Stop Wasting Ad Spend: How to Catch Underperforming Creative Before It’s Live
Creative remains king.
Among the many variables that make up a successful advertising campaign—including brand, targeting, reach and recency—the aspect that contributed the most to sales was creative.
Yet, despite its importance and rising costs, many companies still see their return on ad spend go to waste on creative that may look good, but doesn’t actually boost ROI.
And here’s the kicker: that realization only happens after the campaign is launched. So that means all that effort—and budget—is gone without a chance to course-correct proactively.
But here’s the good news: leading brands are ditching the pre-launch guesswork and post-launch regret. They’re validating creative before launch.
How? With real feedback from real people. This blog shows you how.
Why traditional ad performance data falls short
Campaign performance dashboards are useful for postmortem diagnostics after the fact. Click-through rates, impressions, and conversions are no more than numbers on a report. They don't reveal the specific friction points or emotional reactions that real customers feel. That's a huge gap in creative design that traditional performance metrics will miss.
That’s why launching based on internal reviews, past campaigns, or stakeholder instinct is no longer enough. Today’s audiences expect relevance, clarity, and emotional connection—and they’ll scroll away in seconds if it’s missing.
The results: missed return on ad spend, lost pipelines, and a frustrated CMO. Worse, a tone-deaf or confusing ad can damage your brand perception at scale.
Common pitfalls include:
- A premium video ad skipped after 3 seconds because the opening visual didn’t hook viewers
- Messaging that’s clear to internal teams but confuses your actual target customers
- Calls to action buried in complex visuals or language
And while A/B testing offers some insights, it still happens after launch.
How leading teams validate creative in the interest phase
In the “interest” stage of the buyer journey, your audience is actively evaluating vendors, narrowing their shortlist, and seeking confidence in potential partnerships. Your messaging and creative must connect fast—and clearly differentiate you.
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Unlock what works: how to test messaging and creative to connect, convert, and inspire
1. Validate messaging and creative before launch
Performance marketers and advertising teams need to test their creatives early. That's where qualitative testing comes in—it captures the human side of your campaign that data alone can’t explain.
Before committing a budget to a message or visual, qualitative feedback helps you understand what your audience sees, feels, and remembers. You can uncover emotional reactions, confusion points, and what actually sticks in your target customer's mind.
That’s the level of clarity needed to build high-performing, ROI-positive creative assets that don’t just look good, but work.
With platforms like UserTesting, marketing leaders can test early-stage creative—scripts, storyboards, static ads, even unpolished videos—with real audiences. Within hours, you’ll see what works and what doesn't.
You can:
- Identify whether your value prop is coming through clearly
- Understand how your target personas emotionally respond to messaging
- Optimize visuals, tone, and hierarchy before finalizing assets
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2. Align internal teams around external truth
A lot of times, internal stakeholders like CMOs, product managers, engineers, and designers may know their product like the back of their hand. But how the product is perceived by the general user may be totally different. This is called the experience gap.
According to a study by PwC, only 38% of U.S. consumers say the employees they interact with understand their needs.
So, what better way to align your entire internal team than with actual user feedback? While your corporate communication teams often bring talented perspectives to the table, qualitative testing gives you direct audience-backed insights that everyone can align on—making it easier to approve creative quickly and confidently.
You’re no longer guessing what your audience thinks—you’re watching them interact with your product in real time.
3. Build a data-backed shortlist of winning assets
Instead of launching dozens of variants and hoping one works, leading teams narrow down to high-performing options pre-launch.
By leveraging video, live interviews, and usability tests, you can pressure-test multiple creative concepts backed by real customer feedback.
- Video feedback
Captures real-time, spoken feedback through screen recordings and think-out-loud protocols while users are using your product. Marketing teams can observe how users interact with creative assets as they narrate their thoughts, providing emotional cues and context.
- User interviews
With one-on-one, live video interviews, marketers can dive deeper into customer motivations and perceptions. These sessions are moderated by a team member, allowing for follow-up questions, clarifications, and spontaneous insights.
- Asynchronous, unmoderated tests
While moderated tests provide structure and flexibility, with a facilitator guiding users through scenarios and creative assets, unmoderated tests allow users to engage with creative independently and naturally—perfect for scaling tests quickly and capturing organic reactions at speed.
This level of granularity is especially powerful for multi-channel campaigns where visual consistency, message hierarchy, and call-to-action clarity must align seamlessly across formats.
How Microsoft truly understood their customers with UserTesting
If you are not learning from your customers, you are not learning,” said Tracey Craft, Brand Content Studio Manager at Microsoft. “If you are not learning from your customers, I assure you, you are not making the right decisions.”
Microsoft wanted to move beyond its mission of becoming the PC in every home to empowering every person to achieve more. To do this, they needed a way to truly listen and understand their customer's needs.
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That's when they turned to UserTesting. Since 2014, teams across the organization—from Xbox to brand marketing—have used UserTesting to run remote qualitative research, uncover unmet needs, and refine messaging before going to market.
The result? Sharper creative, fewer product misfires, and stronger emotional connections with customers.
There's such value in learning directly from our customers. Now, we can get feedback within a couple of hours and at scale...The more we can talk with them, the more we can drive empathy into the product teams, and the better our customer experiences will be.
Creating a customer-first creative process
Every impression, click, and conversion counts, and you can’t afford to fly blind. Your campaign’s success hinges not just on how polished your creative looks, but how well it resonates with the general audience.
And the only way to know that is to truly listen to your customers before launch. With UserTesting, leading brands are gaining fast, human insight to eliminate guesswork, aligning internal teams and delivering creative that drives real results.
If your goal is to reduce wasted ad spend and build a creative that converts, then it’s time to add customer insights to your pre-launch checklist.
Key takeaways:
- Assumptions are costly. Launching a creative before validating its efficacy can cause wasted ad spend, lost conversion opportunities, and a tainted brand image.
- Traditional metrics show what happened, but not why. Qualitative testing can help you identify friction points and understand why users behave the way they do in real time.
- Test creative before launch. By testing your creative with real users before it goes to market, you can cut the guesswork and gain actual audience feedback, allowing it to drive your creative design.
Close the experience gap. Leading marketing teams leverage qualitative testing to align internal teams with actual feedback from their customers, reducing launch risk and improving ROI.
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