In 2024, a winning Meta creative held its efficiency for a median of 19 days before decaying past usefulness. In our 2026 sample of 1,800 creatives across 60 accounts, that half-life is down to 9 days. Auction density and AI-accelerated copycatting are the obvious culprits; the consequence is less obvious.
More ads is the wrong answer
Teams respond by doubling output. But volume without structure just burns concepts faster — you exhaust the angle, not the format. Accounts with the flattest decay curves in our data shared one trait: they run a concept ledger. Every creative is tagged by angle, format, hook, and proof type. Fatigue is diagnosed at the angle level, and refreshes swap the exhausted variable — not the whole ad.
The 70/20/10 that actually holds up
Seventy percent of spend on proven angle × format pairs with rotating executions. Twenty percent on new executions of proven angles. Ten percent on genuinely new angles. Accounts running this structure sustained CPAs through creative droughts that sent unstructured accounts up 40%.
The craft isn't dying. It's moving up a level — from making ads to designing the system that makes ads.