10 tips for creative that wins in 2025

It’s a billion-dollar question. Maybe a trillion-dollar question, since that’s what the ad market will apparently hit in 2025: how do you win with creative? We recently gathered 5 experts to talk about creative that wins … and what’s going to be hot in 2025.

We talked about creative strategies that break through the noise in September. In November, we moved on to creative formats that win. That means about formats & placements, better ways to create, test, measure, and optimize your creative, plus insights into holiday season creative. And we even took out our crystal ball and predicted some of the big trends for 2025.

The expert panelists:

• Philip Buerger, Cofounder, TubeScience
• Sol Panella, Art Director, Appvertiser
• Emmanuel Bergman, Creative Studio Manager, Unity 
• Deanna Nguyen Ulrich, Senior Manager, Creative Strategy, Liftoff
• Saadi Muslu, VP Marketing @ Singular 

Watch the whole webinar on-demand right here, and keep scrolling for just a few of the highlights: 10 tips for creative that wins in 2025.

10 tips for creative success in 2025

What’s working? What’s going to work in the coming year?

Here’s some of the best insight from people who build, measure, and analyze creative every single day.

1. Don’t build ads, build portfolios

Unless you get super lucky with a unicorn creative that just goes complete bananas, 1 ad here or there isn’t going to make or break your growth strategy.

Rather, think about groups of ads in multiple formats and categories.

“When we think about formats, we actually think mostly in terms of ad portfolios, not just individual ads,” says Philip Buerger, Cofounder of TubeScience. “It’s because we are thinking about how we can increase auction liquidity. And you do this by having a portfolio that can participate and win in as many relevant auctions as possible.”

You need a broad mix of ads to compete in many auctions, not just the ones everything thinks about.

 

 

In other words, you can’t just go UGC and static: you’ll miss out on hitting audiences earlier in the consideration stage. As 1 marketer told me: you can’t just always be picking apples. Sometimes you actually need to plant a few trees.

2. Vary the length of your videos

Creative that wins isn’t the same across the board. In non-gaming, 15-second videos used to be standard, but now even 6-second UGC videos are working. In gaming, however, longer often works better says Appvertiser’s Sol Panella.

Liftoff’s Deanna Nguyen Ulrich agrees:

“In non-gaming we’re seeing actually a shorter form video still performing quite well. We’ll see if that trend changes. But again, it depends on the sub-vertical of those apps. So with social, we’re seeing a bit of a longer video performing well.”

Something that’s also doing well: sort of a choose-your-own-adventure style of ads with both a video and a playable, and users can choose to skip the video to play the playable, Ulrich says.

3. Tiktok and reels: 2 video styles that are killing it

Video now represents more than 60% of time spent on Facebook and Instagram, says Buerger. And of course it’s almost 100% of time spent on Tiktok.

So what’s working?

Character-led stories and useful information.

“We’ve seen particularly two concepts or strategies working really well, which are character-led stories, which are great formats because they’re easy to integrate problem/solution/sales formulas in it in a very authentic way, while you still can create emotional connection with the character and make it entertaining while still having a selling ad,” he says.

“And the other part is useful information. And that makes sense because if you think of making concepts for a specific placement platform, you need to understand why people come to that, what they’re looking for. And people come to TikTok or Reels because they want to get either entertainment or they want to find or learn something new.”

4. Don’t forget good old-fashioned banners!

In our rush for video ads and rewarded ads and playable ads, sometimes we forget good old-fashioned banner ads. 

And yet they can be tremendously successful.

On Google, horizontal banners are actually among the top performers, says Panella.

They have other uses too. As Marcus Burke explained on the Growth Masterminds podcast recently, static ads such as banners can actually be a very strong component of your retargeting strategy, even when technically you can’t retarget because you don’t have an IDFA.

Especially, he says, when you tailor the ad creative to different stages of the customer/player/user journey.

5. Go seasonal, but go seasonal light

Yep, it’s the holiday season in a lot of places around the planet. Yes, you should consider adding some seasonal flavor to your ads and maybe even your App Store or Google Play listing, or app icon.

But don’t go overboard in your search for creative that wins.

