What 82 B2B SaaS marketers told us about ad creative that works

What teams believe about ad creative vs. what they say they pull off

Nearly everyone who took the survey believes ad creative decides whether a campaign wins.

Of the 82 B2B SaaS marketers we surveyed, 73 said creative has a real measurable impact on performance.

Ask those same people whether their own ads actually stand out from competitors, and only 35 put themselves at the top of the scale.

Almost everyone believes creative drives performance. Fewer than half think their own ads stand out.

We analyzed the responses to find what sets apart the teams whose ad performance is improving. It wasn’t company size, specific roles leading the ad team or resourcing.

In this sample of 82, the variable that tracks most tightly with an improving campaign trend is whether a marketer ranked their own creative is distinctive. And it climbs like a staircase.

Among those who rated their distinctiveness low, 8% said their campaigns were improving. Among those who put themselves at the top, 54% did. That's nearly seven times the bottom group.

The more distinctive marketers rated their creative, the more likely they were to report improving campaigns.

Two caveats are worth naming before anyone leans too hard on this. The arrow could run either way: distinctive creative might produce improving campaigns, or improving campaigns might make people braver about calling their own work distinctive. And marketers here are rating their own work, when the people who should really be judging distinctiveness are customers.

Even with both caveats on the table, the experts stood by the finding. All of them said distinctiveness usually drives performance, not the other way around. And despite the self-rating limitation, they recognized the underlying pattern instantly, from watching it play out across their own clients and work.

So when distinctiveness is that important then why do so few teams believe they have it? One of our expert contributors boils the whole gap down to two things in short supply.

“Taste and time. Marketers live in the bubble of their own industry and do not spend enough time looking outside it. And time keeps getting scarcer. But it is worth it: one truly creative ad can do the work of ten boring ones.”

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REVEAL RESPONSE

Shlomo Genchin

Creative Director

We know taste has become a major topic with AI being able to produce hundreds of generic graphics and creatives within a few clicks, and for good reason.

Distinctiveness is partly a function of how much great work outside your own category you have actually looked at and analyzed. If your only source of inspiration comes from going through competitor ad libraries then you run the risk of falling in the same boxes.

One push-back from one of the experts worth stating before leaning on the finding is that marketers here are rating their own work, when the people who should be judging distinctiveness are customers. That is a real limit.

But the rest of the practitioners recognized the pattern instantly because they watch it play out across their clients and their own work. Some took the explanation beyond the creative itself, into how teams are built, which is also our observation across the work we do with clients at Diligent Studios.

We know taste has become a major topic, with AI now able to produce hundreds of generic graphics and creatives in a few clicks. But taste is what separates good work from noise, and that was true long before AI entered the picture. AI didn't create the problem, it just made the gap easier to see.

So where does taste actually come from? Largely from what you expose yourself to. If your reference point is only your own product category, you inherit its ceiling instead of raising it. Go through competitor ad libraries for inspiration and you'll end up in the same boxes everyone else is stuck in.

This explains part of the gap. Some of the practitioners took the explanation even beyond the creative itself, into how teams are built. This is something that we have observed too, across the work we do with clients at Diligent Studios.

“Creative and performance teams rarely speak the same language. That gap is one of the main reasons why distinctive ads are so hard to ship month after month.”

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REVEAL RESPONSE

Niko Dovidija

Co-founder & Creative design lead

Overall, there is clear consensus on distinctiveness being a growth lever. And we’re not claiming to be the first to point this out.
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According to LinkedIn’s B2B institute, distinctive assets, the specific repeatable elements that attach an ad to a brand, are not a finishing touch. They’re what lets the audience know the ad came from you in the first place. Without them, even a “great” ad creates no attribution or brand association. So even if the audience enjoys it, they forget whose it was, which leads to more ad budget waste.

The intuitive story is that better-resourced teams make better creative. More time, more designers, more rounds, more budget. In this sample, that story is half-true.

Sort the 82 on two axes, resourcing and distinctiveness, and four groups appear: well-resourced and distinctive (Winners), under-resourced but distinctive (Heroes), well-resourced but not distinctive (Warning), and neither (Stuck).

Distinctiveness (the vertical axis) decides which teams report improving campaigns. Resourcing (the horizontal axis) barely changes that picture.

✦ Money buys output, not what drives performance

If money were the growth fuel, the well-resourced distinctive teams (Winners) would leave the under-resourced distinctive teams (Heroes) in the dust but they don’t.

According to the survey responses, what lifts a quadrant off the floor is distinctiveness, not budget.

The clearest case is the under-resourced teams. The non-distinctive ones report improving campaigns at 6% and declining at 53%. The distinctive ones, working under the same constraints, report improving campaigns at 48% and declining at 7%.

Same tight resources, opposite results. Distinctiveness flips the trend from declining ad performance to improving.

✦ The reason bigger teams dilute bold work

When we asked the experts who build creative for a living why this could be happening, the explanations converged on structure. Bigger teams come with more red tape and more people who can each sand an edge off a bold idea before it ships.

