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Why Creative Diversification Is The Smartest Efficiency Play When Budgets are Flat

Budgets flatlining but targets growing? You're not alone. Here's a 4-step performance-boosting play to convince finance to unfreeze marketing dollars.

AuthorAuthor

Dan Moran & Sam Makalou
May 16, 2025

Welcome back to Funnel Vision, the weekly newsletter that puts performance creative & growth marketing in focus. Brought to you by the crew at Ready Set.

Every time you shuffle a standard 52-card deck, you’ve created a combination that has almost certainly never existed before in the history of the universe. There are 8 × 10⁶⁷ different possible orderings, about 10⁴⁴ times more than the roughly 10²⁴ stars in the observable universe.

Here’s what’s inside today’s edition:

  • Why creative diversity could be the key to more budget

  • How to make the case for more creative investment

  • The latest industry news you may have missed

Reading time: 4 minutes

CREATIVE STRATEGY

Why Creative Diversification Is The Smartest Efficiency Play When Budgets are Flat

Gartner just handed marketers a reality check.

Budgets are stuck at 7.7% of company revenue for the second year running. What’s more, 59% of the 402 CMOs surveyed said that number is insufficient to hit targets.

There’s a couple reasons why it feels tighter every quarter:

  • Paid media still eats 30.6% of the budget

  • Rising CPMs make every click more expensive

  • Macroeconomic jitters keep finance on lockdown

But jumpstarting flatlined marketing budgets will be a function of showing proof over promises.

One of the smartest efficiency unlocks has to do with your creative—specifically, creative variety. And we’ve got the numbers to prove it.

Here’s why creative diversification matters

  • Campaigns with multiple concepts show 46% lower CPA compared to campaigns with just one.

  • Performance deteriorates after 30–45 days, but frequent creative refreshes mitigates decline.

  • Creative diversification boosts incremental reach by 9%; same spend, more eyeballs.

Now these are the kind of hard numbers marketers need to convince tight-fisted CFOs to greenlight greater creative investment.

So let’s keep going.

How to make the case for more creative investment

Here’s the playbook for making a few smart tweaks to your creative strategy that’ll boost performance, impress finance, and unlock more budget.

1. Quantify the baseline

  • Pull the last 90 days of CPA, ROAS, and platform spend. 

  • Count the number of unique creative concepts.

  • Generate your Creative Diversity Score and Creative Map to benchmark current state and turn “creative diversity” into CFO-grade metrics.

2. Model the upside (a hypothetical)

  • Assume spend remains flat. Your $1M quarterly media budget with a $50 blended CPA gets you 20k conversions.

  • While diversifying creative can net 46% CPA reductions, let’s assume a safer 20% cut: $50 – 20% = $40 CPA → 25k conversions for the same $1M spend

  • Factor the 9% incremental reach unlock → 27,250 conversions

  • At $30 gross profit per conversion, that’s $217.5k in incremental margin this quarter

That’s a six-figure upside without increasing spend.

3. Position the investment

(Hypothetical numbers based on industry standards.)

  • 30 new ads across three formats: $60k

  • Post-production remix pool: $10k

  • UGC creator roster (8 individuals): $12k

  • 10% contingency buffer: $8k

  • Creative Diversity Score boost from 64 → 85

Total: $90k buys a quarter's worth of diversified performance creative that pays for itself more than twice over.

4. Install controls

  • Refresh Diversity Score and Creative Map every quarter

  • Track days-to-fatigue for each concept

  • Pause assets that slip below target CPA for >2 weeks. Redeploy spend to high-performers or new iterations.

  • Book a 90-day review with Finance to report return on creative investment

Follow these four moves and you’ll replace guesswork with hard numbers your CFO can plug straight into the P&L.

When I was at Meta’s agency summit in NYC a few months back, they shared a stat that I’ve been thinking about ever since…

Only 12% of CMOs feel confident making the case for more creative investment.

That’s because most budget conversations start (and end) here:

"We already spent our creative budget last quarter. Those assets are still running. Why do we need more?" – Your CFO.

Sound familiar?

The way through isn’t another brand building speech that falls on deaf ears. You need to speak their language. You need numbers. Here's what I’d tell my finance team to change their mind:

Tell them creative fatigues. Show exactly how and when performance drops as ads fatigue. Numbers tell a stronger story than hunches.

Tell them diversification improves performance. More ads = more revenue doesn’t compute for finance-minded folks. Show them how variety drives performance, and walk them through the numbers above to prove it.

Tell them the ROl story. Position creative as a performance multiplier, not an expensive art project. Again, numbers beat gut feel.

Bottom line: If you come to the next budget meeting equipped with your Creative Map, Diversity Score, and a systematic plan (see above) to drive revenue more efficiently, the purse strings will loosen.

Ready to run the numbers?

Calculate your Creative Diversity Score, grab your Creative Map, plug the data into the four‑slide deck above, and start turning flat funding into fat margin

Refer Ready Set to marketers in your network and get $1,000 if they become a client.

🛳️ “Bigger is better” was the theme of Amazon’s second-ever upfront. Considering Bezos once tried to dismantle an historic bridge to get his yacht through, should we be surprised?

🍿 Netflix's ad-supported tier grew 34% in Q2, topping 94M active monthly users. Plot twist: the VP who built the program is departing the streaming giant.

🤖 Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the future of advertising in a lengthy interview with Stratechery. Spoiler alert: it involves AI.

🗞️ Microsoft is launching a magazine. It’s the latest big brand to hop on the most innovative marketing channel in 2025… print media.

💃 Video, creators, and Reels stole the show at Meta’s NewFronts 2025.

🍗 How this fast-growing, made-to-order fried chicken chain is using AI to become a household name (More)

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Thanks for reading!

That’s all for this week. Seeya next time 🫶 

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Dan Moran & Sam Makalou

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