The creative, which is what advertising calls the image or the video of an ad along with its text, has about three seconds to make someone stop scrolling. What decides those three seconds is not good taste but a handful of fairly concrete things that can be learnt.

What makes it work:

• Talk about the problem, not the product. Nobody cares that your equipment has twenty functions; they care about stopping the toothache on Tuesday. Write what the person gets, not what you sell.
• Give a reason to act today. An offer with a date, limited places or a seasonal campaign push people to do something now rather than in a month, which in practice means never.
• Make it clear at a glance. Little text, good contrast, one single idea. If the image has to be deciphered, you have already lost.

The enemy: creative fatigue. It is what happens when the same people have seen your ad too many times. It works well at first, Meta shows it more because of that, and from showing it so much the audience gets tired and stops reacting. From then on, getting a customer costs you more every day.

The signal that gives it away is frequency, which is the average number of times each person has seen your ad. When it rises steadily while the share of people clicking falls, the ad is spent and it is time to change it (see «When an ad has burnt out and what to do»).

What you can do with Markettai. The creative generator gives you several versions of the same concept in minutes (see «Creatives»), and that is your first line of defence: having a replacement ready before you need it. On top of that, BOOST, the automatic system that watches your campaigns, creates new versions and runs them alongside the original when it detects that it is performing worse (see «What the system does while you sleep»).