Volume vs Diversity: The Creative-Output Number That Actually Moves Performance

Nine times out of ten, when a founder tells me their creative is underperforming, the first number they reach for is volume. "We're only shipping eight ads a week. So-and-so says you need thirty." And nine times out of ten, that number is the wrong thing to be staring at.

I want to take the volume question apart, because it's one of the most repeated and least examined rules in performance creative. The quota gets passed around like gospel: ship more, always more, the machine is hungry. Some of the smartest brands I watch are now doing the exact opposite, and getting better results for it. So the rule clearly isn't a rule.

Let me show you what's actually going on underneath.

The tell: two great brands, opposite moves, both right

Here's what broke the "more is always better" belief for me. In the same stretch, two genuinely excellent brands moved in opposite directions on volume, and both moves worked.

One premium brand cut its output roughly in half. It had been shipping something like seventy ads for a big sale and pulled that back to thirty. Performance didn't drop. It improved. The team was less taxed, the work got better, and the account didn't blink.

Another brand, around the same time, was ramping volume hard, pushing thirty-odd fresh concepts a week and wanting to go higher still.

If volume were the lever, one of those brands would be wrong. Neither is. Which tells you volume isn't the lever. It's a proxy for the lever, and a leaky one.

What the quota is really standing in for

Strip it back and the thing the platform actually rewards isn't volume. It's diversity.

When someone opens the app, the auction is trying to match the single best ad to that specific person from everything you've given it. The more genuinely different angles, formats and openings you've supplied, the more chances you have to be the right ad for the right person, and the more types of people you can win. That's the real mechanic. Diversity is what buys you reach into pockets of the audience you weren't reaching before.

Volume only helps insofar as it carries diversity along with it. And here's where most brands go wrong: they hit the quota by making the same ad thirty times. Same talking-head format, same hook shape, a different headline or a swapped button colour. That's thirty ads and one idea. The auction sees one idea.

The way I'd frame it: five genuinely different swings at a concept beat a hundred near-identical variants every time. I'd far rather a brand shipped five ads that each said something distinct than a hundred that were all the same ad wearing slightly different hats.

So the moment a founder says "we need more volume," the honest question back is: more diverse ideas, or more copies of the idea you've already got? Those are completely different problems, and only one of them is solved by spending more.

Why one brand could halve volume and win

Look closely at the brand that cut output, because the reason is instructive and it isn't "less is more."

They weren't trimming for the sake of it. They'd realised they were over-indexed on the cheapest, easiest content to make. The kind of low-fidelity, phone-shot stuff you naturally over-produce when you're chasing a volume number, because it's fast. When the only goal is "hit thirty," you reach for whatever's quickest to shoot, and quality quietly slides.

So cutting volume wasn't the win. It was what cutting volume freed up. It opened the bandwidth to make fewer, higher-fidelity, more considered pieces, and to put real time into concepts instead of churning variants. They moved from "how many ads this week" to "which ideas are worth making," and let the ideas set the count.

That's the bit the quota crowd misses. A volume target can actively push you towards worse creative, because it rewards speed of production over quality of idea. For a brand that's already producing plenty, the gain often sits in cutting the filler and upgrading the rest, not in adding more.

So how many concepts should you actually run?

Here's my honest take, and I'll put numbers to it, because "it depends" is a cop-out. The right output maps to where your account is, not to a guru's quota. Spend level is the cleanest proxy for that, so let me walk three tiers with invented but realistic figures.

Around A$10k a month. You're hunting. You don't yet know which angle, which format, which audience is going to carry the account, so your job is to find out cheaply. This is the one tier where leaning toward volume genuinely earns its keep, because reps are how you learn what works when you've no winners yet. I'd aim for something like four to six new concepts a week, deliberately spread across different messages and formats, kept low-fi and cheap to produce. You're buying information, not polish. Don't blow the budget on a hero shoot before you know what the audience even responds to.

Around A$50k a month. Now you've got signal. A couple of angles are clearly working and you've felt the difference between a concept that scales and one that fizzles. The job shifts from "find anything" to "deepen what works and keep the pipeline fed." I'd run maybe six to ten new concepts a week, with a noticeably higher quality bar, and start introducing more produced, higher-fidelity work alongside the scrappy stuff. The mix matters more than the count here. A few strong new swings plus enough variation on proven winners to keep them from fatiguing.

Around A$200k a month and up. This is the tier where the instinct to crank volume can quietly hurt you. You've got proven concepts spending real money, and the temptation is to flood the account to feed it. But at this scale your edge is range and production value, not raw count. I'd think in terms of bigger, more distinct concept bets, fewer of them, each properly made, rather than a hundred tiny variants. This is exactly where a brand can cut total output, replace the filler with five sharp, well-produced swings, and watch CAC improve, because the weak, near-duplicate ads were dragging the average and crowding the budget that should've gone to the strong ones.

Notice the shape. Volume is highest, relative to your sophistication, when you're small and searching. As you mature and accumulate winners, the centre of gravity moves from quantity toward diversity and quality. The quota that's right at A$10k is often actively wrong at A$200k.

When cutting volume is the move

To make this concrete, here's the situation where I'd tell a brand to ship less, not more.

You're spending well, you've got winners, and your account is a wall of ads that are mostly minor variations of each other. Your team is stretched thin keeping the count up. New concepts are getting starved because the budget's spread across forty things that all say the same thing. That's the moment to cut. Kill the duplicates, take the bandwidth you get back, and pour it into a handful of genuinely new, properly produced swings.

I've seen that exact move take pressure off a team and improve the numbers at the same time, because you stop paying the production and attention cost of creative that was never going to carry the account on its own. Fewer, better, more different. The account gets healthier, not hungrier.

The brands that get this wrong are chasing a number someone gave them at a conference. The brands that get it right are asking a better question: not "are we shipping enough," but "are we shipping enough genuinely different ideas, made well enough, for where this account actually is."

So before you go hire to triple your output, pull up your own ad account and look at it honestly. How many real ideas are in there, versus how many copies of three ideas? And given what you're spending and what's already working, is your next gain actually hiding in more volume, or in the diversity and quality you'd open up by making less, better?