by “Make it more clickable.”
These three words have quietly diluted modern marketing. Because somewhere between optimisation and iteration, everything started looking the same.
You can see it in your own feed.
One ad screams discount.
Another pushes urgency.
A third looks… vaguely familiar, but you can’t tell from where.
Individually, they might work, but together they say nothing.
And that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
Most campaigns today don’t feel like campaigns. They feel like collections of ads trying very hard to perform. The issue isn’t CTR because clicks do matter. They always will, but this is where CTR in performance marketing starts becoming limiting, when it becomes the only measure of success.
You’re no longer asking, “What’s the idea?”
You’re asking, “What will get a response right now?”
And those are very different questions. Over time, you start seeing the trade-offs.
Insight gets replaced with urgency.
Storytelling gives way to instruction.
Design starts coming from templates, not intent.
This is where performance marketing begins to lose creative distinctiveness. And slowly, brands start losing their edges.
By aiming for better CTR without storytelling performance improves for a while, but recall of the brand starts dropping.
So we tried to reframe the problem not as CTR vs creativity in performance marketing, but in synergy with few key actionables:
a. Building umbrella campaigns.
Not in a “big campaign launch” way, but as something every asset could anchor to. Because when everything points back to the same thought, people start recognising you, without trying too hard.
b. Anchored and creative direction
We became stricter about what every asset tells and looks like. So whether it’s a static, a video, or something in between, it feels like it comes from the same place. We made sure that every pixel in our asset anchored back to the same creative direction.
c. No one-shoe-fit-all approach
Most brands want to use the same creative pan-India. We started treating each region as a different brief and paid attention to:
Relatable location-specific visual cues.
Colloquial storytelling.
Details that repeat just enough to stick.
d. AI for CTR
Even with AI, the approach stayed the same.
We didn’t use it to produce more. We used it to explore things we normally wouldn’t. Because right now, in a feed full of sameness, difference is what earns attention and improves CTR meaningfully.
Why were these actions taken?.
To make the TG remember, recognise and come back to the brand.
And that’s the part most performance marketing strategies miss.
CTR will tell you if someone clicked, but it won’t tell you if they cared or if they’ll choose you again. That part still belongs to creativity, because in creative performance marketing, recall isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.
So no, CTR isn’t killing creativity. But the way we’ve reduced marketing to what’s immediately measurable? That’s where the real problem lies.
If you’re only optimising for clicks, you’ll keep paying for people’s attention.
But if you build something people remember, you won’t have to fight as hard for it next time.