 

 

“With the holiday season upon us I would definitely say we try to be as authentic to the core evergreen brand as possible … [your] evergreen narrative but still incorporating some seasonal elements,” says Ulrich. “So not to be too overbearing with your seasonal visuals … and make sure whatever you’re doing is true to your core brand storytelling.”

6. Sometimes, be late … intentionally

I’ve seen Super Bowl creative come out the week after the big game, and thought it was an error that reflected poorly on the marketers behind a certain brand.

Wrong!

Sometimes, being late is more performant than being on time.

“Holiday creatives definitely perform really well,” says Unity’s Emmanuel Bergman. “And the interesting thing is actually for us, we see that they continue over performing better than other creatives months later … I even saw [holiday] creatives still outperforming other creatives in April!”

That might be an extreme example, but the reality is that people notice the incongruous. 

Having your ad blend in with everything else falls right into our tendency towards adblindness, so standing out, being unusual, even if it’s for a nominally wrong reason, could be a very good thing indeed.

7. Don’t fall into the trap of just demanding attention

I get it: if you don’t get attention, you can’t convert. You need that first bit of attention in order to earn the right to tell your story and get a shot at converting to a click, then an install, and finally a profitable, engaged user.

But just going to attention is a long-term losing strategy.

“It’s not all about just capturing attention in your openers,” says Buerger. “If you’re only focused on attention grabbing in your openers it can very easily feel like a bait and switch in the ad. And so you will end up making an ad that might get people to watch, but not really to buy.”

In other words, creative that wins is creative that drives hard ROI, not just clicks.

 

 

Shock-value creative might get you upper funnel high-fives, but lower funnel uh ohs.

Which, of course, is tremendously uncool.

8. Creative that wins is localized creative

You can’t just plaster Main Street America everywhere. And you can’t just deliver the same message to teens as you do to boomers. 

Creative needs to be localized and targeted to specific audiences and subcultures.

“It’s a rule of thumb that ads should feel native and should feel local,” says Singular’s Saadi Muslu. “That’s not just the language of the country, but also lingo and slang, which really varies based on countries and even maybe city-based.”

Otherwise, it just sounds like this:

 

 

And that’s not likely to be performant. (Although, as per holiday creatives in April, you might want to try even something like that and pass it off as irony. Hey, you never know!)

9. Calculate your cost of testing

If you make a million creatives, your cost of testing is likely to skyrocket. Yes, AI can help you make a thousand variations of this 1 image, but do you need a thousand? Can you afford to test a thousand?

The answer is a solid maybe, and it depends on your cost of waste.

“So one thing that we are trying to educate our clients into is not only looking at a fixed percentage [of budget for testing], but actually looking at what we call cost of waste,” says Buerger. “So basically, measure how inefficient your tests are, how much money you are wasting in terms of inefficiency, in terms of your CAC is higher on the test than your account average by test.”

“So it could be that your cost of waste is very low, and as a result, you could not only spend 30%, you could spend 50% or 80% of your budget. Because you don’t really pay for it in terms of inefficiency.”

That’s smart.

But it could also be that your cost of testing, or of waste, is high, because you’re just throwing more brown stuff against the wall to see what sticks. That’s a high-risk strategy at scale, because testing becomes so much less efficient and so much more costly, both in actual cost of ad placements but also opportunity cost versus better ads.

So calculate your cost of testing in order to make not just creative that wins, but a creative strategy that wins.

10. Use AI to make/monitor/improve creative that wins

If you don’t know what’s in your images and videos, it’s hard to know what themes, icons, colors, or messages perform. So you have to tag all your creative and employ proper data governance to ensure that all your money and time spent optimizing creative doesn’t go to waste.

Or you could let AI carry some of the load.

“A Singular product that we’re now in beta with is automatically tagging your ads based on different languages,” says Muslu. “When you have that automation, you can actually measure the impact of localized ads versus non-localized ads and see the additional return that you’re making for the investment.”

Other uses of AI, says Ulrich, include managing all the administration of creative creation and testing, managing localization, translations, captions, and voiceovers, and exploration of new concepts.

So much more in the full webinar

This is just a taste of the insight from the full webinar. There’s a ton more insight and information that will help you win with creative in 2025.

Watch the whole webinar on-demand right here.