One Size Fits None: Why Your Creative Strategy Needs a Costume Change

Picture this Halloween scenario: It’s late October, and you’ve got three Halloween events this weekend: your company’s office party Friday, your friend’s masquerade Saturday, and the neighborhood bar crawl Sunday.

You’re swamped with work, so you make an executive decision: one costume, three parties. You dig out your plastic fangs, dust off the old vampire cape, and call it done.

Friday night you walk into the office party in full Dracula mode. Except everyone else is wearing subtle, work-appropriate costumes with funny name tags and animal ear headbands. You’re wearing a cape and stage makeup. You’re probably getting cropped out of the group office photo.

Saturday, you show up to the masquerade in the same vampire getup. But this crowd went all-in with custom Venetian masks and theatrical makeup that took hours. Your costume-in-a-bag suddenly feels like you didn’t care enough to try.

By Sunday’s bar crawl, you’re still in the same vampire costume, now wilted and wine-stained. Everyone else is in pop culture costumes and group themes. You’re just… tired Dracula.

Same costume. Three very different rooms. And in each one, you stuck out, but never in the way you hoped.

That’s exactly what happens when we take one ad and drop it across every digital platform without adapting. We show up, but we’re not reading the room.

The Creative Reuse Dilemma

I’m having this conversation more often with peers throughout the digital marketing world as clients face pressure to expand onto TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, and other platforms. The timeline is tight, the budget questions are real, and the obvious solution seems to be: “We already have great creative! Let’s just use that!” I understand the logic, as versioning takes time and resources.

But here’s what I’ve learned from watching campaigns across platforms: each platform has its own creative language. What works brilliantly on one can fall completely flat on another, not because the creative is bad, but because it’s speaking the wrong language to the wrong audience.

Taking the Measured Approach

When clients want to expand quickly, I always suggest we take a more methodical approach. Yes, speed feels important, but strategic expansion tends to deliver better long-term results than rushed launches.

Here’s what works best:

Same Brand, Different Audiences

Here’s something worth considering: good creative isn’t automatically universal creative.

Your award-winning campaign might be genuinely brilliant, but effectiveness depends entirely on context. The same creative can perform amazingly on one platform and struggle on another simply because you’re reaching different people in different mindsets.

Consider the difference between your audiences:

Same brand, same product—but completely different people with different expectations.

Building Your Attribution Framework

Another thing that often gets overlooked in platform expansion is having a solid attribution framework before you start.

While we can easily gauge surface metrics like CTR, we need to understand the quality of the action before writing off creative or an audience. A low click-through rate on TikTok doesn’t necessarily mean your creative failed—it might mean you’re reaching the right people who engage differently than your LinkedIn audience.

I rarely see clients with unlimited budgets for upper-funnel activities, so connecting platform performance to business outcomes becomes essential. The challenge is that as you move up-funnel, the measurement complexity increases significantly, but so does the need to understand what’s actually driving quality engagement versus vanity metrics.

Having that tracking framework in place before launch makes the inevitable “how’s it working?” conversation more productive and helps you optimize creative performance based on real business impact, not just platform-specific engagement rates.

A Framework for Expansion

Based on what I’ve seen work well:

1. Platform Research First Spend time understanding each platform’s content norms. What gets engagement? What feels native versus promotional? What are the unwritten rules?

2. Create Platform-Specific Content
Your TikTok content should feel natural on TikTok, even if it wouldn’t work elsewhere. Platform-native usually beats universally optimized. What are your competitors doing?

3. Start with Test Budgets
Learn each platform’s dynamics before committing significant resources. Every platform has its own learning curve.

4. Plan Your Measurement Approach
Know how you’ll track cross-platform impact before you launch. This becomes increasingly important as your platform mix grows.

Moving Forward

Platform expansion isn’t about being everywhere—it’s about being effective where you choose to show up. Your audience can tell when content feels forced or out of place, and they’ll move on quickly.

The good news? Taking a strategic approach to expansion often delivers better results than rushing to launch everywhere at once. Your existing creative is valuable, but it just might need some translation to speak each platform’s language effectively.

Don’t let the pressure to expand undermine your thoughtful marketing strategy.

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