There’s a familiar story in performance marketing: your results are only as good as your creative.
Most teams agree with that in theory. In practice, when performance stalls, the first things we tend to blame are budget, platforms, algorithms, or timing. What often gets overlooked is the most human and frustrating blocker of all: getting strong creative out the door.
At Mira, we’ve seen this play out again and again. The issue is rarely a lack of spend or even a lack of talent. More often, creative gets stuck long before it ever has a chance to perform.
When we dig into why creative momentum slows, the same themes come up:
None of this is a failure of effort. It’s a structural problem. And the result is usually the same: safe creative that feels “on brand,” but doesn’t actually move performance.
When creative momentum slows, the instinct is often to push harder. More brainstorms. More rounds. More opinions. More urgency.
The problem is that creativity doesn’t respond well to pressure without direction. Forcing ideas for the sake of shipping something tends to produce work that nobody is fully confident in, and that lack of conviction shows up in performance.
Instead of asking, “What else can we try?” We’ve found it’s far more productive to step back and ask, “What does reality tell us works?”
We look at best-in-class creative across platforms and categories, not to copy it, but to understand patterns. What types of messages are brands leading with? What formats are audiences responding to? Where are brands taking risks, and where are they playing it safe?
Just as importantly, we take time to understand what our clients are naturally drawn to. Not every strong idea will feel right for every brand, and forcing a direction that doesn’t align internally rarely leads to good outcomes.
From there, we translate those insights into a small number of clear creative directions. Directions that are grounded in what’s already resonating in the market and what makes sense for the brand.
This structure gives teams something concrete to react to, rather than debating ideas in the abstract.
Once creative is live, the conversation needs to shift quickly from opinions to evidence.
The good news is that performance data is incredibly honest, if you let it be.
No single metric tells the whole story, but together they paint a clear picture of how your audience is responding.
This is where creative decisions become much easier. You’re no longer debating what someone likes. You’re responding to what your audience is telling you, at scale.
Rather than chasing one “perfect” idea, we typically recommend going to market with four distinct creative directions.
This does a few important things:
From there, we scale what resonates and pivot away from what doesn’t. Not based on leadership preferences, not based on the designer’s favorite concept, and not based on internal bias, but based on how real people respond.
