatigue curves, a variant taxonomy so decay could be attributed to a specific element, and an archive so dead ideas were never repurchased.
Execution
Continuous UGC and motion production, hook and proof variation at volume, market-level localisation, and a testing block sized to guarantee a validated replacement before the incumbent decayed.
Result
Tracked as ROAS stability across the quarter, creative half-life by concept and share of spend on validated creative.
Learnings
Fatigue was concentrated in hooks, not offers. Replacing the first three seconds recovered most of the performance at a fraction of full production cost.