The creative fatigue checklist we run before touching budgets

CPA up 20% week over week. The instinct is to check bids, audiences, budgets. Nine times out of ten, the first thing to check is how long the winning creative has been running — and what percentage of spend it carries.

Our checklist: (1) Spend concentration — if one ad carries over 40% of spend, you're one fatigue cycle away from a bad month. (2) Frequency on prospecting — above 2.5 with flat CTR, the well is dry. (3) Hook staleness — if the same opening 1.5 seconds has run for eight weeks, the audience has memorized it. (4) Angle coverage — how many distinct angles are live, not just variants of one. (5) Winner pipeline — how many new candidates are in testing right now.

If any of those light up, the fix is production, not optimization. Bidding strategies can't refresh a stale hook; they can only spend money slower while it decays.

The agencies that scale reliably aren't better at optimization. They're better at feeding the machine.