u/Fabulous_Piglet6091

For people who work in marketing or run paid ads: how do you decide which ad creative to launch first?

Say you have 5 different versions of an ad — different hooks, visuals, copy, thumbnails, or CTAs. Before spending media budget, what actually determines which one goes live?

Is it usually:

- Past campaign data

- Internal creative judgment

- Client preference

- Platform best practices

- A/B testing after launch

- Some kind of pre-launch testing

- Something else

Also curious: how often does a creative that looked good internally end up performing badly once launched?

I’m asking because I’m trying to understand how creative selection works in real workflows, especially in agencies and performance marketing teams.

I’m trying to understand how marketing teams and agencies choose between multiple ad creatives before launching campaigns.

In practice, it seems like creative selection often depends on internal judgment, client preference, past campaign learnings, and then A/B testing after launch. I’m curious how structured this process is for other teams.

A few questions I’m researching:

1. When you have 3–10 ad variants, how do you decide what goes live first?
2. Do you pre-test creatives before launch or mostly learn through campaign data?
3. What usually causes a creative that looked good internally to underperform?
4. Is wasted media budget from weak creatives a meaningful problem?
5. Do clients care about evidence behind creative recommendations?

Also happy to hear thoughts directly in the comments