Sometimes Exceptional Ad Creative Comes from Strategic Restraint, Not Big Swings

When creative teams start swinging too big, it’s often because they’ve lost sight of the fundamentals.  At its core, advertising is meant to deliver results without compromising the audience’s experience. When teams fall too deeply in love with their own ideas, the work starts chasing recognition instead of KPIs, and creative ambition overtakes strategic purpose.

Powerful creative has never been easier to make, and never harder to master. With an expanding universe of tools promising faster and flashier results, restraint has become one of the rarest skills in the industry. The strongest work doesn’t shout. It earns attention with clarity, intent, and a disciplined sense of what not to do.

The Philosophy of Restraint

Zynga’s Creative Director of Advertising, Matt Sharpe, has spent more than a decade shaping mobile advertising with that philosophy in mind. As a contributor to the IAB Tech Lab, he helped introduce the industry’s Creative Guidelines and Best Practices in Advertising in Gaming, setting standards designed to make digital ads less intrusive and more effective. He has led creative planning for global brands like Disney and McDonald’s, and today guides a team focused on building ads that feel natural within the gaming experience rather than forced into it.

Sharpe sees the growing overlap between ads and entertainment as a positive evolution when done well. “The goal is to create an experience that engages and entertains the person viewing the ad. It shouldn’t be boring or redundant. You want the ad to not absolutely suck. When entertainment and advertising blend well, everyone wins,” he says.

The Art of Translation

A crucial part of Sharpe’s team is helping brands communicate in a way that feels native to players. “We take the core elements of a brand’s message and present them in a way that meets players where they are,” Sharpe says. “It shouldn’t feel airdropped into the experience. You want it to feel as seamless as possible.”

That philosophy stands in sharp contrast to the “innovate at all costs” mindset that often drives teams toward overproduction. Sharpe cautions that big swings are rarely the problem, but unfocused swings are. “Just because you can deploy hundreds of creative variants doesn’t mean you should,” he says. “When creative teams start taking big swings for the sake of being impressive, it tells me they’ve lost sight of the project’s purpose and need to recalibrate.”

Purpose Over Novelty

For Sharpe, the real danger comes when novelty or complexity becomes a goal in itself. That’s when creative gets louder but less effective, diluting the brand’s voice in a flood of experimentation. The key difference, he says, is intention. Experimentation is valuable, but only when it serves a clear objective. “Sometimes you have to try something to learn it’s not right for you,” he says. “You test it, you reflect, and you decide whether it aligns with your goals. If it doesn’t, you put it aside and revisit it when it might.”

The Success Pyramid

To help teams stay anchored, Sharpe uses a framework he calls the Success Pyramid, a tool designed to bring discipline back to the creative process. The concept is simple: purpose first, style second. The base of the pyramid is the client’s KPIs. Everything else builds from that foundation. “We start with what the client is actually trying to achieve,” Sharpe explains. “From there, we identify what elements need to appear on screen to communicate those goals effectively.”

The process is intentionally conversational, not tactical. Sharpe compares it to meeting someone for the first time. You don’t introduce yourself by listing your full biography. You structure what matters most, reveal information thoughtfully, and build toward connection. “Once the core priorities are set, we layer in the brand’s identity like paint,” he says. “Adjusting things like scale and placement draws attention where we want it, but it all sits on top of a clear foundation.”

Crawl, Walk, Run

This stepwise approach helps de-risk the creative process, especially for brands new to gaming. By moving in deliberate steps, Sharpe’s team builds trust while ensuring the work doesn’t drift from the strategy. The framework also helps rein in the temptation to over-engineer concepts, pushing teams to make thoughtful choices instead of chasing every possibility.

The Payoff of Creative Maturity

Ultimately, Sharpe believes that frameworks, constraints, and even the occasional failed experiment all support the same goal: building creative maturity. Maturity, he says, is an earned progression. First, a brand must show up consistently, establishing a recognizable identity and voice. Then it must reach a stage of polish, where audiences begin to expect a certain level of quality. Only then has the brand earned the right to deliver a calculated moment of disruption.

“When you’ve built that foundation, you can break expectations in a way that feels deliberate and deserved,” Sharpe says. “That’s the creative payoff. It’s the moment when discipline and daring finally meet and the audience can’t look away.”

In Sharpe’s view, true creative excellence doesn’t come from the biggest swings. It comes from the right ones: choices made with purpose, clarity, and enough restraint to let the message shine.

Matt Sharpe | Creative Director of Advertising

Matt Sharpe serves as Creative Director of Advertising at Zynga, where he helps guide campaigns for brand partners across the company’s portfolio of titles. Sharpe is a 20-year veteran of the tech and advertising space, with a focus on creating customized, engaging experiences. Past and current client experience includes NBC, FOX, Disney, Progressive, Hasbro and more.