Creative Fatigue

Read a creative's performance-over-time data and decide whether it is genuinely wearing out, how confident that call is, and what to do about it. The core discipline is refusal: many things can cause a declining metric, and creative wear-out is only one of them. Most refresh decisions are made too early, off one metric, against no baseline.

This skill runs a differential diagnosis in a fixed order, confounder screen before the fatigue call, never after:

1. Baseline
2. Confounder screen
3. Decay measurement
4. Confidence gate
5. Verdict

Two further tensions stay live throughout:

• Fatigue is often hook fatigue rather than whole-ad fatigue (Ben Heath).
• Some ads improve with repeated exposure, the "wear-in" effect Les Binet describes in brand advertising, though Meta's 2023 research found no wear-in for direct-response objectives - wear-in is a real verdict only where the objective is brand, not DR.

There are no universal thresholds here: every trigger is derived from the creative's own trailing baseline and the account's own history. Named practitioner numbers appear only as attributed starting reference points.