But there's another problem underneath that. In a large team a designer often just designs. They're handed a brief, they execute it, and they never see how the work performed once it ran. So the person making the creative decisions is cut off from the only feedback that would sharpen them. The strategy gets set in one room and the file gets made in another, and distinctiveness leaks out in the gap between.

✦ Constraint forces the thinking that creates distinctiveness

Smaller operations are forced into efficiency, and the marketers whose campaigns are improving describe the same reordering: resources matter less than the thinking, the lion's share of the result coming from strategy and concept, only a fraction from execution.

✦ The experts don't agree on why, and that's worth seeing

They do not all locate the cause in the same place, and the disagreement is worth sharing. Some point to size itself, fewer approvals, fewer hands to dilute a decision. Others call size a red herring, where it comes down to the strength of the brand and the skill of whoever is making the work, since most brands run on a single dedicated designer and the results swing wildly.

✦ Past a certain point, more resourcing backfires

There is even a failure mode at the top end, where too many resources hurt because undefined roles and too many opinions pull the work in every direction until it says nothing at all and is stripped of any distinctiveness.

Spend on distinctiveness,
not on headcount

So if you are a leader trying to improve your campaign performance, distinctiveness is what actually moves it. More resourcing helps a little, but nowhere near as much. Hire more designers without changing how the team finds distinctiveness and, on these numbers, you barely move at all. You shift from one weak position to another, from 'Stuck' to 'Warning'.

Let’s go back to the gap we opened with: if almost everyone agrees creative has a direct impact on ad performance, then why aren't more teams creating ads that stand out from their competitors?

The answer is not that they are lazy or unconvinced. It is that the whole system around them rewards the safe choice, and according to the survey results, even the way they describe their own problem points them in the wrong direction.

✦ Change how you ask the question and the answer flips

We asked about creative bottlenecks twice. Once as a tidy checklist with five options. Once as a blank box so the respondents could describe it in their own words.

Given a checklist, 63% blamed bandwidth. Ask the same question with no list, and that number drops to 29%, with ideation and process coming out just as often.

When we handed people the checklist, capacity topped the list by a wide margin.

But when we gave the same people a blank box and asked them to describe the bottleneck in their own words, capacity dropped to 29%, with ideation at 28% and process at 25%. Three roughly equal piles.

The checklist points 2.2 times harder at “we need more hands” than people do when they have to say it themselves. The instinct to blame capacity is so strong it shows up the moment you give it a box to live in.

✦ Capacity is the only answer the system knows how to fund

That instinct is exactly how the gap stays open. The checklist version of the problem is the one the whole marketing machine is built to hear: board decks, headcount requests, budget templates, agency briefs.

Capacity is a line a CFO knows how to fund. Ideation and process are slippery, hard to measure, hard to defend in a budget meeting, so the system nudges every team toward the one lever it knows how to pull, even when two other levers matter just as much.

You ask for more hands because more hands is the request that shows up more cleanly on a spreadsheet. Then the new hands produce more of the same safe work, and the gap does not move.

“Everyone says creative matters, but in practice it's easier to recycle familiar formats and optimize what’s already done. Many brands are afraid to take risks. To truly stand out you need both a clear strategy and creative courage to create that emotional connection, and that doesn't necessarily come from having more resources.”

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REVEAL RESPONSE

Sagih Keinan

Sr. director performance creative

There’s another version of the same trap upstream of the budget request. When a team cannot generate distinctive ideas, it rarely names that as the problem because it does not feel like a skill gap. It feels like not enough time. But the people who are genuinely good at this describe ideation differently: not waiting for lightning, but running repeatable frameworks they have learned, where what changes from ad to ad is the human insight.

The teams stuck on “we need fresh ideas” are usually starting from a blank page every time, then reading the slowness as a capacity shortage. It is not. It is a craft they have not built or hired for, and often a missing owner: someone whose job is the concept, the connective idea linking marketing logic to visual execution.

Without that owner, expectations swing between the performance side and the design side and neither is satisfied, and the team reaches for more hands because hands are easy to ask for.

✦ More output is the last thing a direction problem needs

The capacity instinct sends teams straight to tools that produce more, exactly when the missing ingredient is direction, not output. AI is the sharpest version of the trap, and the people using it most fluently are clearest about its limits.

“My creativity exploded with AI but not because it helps me generate a ton of assets. Certain graphic elements would have been impossible for me to make, and now I can. But the concept and the copy have to be right (AI is not great at either). I also take what I need and never follow what AI tools give me 100%.”

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REVEAL RESPONSE

Chiara Verdoliva

Brand & Creative Lead

✦ Ask yourself the open question before you ask for more hands

Our advice here is to ask the open-text question of yourself before you write the next headcount or volume request. In your own words, with no list in front of you, what do you actually wish was easier?If the honest answer includes some version of “we do not know what would make our work stand out in a sea of sameness,” that is an ideation and ownership problem, and more hands, or more generated assets, will not touch it.

External sources: The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, 2030 B2B Trends; Paul Feldwick, Feldwick on Fame (LinkedIn / The B2B Institute).

Contributors

Our thanks to the 82 marketers who answered the survey honestly, and to the experts and practitioners who lent their expertise and candor to this report. The survey surfaced the patterns. The experts gave them depth.