Creative is the bottleneck of Modern User Acquisition

Why volume, fatigue, and creative intelligence now decide who scales.

User acquisition is no longer constrained by bids, targeting, or even channels.
It’s constrained by creatives.

As I say early in the episode:

“The biggest pain point in the UA world is creatives. Creative production, optimization, refresh, and analysis. It’s not easy to solve.”

This isn’t just a personal observation. It’s a pattern showing up across UA teams of all sizes: creatives have become the hardest part of scaling.

The Creative Volume Reality Check

The modern UA landscape is defined by imbalance.

A tiny fraction of creatives absorb the majority of spend. Everyone is chasing the same outcome: find the next winner and scale it before it dies.

And the most common question I hear from teams is always the same:

“How do I beat the creative winner?”

The uncomfortable truth is that you don’t beat it with a single better idea.
You beat it with systematic volume and faster iteration.

High-spend advertisers don’t win because they’re more creative.
They win because they produce, test, kill, and refresh at a speed most teams can’t match.

What’s actually working right now

Despite endless experimentation, only a narrow set of creative patterns consistently works at scale.

Right now, those are:

• Creator-generated content
• Humor
• Hyper-casual gates
• Long-form playables
• AI-generated videos

As I explain in the episode:

“Everybody wants to watch AI stuff because it’s novel and new and attention-grabbing.”

These formats work because they align with how users actually consume feeds:

• They feel native
• They stop the scroll
• They deliver immediate context or interaction

But novelty doesn’t last.

Which leads directly to the real killer of performance.

Creative fatigue is not a mystery

Creative fatigue isn’t a vague feeling. It’s measurable.

“CTR goes down. CPI goes up. People saw your creative millions of times. They don’t care anymore.”

The problem isn’t recognizing fatigue – it’s reacting to it fast enough.

Most teams still:

• Compare creatives across too many dashboards
• Argue internally instead of acting
• Discover fatigue only after performance collapses

By the time alignment happens, the winner is already dead.

The real bottleneck: Creative analysis at scale

Once you run multiple UA channels, creative analysis becomes exponentially harder.

You’re no longer dealing with:

• One platform
• One format
• One reporting view

You’re dealing with everything at once.

And as I put it bluntly:

“If you need to check how creatives perform, you either build one solution in-house or go through all the dashboards which is messy and time-consuming.”

This is where most teams lose speed.

Not because they lack ideas, but because they lack creative intelligence.

Most conversations about AI in UA focus on production: generating videos, images, hooks.

That’s only half the story.

“AI shouldn’t be only used for creative production. It should be used for AI tagging.”

At scale, manual naming conventions break.
Teams change.
Standards drift.
Libraries become unusable.

AI-powered tagging changes the game:

• Search creatives by hook
• Filter by scene
• Group by gameplay type
• Compare performance by element, not just asset

Instead of guessing why something worked, you can actually see it.

Why does this become mandatory at scale

There’s a clear threshold where manual creative analysis collapses.

Once you scale beyond a few hundred thousand in monthly spend, complexity explodes:

• More channels
• More formats
• More creatives
• Faster fatigue

As I say in the episode:

“If you want to scale beyond a few hundred thousand per month, you need more UA channels and that multiplies creative complexity.”

At that point, creative management stops being a creative problem.
It becomes an infrastructure problem.

The real takeaway

The episode ends on what is probably the most important sentence for modern UA:

“Creative is the most important part of the whole UA. You need to be informed on a daily basis which creative is taking over and why.”

Not weekly.
Not monthly.
Daily.

Winning teams don’t just produce more creatives.

They:

• Detect fatigue earlier
• Understand why something works
• Recombine winning elements faster than competitors

That’s not creativity versus data.

That’s creativity powered by intelligence.