In performance marketing, everyone wants the fastest route to a winning ad. Imitating successful campaigns can seem like a shortcut to success, but Xevio CEO Nadim Batista-Kuttab strongly cautions against it, explaining that copying a creative will not only fail to recreate an ad’s original success, but also place advertisers at a disadvantage. That’s partly because, in performance marketing, true engagement happens on your landing page, not in the ad itself. For that reason, creative originality matters even more here than in social ads.

“You don’t have a 60-second video like you do on other channels, like Meta or Instagram, where you can really explain and sell,” reasons Nadim. “That’ll be done later, in your content piece, after the click.”

Below, we break down the dangers of copying creatives, along with Nadim’s recommendations for scaling profitably.

The Imitation Trap: You Only Get Residual Clicks

Everywhere you look, you see a competitor’s ad. It’s clearly getting clicks and sales, and you understandably want in on that action.

It’s only natural to assume that the creative will work the same magic for you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen in native advertising. With native, as soon as a creative enters the auction, performance history starts to compound. When the ad is a duplicate, that history can work against you.

“If somebody’s running something, and you take that something to run yourself, you’re not going to be as successful as the first person to run that creative,” Nadim says. “The reason is quite simple: They’re more established than you, because they launched the creative before you did. They’ll be higher up in the feed, they’ll get a more relevant click, and you’ll be left with whatever’s left.”

This caution comes down to how the ad auction works. Algorithms reward relevance, quality, and performance history: When you copy an existing ad, you’re competing against an ad that is both earlier in the feed and cheaper to deliver to the platform.

Below are two benefits the original advertiser gains that you won’t be able to duplicate.

First-Mover Advantage

When you steal an existing creative, you’re copying from an advertiser who has already built strong engagement signals. This includes:

• Click-through rate (CTR).
• Relevance scores.
• Consistent positive conversion signals.
• Audience fit over time.

These signals tell the platform, “This ad performs. Show it to more people at a lower cost.”

You can copy the image, the headline, and even the landing page, but you can’t copy the performance history that gives the original ad momentum. Without that, your cost per acquisition (CPA) will be higher.

Dominant Position

When you run a copycat creative, the original advertiser stays ahead of you. That advertiser has already:

• Trained the algorithm with strong engagement and conversion data.
• Accumulated positive performance signals across placements.
• Captured the highest-intent audiences at the lowest click costs.

Your version competes with that original creative but carries a weaker expected CTR. As a result, the platform pushes it lower in the feed, leaving you with more expensive and lower-intent traffic. With rising competition and higher native ad costs, being deprioritized in the feed makes scaling significantly more costly.

The Rule of Continuous Testing: Outperform Your Top Winners

In marketing, even a top-performing ad has a shelf life. Successful advertisers understand that sustainability is the goal, and sustainability comes from continuously challenging your best performers.

“My testing philosophy is, ‘Always be testing,’” Nadim says. “Always try to outperform your top performers. It’s a good position to be in: If you found something that performs, throw things against it at low scale and see if it works better than what’s scaling.”

Even a 0.1% CTR improvement can be meaningful at volume, especially if it’s supported by A/B testing, as it can mean the difference between your campaign plateauing and scaling. Consistent testing also helps combat creative fatigue, which often causes engagement on a high-performing ad to drop 20-30% week over week toward the end of its run.

Put simply, your best-performing ad today won’t stay on top unless you keep it competitive.

Creative Freedom and Out-of-the-Box Thinking

Imitation limits growth, and stagnation stalls performance, so what actually does work in 2025? Bold, scroll-stopping creativity. Display advertising offers far more creative freedom than you may realize: While compliance restrictions protect against misleading content, the creative range is still endless.

“One of our top solar ads in Germany was floating solar panels in space,” says Nadim. “It didn’t make a lot of sense — we aren’t going to be selling solar panels in space! — but it was a very catchy image. It looked super nice: It was AI-generated and touched up by our design team. That is creative freedom 101.”

Was it literal? No. Did it stop the scroll? Absolutely, and that’s the point: Users on the open web aren’t interested in being sold to, they’re looking for compelling content. Your ad should feel like the gateway to the story, not a product pitch.

This extreme example illustrates how the most effective ads often defy conventional expectations. The key is to:

Innovate Visually

Before your headline can earn the click, the visual must earn the pause. Display ads live among editorial content, so your image needs to work hard to break scanning patterns. This is where creativity — and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted concepts — offer a competitive edge.

Highly effective native visuals tend to:

• Break visual patterns.
• Trigger curiosity.
• Connect abstract ideas to familiar experiences.
• Use AI-generated concepts to explore ideas that would otherwise be expensive or time-consuming to create.

AI makes it easier to generate unique content that stands out in user feeds. When used intentionally, the technology becomes a creative accelerator, allowing you to test more conceptual visuals and learn from the results.

Test Volume: Don’t Bet on One Big Idea

Once you’ve found a winning creative, it can be tempting to lean into it, but that’s where many performance marketers stall. Nadim emphasizes that variety, not perfection, is what unlocks scalability.

“One of the superpowers of open-web display ads and Realize is that we can, as advertisers, really throw a lot at the wall and see what sticks,” he says.

Instead of investing all your effort into a single creative, launch multiple small, inexpensive variations. Performance platforms distribute creatives across hundreds of sites, contexts, and audiences. A creative may underperform in one environment, yet deliver surprisingly strong results in another. Volume testing reduces your risk and helps you learn more about what works.

A healthy group of creatives might include:

• 4–6 visual concepts per theme, including some that are AI-assisted.
• 6–12 headline hooks to go with them.
• Micro-tests to get a feel for the market before scaling.

This approach keeps feeds fresh, reduces creative fatigue, and continuously generates new winners to compete with your top performers.

Key Takeaways

In today’s competitive advertising marketplace, the only way to sustain results is through originality and continuous optimization. Yes, copying a competitor’s high-performing creative can seem like a shortcut, but it places you at an immediate disadvantage: Your ad enters the auction with weaker performance signals, higher CPCs, and lower-intent traffic. Instead, focus on creating original content that stands out in feeds while still being relevant to your brand message.

It’s also important to keep your ads fresh. Even a top-performing creative will degrade over time. Test and experiment, keeping a close eye on data and adjusting your campaigns accordingly. The brands that succeed are creating unique concepts that other marketers want to copy, giving them that first-mover advantage.