SKILL.md
Creative Fatigue
Read a creative's performance-over-time data and decide whether it is genuinely wearing out, how confident that call is, and what to do about it. The core discipline is refusal: many things can cause a declining metric, and creative wear-out is only one of them. Most refresh decisions are made too early, off one metric, against no baseline.
This skill runs a differential diagnosis in a fixed order, confounder screen before the fatigue call, never after:
- Baseline
- Confounder screen
- Decay measurement
- Confidence gate
- Verdict
Two further tensions stay live throughout:
- Fatigue is often hook fatigue rather than whole-ad fatigue (Ben Heath).
- Some ads improve with repeated exposure, the "wear-in" effect Les Binet describes in brand advertising, though Meta's 2023 research found no wear-in for direct-response objectives - wear-in is a real verdict only where the objective is brand, not DR.
There are no universal thresholds here: every trigger is derived from the creative's own trailing baseline and the account's own history. Named practitioner numbers appear only as attributed starting reference points.