Fresh Needs a Reason | TMG editorial cover

Being tired of looking at an ad is different from knowing the audience needs a new one.

I. The recommendation that sounds responsible

I suggested refreshing an ad that a client felt was working well. A different color. A variation on the same idea. Nothing dramatic.

The client pushed back. Why change something that was doing what we wanted?

Fair question. I was thinking about getting ahead of fatigue. They were thinking about protecting something useful. Neither of us needed to be wrong for the recommendation to need more work.

But I had skipped a step. I'd gone from a concern about what might happen to a recommendation to make something new. Those aren't the same thing, even if the new version would look great in a presentation.

That's an easy move to make in this business because fresh sounds responsible. We're paying attention. We're improving things. Nobody wants an agency that just leaves the account alone.

Still... activity is a pretty convenient way to demonstrate attention when the harder thing is explaining exactly what needs attention.

II. We see it more than they do

I can get tired of a piece of creative because I've spent too much time making it.

I've seen the first version and the revision. I've looked at the crop that didn't work. By the time an ad is approved, it can feel familiar enough that I'm already imagining its replacement.

That familiarity doesn't tell me what somebody encountering it for the first time will think.

It also doesn't prove that people who've seen it before are still responding. The point isn't to give an old ad permanent immunity. It's to stop treating my own boredom as audience research.

The same problem shows up with websites. I can know a page so well that a sentence feels painfully obvious. For a customer, that sentence might be the first clear explanation they've found all afternoon. Removing it because we're tired of reading it would be a strange definition of improvement.

I have to separate being close enough to the work to notice a problem from being so close that I start creating one.

III. Give the variation a job

The useful turn in that conversation came from the client. Instead of simply replacing the ad, could a different version make sense for somebody who'd already encountered the first one?

That changed the assignment.

Now the variation had a reason to exist beyond looking different. It could be a follow-up. The original could still do its job while we figured out whether the next version had something useful to add.

We discussed that direction. I'm not going to turn a proposed test into a victory story. The discussion itself is what stuck with me because it made the recommendation more precise.

A different color might still be part of the execution. But a color change isn't an explanation of the role the ad should play.

If I ask for a follow-up, I have to think about what the first ad left unanswered. If I ask for a replacement, I have to explain why the first ad should lose its place. Those lead to different work. Calling both of them a refresh hides the decision we're actually making.

IV. The cost isn't only production

Making another version takes time, sure. But the larger cost can be losing track of what we learned from the original.

Suppose, as an example, we change the offer at the same time we change the visual. Then we move the ad into a different audience. If it performs differently, we have a lot of explanations available and very little reason to favor one.

We might have made something better. We also might have made it harder to understand what happened.

That's a cost I have to account for before putting TMG's name on the recommendation. More options aren't automatically more learning. Sometimes a smaller change gives us a much more useful answer.

I still like making things. I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy seeing a new direction come together. But that makes this my responsibility. The work can't need changing just because we're good at changing it.

There are plenty of reasons to replace an ad. An offer ends. Something in it becomes inaccurate. Evidence suggests the audience has stopped responding. We shouldn't sit on our hands when the reason is there.

When the reason is mostly that we've been looking at it for a while, though, I think the client deserves a better conversation before we open the design file.