Glossary · Marketing Strategy
Creative Fatigue
also: ad fatigue · entropy-based creative decay
Definition
Creative fatigue is the decay of advertising performance as the same creative is repeatedly shown to the same audience. Entropy-based detection metrics identify the inflection point earlier than CTR decline, typically 40-60% through the CTR curve, enabling proactive rotation before wasted spend accumulates.
Creative ad performance follows a predictable decay: the first impressions generate outsized response, the hundredth impression generates minimal response. Classical monitoring uses CTR or conversion-rate decline, both lagging. Entropy-based detection treats the audience-creative matching as a distribution and flags fatigue when the distribution's entropy drops, fewer audiences are responding. This signal precedes performance collapse by 2-4 weeks, enabling proactive creative rotation.
Essays on this concept
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- Marketing Engineering
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