These days an overwhelming amount of attention is paid to video creative, and for good reason! There are countless performance creative agencies that focus primarily on video, almost every growth agency (Thesis included) now offers creative services including video production and post-production, and I find that most discussions online (including FB groups, YouTube videos, Twitter etc.) about FB/IG creative focus primarily on video assets.

That said, in many instances we will see static images that really perform. They might be a little less exciting to work on and optimize, but they can really contribute. With that observation in mind, I pulled data from 14 US D2C ad accounts (including both Instagram and Facebook spend) and used Facebook's Media Type breakdown to look at spend distribution and CPA for both Image and Video assets. Here is the data:

Obviously, this is a tiny sample set so I would take this results with a big grain of salt. That said, I do think it's notable that of the 5 biggest ad accounts 3 of them leverage Image assets quite meaningfully (34-63%). In most cases the Image CPAs are lower than the Video CPAs, but I think that's largely a function of Image assets over indexing to Retargeting/Retention efforts which perform better.

Though it can be tempting to go all in on video assets, I intend to use this data as added inspiration to continue investing in and testing Images. Perhaps you will do the same!

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