If you’ve worked in marketing over the past decade, you’ve felt the dramatic shift. Performance marketing used to be about targeting and bidding strategies. But today, creative is king, and it’s only getting harder to keep up.
According to recent research by AppsFlyer, just 2% of ad creatives drive the vast majority of spend and results:
- In Q1 of 2025, the top 2% of creatives in games accounted for 53% of marketing spend
- For non-gaming apps, the top 2% got 43% of the spend
That means 98% of creatives never scale. They’re tested, burned out, and discarded.
Why? Because they’re not personalized. They’re not psychologically aligned. They’re not built for the actual humans they’re trying to reach.
In this article, we’ll explore why creative is the new performance lever, and how Solsten Chat helps you generate emotionally resonant, personalized content using AI, so your next creative is always in the winning 2%.
The Creative Bottleneck is Real (and expensive)
AppsFlyer’s analysis shows just how staggering the creative challenge has become:
- Games spending over $7M per quarter produce an average of 2,743 video creatives per quarter
- That’s 3x more than those spending $4M–$7M, and 5–6x more than those spending $1M–$4M
- Even among big spenders, 8% increased output YoY, while smaller brands reduced theirs by 3%
Why are high-spend games investing so heavily in creative?
Because they know creative is performance. Not just a part, but the whole thing.
But for many teams, producing hundreds of emotionally resonant, high-performing creatives is unsustainable. Now, that’s changing.
Why Marketing Creative is the New Gold
In the post-IDFA era, targeting has become far less reliable. Behavioral signals are harder to track. Algorithms are getting better, but also more generic.
The last major performance lever left? Creative.
Top-performing brands now rely on:
- Emotionally resonant messaging
- Rapid creative iteration
- Psychologically targeted storytelling
But 98% of creative misses the mark simply because they don’t know what drives their audience beneath the surface.
Making the Psychology-Marketing Connection: Real Benefits for Real Marketers
Seasoned marketers have seen countless tools promise audience insights that ultimately delivered generic demographic data at best. The fundamental challenge has always been the same: truly understanding what makes your audience tick at a psychological level.
This is where psychological insights create genuine value for marketers struggling with creative performance. When you can tap into the deeper motivations driving your audience’s decisions, everything changes.
From Surface Demographics to Psychological Drivers
Traditional audience targeting relies heavily on basic demographics and past behaviors. But knowing someone is a 34-year-old from Chicago who previously bought running shoes tells you almost nothing about why they make the decisions they do.
The marketers who consistently outperform their competition are those who speak directly to core psychological motivations. Understanding the bridge between psychology and marketing means uncovering the specific values, personality traits, and intrinsic motivations that actually drive conversion.
Translating Psychology into Practical Marketing Elements
One of our gaming clients had been targeting “competitive gamers” with achievement-focused messaging for months with diminishing returns. When we analyzed their audience’s psychological profile, we discovered their most valuable players were actually driven more by social connection and collaborative experiences than individual achievement.
Within three weeks of shifting their creative to emphasize team play and social bonds, they saw a 28% increase in player retention and a 42% boost in social shares. The audience hadn’t changed — only the psychological understanding had improved.
Continuous Psychological Refinement
The most powerful aspect of incorporating audience psychology into your creative process isn’t just the initial insights, but the continuous refinement. Whereas before you might make educated guesses about what creative would resonate, now you’ll build on validated psychological patterns.
This iterative approach based on psychological data consistently helps teams escape the creative rut of recycling the same ineffective approaches. Instead of wondering why 98% of your creative isn’t scaling, you’ll understand exactly which psychological triggers are driving performance in the winning 2%.
Solsten Chat: The Creative Copilot You’ve Been Waiting For
Solsten Chat is a new kind of AI assistant. One that’s built on:
- Deep audience psychology
- Real psychographic segmentation
- Brand voice control
It’s more than a mere content generator. It’s a performance creative engine.
With Solsten Chat, you can:
- Generate messaging and scripts based on audience motivations
- Match tone and emotion to each segment’s communication style
- Produce creative briefs that align with what your users care about
Want to make a high-retention Instagram ad for women who value self-expression and independence?
Solsten Chat will give you a creative script, CTA, and visual prompt in seconds.
Need ad copy for high-conscientiousness males who care about optimization and mastery?
Solsten Chat has the prompt, tone, and value prop ready.
Go From Data to Creative in Minutes
Solsten’s psychographic engine is built on:
- The world’s largest audience psychology dataset
- Over 20,000 brands and 100,000 interest groups
- Millions of data points across values, personality, and motivations
This lets Solsten Chat:
- Suggest ad creative themes that match psychological drivers
- Recommend visuals, CTAs, and formats based on past high-performers
- Personalize content by segment; not just by age or gender, but by mindset and behavior
Ad Creative That Actually Converts
Consider these insights from AppsFlyer:
- Creatives with male celebrities get more spend, but those with female celebrities slightly outperform on social retention
- Games that scale are 3x more prolific in creative production than the next tier down
The takeaway? Quantity helps, but quality wins. And quality means alignment with your audience’s values, emotions, and aesthetic preferences.
Solsten Chat helps you:
- Test faster
- Personalize deeper
- Iterate smarter
Why Personalization is Everything
Now more than ever, performance creative is about one thing: relevance.
Solsten Chat helps you:
- Match your message to the emotional tone of your audience
- Adapt visuals and language for each psychographic segment
- Stay in brand voice across channels and creative formats
This is the future of performance marketing. And it’s available now.
Ready to Create Ads That Perform?
If you’re ready to:
- Break through the 2% creative ceiling
- Lower CPAs and improve ROAS
- Build content that feels crafted for every customer
Then you’re ready for Solsten Chat.
Start free or book a demo today.
FAQs
1. What is Solsten Chat?
Solsten Chat is a psychologically intelligent AI chat tool that helps marketers generate personalized ad content based on audience psychology.
2. How is this different from using ChatGPT or Claude for ad copy?
Solsten Chat is trained on our enormous database real psychological profiles, not just language models. It aligns your creative with the exact motivations of your target segments.
3. Can Solsten Chat help us generate video scripts or influencer prompts?
Yes. You can generate full scripts, CTAs, tone recommendations, and even creative briefs tailored to different audiences.
4. Does Solsten Chat help with targeting or just content?
Both. It helps you understand which psychographic segments to target and how to communicate with each segment effectively.
5. How do I know what audience traits to focus on?
Solsten gives you instant access to audience psychographics, across gaming, wellness, consumer goods, and more. That way, you know what matters most.
6. Can I use Solsten Chat if I’m a small team?
Absolutely. It’s designed for both solo creators and large performance marketing teams who need scale and insight.
7. Does Solsten Chat support multiple languages or regions?
Yes. You can generate regionally adapted creatives and localize tone and messaging based on audience psychology.
8. How do I get started?
Visit solsten.io to start your free account or book a personalized demo.
Win the Creative Game With AI That Knows Your Audience
Solsten Chat is more than a content tool. It’s a personalized creative strategist powered by the minds of your customers.
