By Sam Boardman, Director, Vonnimedia
It’s undeniable that social has become the number-one flywheel for brands to build relevance in 2026.
At the same time, brands keep throwing money into Meta’s algorithm like an addicted gambler playing the pokie machine, hoping to hit the “jackpot” by guessing what works with their paid social ads. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Paid social is the first time in the history of advertising where we can measure the performance of creative, live.
It’s also the first time in history that (if you organise yourself well enough) you can do something about it, potentially saving you millions a year in advertising or getting millions more in value from your investment.
Also, customers prefer good ads – so give them that.
We’ve built an approach that works for our clients that would be rude not to share, so you can take the guesswork out of the content creation process for your ads. We call it our ‘creative performance framework’.
Here’s how it works.
Now that we can measure creative performance, we believe (and have achieved with our clients) that every good ad can be broken down into “why” it’s successful. If you know “why” an ad is successful, with finite creative resourcing, it makes sense to spend more time making ads that are based on previous successful ads versus the ads that you know weren’t a success.
Makes sense, right?
Ok, so how do you do it. You need three things:
• A strategic framework that we can organise and allocate resourcing
• A way to measure this framework (the variables used to analyse your ad creatives)
• Guidelines and guardrails to continue to spark creativity and maintain relevance.
The creative performance framework provides guidelines for strategists and content production teams to align their resourcing and execution capabilities to meet the requirements for creating great ads.
Whilst there’s no exact science to content creation, we’ve found the 60/30/10 structure to be the most effective for creating something that delivers incremental improvements day in, day out, whilst being simple enough to communicate across the teams involved.
The 60/30/10 reflects the percentage of ads created in each of the categories:
• 60%: Tweaking of top performing ads – this typically involves remaking the same ad for a different demographic, changing out the talent or adjusting a hook. The message is consistent, the creative looks different.
• 30%: are re-shoots of winning messages (unique selling propositions, collation and re-edits of existing content) in fresh ways – changing the script, the location, the talent but keeping the core underlying message. This helps push beyond just a remake of the same ad.
• 10%: completely new ads. We know the next best ad could come from a great concept, so to keep the ad account fresh and ideas rolling, we dedicated 10% of content creation to test a completely new concept.
Every creative is made up of variables that influence buyer decisions. From the message to the setting, the placement, the hook, the CTA – all things that influence the behaviour of customers when they consume an ad.
Now you know the framework, it’s all about execution. This is where brands fall over, waiting too long to iterate on their content before blasting through hundreds of thousands of dollars in media spend on inefficient creative.
The brands we see doing this well are introducing new content using this model multiple times a week, constantly hunting for the next ad to deliver a step change in their business.
If this is new to you, aim for monthly, with the goal of implementing the framework fortnightly by six months from now, then weekly.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Wow, it’s going to cost me a fortune in studio time, expensive production, location shoots – you name it,” you’ve got the traditional content creation model wrong. Take fashion lifestyle Comfrt for example – they execute 15,000 creatives with a marketing team of four people.
You need to get creative and leverage your customers, creators, and editors to utilise the mountain of content in your drives to create consistent, fresh content.
Cut losers quickly, scale winners quickly
The importance of this process is continuous improvement. You should know very quickly, with the right ad testing strategy, whether the ad will perform or not. Ensure you have a clear testing framework to measure performance; don’t leave this to gut feel.
We’ve moved past the point where “creative” and “data” are two different departments. In the modern social flywheel, they are the same thing.
The brands that thrive in the second half of this decade will be those that realise great ads aren’t found in a vacuum – they are created through ruthless experimentation and taking risks.