2025-01-09 · Dae Kim
Building a creative kill list that product trusts
Growth teams rotate creatives quickly; product teams worry about misleading hooks. A kill list bridges the gap by tying shutdown rules to activation metrics, not CTR alone.
We document minimum sample sizes, maximum acceptable CPI drift, and activation floors per channel. Creatives that pass spend gates but fail activation enter a cooling period instead of immediate deletion—useful when seasonality skews short windows.
The rubric is one page, posted where media buyers and PMs both see it. Weekly readouts reference the same thresholds, which reduces ad-hoc escalations.
Kill lists fail when analytics latency is ignored. Build a note about reporting delay into the doc so teams do not panic on incomplete data.
Paid social · Creative