What We’re Learning From Creative Testing on Meta
In a digital world where attention spans are shorter and competition is fierce, understanding what makes people stop scrolling and click on your ads means everything.
By experimenting with different creative formats, visuals, and messaging, we’ve made some discoveries about what performs well on Meta.
In this post, we’ll dive into the best approach to creative testing for Meta ad campaigns.
VIDEOS NEED CAPTIONS
On videos, text captions are essential to ensure your message is delivered loud and clear (even if the sound isn’t). But it’s not just about accessibility; captions enhance engagement and comprehension, making your ad stand out in a busy feed.
Why captions are non-negotiable:
SILENT BROWSING: Many users scroll in environments where sound is off, like public places or during downtime. Without captions, your video risks being skipped.
IMPROVED ACCESSIBILITY: Captions make your content inclusive for viewers with hearing impairments or those who prefer to read along.
REINFORCED MESSAGING: Bold, well-timed captions emphasise key points, ensuring your message sticks even if viewers aren’t fully focused.
BOOSTED WATCH TIMES: Captions can hook users into the story, encouraging them to stick around longer and engage with your content.
To make the most of captions, keep them concise, on-brand, and synced with the visuals. You don’t need to translate word for word, but hit all the key talking points you’d want an audience to receive. Consider using a bold font and contrasting colours to ensure readability across all devices.
LOW-FI HITS DIFFERENT
Low-fi creative is outperforming polished, professional alternatives because it doesn’t immediately feel like advertising. By mimicking the look and feel of organic content, a more ‘unfiltered’ approach blends naturally into social feeds.
Low-fi doesn’t mean low quality. It’s about prioritising the idea, message and authenticity over production value.
Key features of a low-fi ad:
DIRECT MESSAGING: Get to the point quickly. Strong low-fi ads focus on a clear hook, benefit or solution without overcomplicating things. The aim is to balance personality and approachability with purposeful, practical messaging. No fluff, just what the audience needs.
DIY AESTHETIC: Think iPhone footage, natural lighting, screenshots of customer reviews, talking-to-camera videos and simple text-led creative. Imperfect production can make an ad feel more relatable and trustworthy, and less like it’s just trying to sell you something.
EASY TO TEST: Because low-fi creative is faster and more cost-effective to produce, we can test more hooks, messages and formats, learn what your audience responds to and create new variations around the winners.
Ultimately, low-fi works because it looks at home in the feed. And in a sea of highly curated content, sometimes the simplest ad is the one that gets noticed.
USE META’S AI CREATIVE OPTIMISATIONS WITH CAUTION — OR NOT AT ALL
Meta is really pushing its automated creative enhancement features with Advantage+ Creative, even going as far as to automatically apply them so you have to manually opt out. This might be controversial: but we switch every enhancement off, always.
Why? Meta’s AI enhancement feature changes how your ads look without your approval. It might add text, music, and even generate entirely new variations of your creative that look noticeably different from the original — such as superimposing elements into (or out of) images.
The problem is that it at this stage in its development, Advantage+ creative is simply not smart enough yet to produce quality ads that are within your brand guidelines. It doesn’t take into consideration your brand fonts, colours, or general identity at all when making its “enhancements”. The result is ads that are way off-brand.
Often, they’re also riddled with mistakes. We’ve had Meta add music on top of videos that already have audio. It’s photoshopped models into new backgrounds when the original photo was part of a multi-thousand dollar campaign shoot. It’s added caption overlays to photos that make no sense, in fonts we’ve never seen before.
In theory, this tool is designed to help ads perform better. In practice, it enables Meta to make bad creative decisions on your behalf, serving ads that haven’t been reviewed and signed off by the client. Not on our watch.
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