Success in digital marketing used to be about targeting. If you could identify the right audience, segment it effectively and serve relevant messages at a large scale, your brand would be able to build awareness, generate leads and grow sales.
Brands that mastered strategies such as lookalike audiences, interest targeting, behavioural signals, demographic segmentation and continuous optimisation usually had an edge over their competitors.
Today, however, brands can no longer count on smarter targeting as a major differentiator. After years of advances in artificial intelligence (AI), most advertisers have access to the same tools and algorithms on programmatic advertising platforms. AI solutions such as Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, Google’s Performance Max and TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaigns make automated targeting decisions in real time on advertisers’ behalf.
While this saves time, improves accuracy and reduces manual effort, it also means you have less granular control over targeting decisions in your campaigns. Because all brands now have access to the same AI optimisation tools, the winners are finding new ways to stand out from the rest. Creative, produced at scale, is emerging as the differentiator for the successful brands that attract the right audience, communicate relevance and drive action.
The creative fatigue problem
You can usually depend on the algorithm to find the right audiences for your message. Today, what really matters is making the most of the audience’s attention while you have it. This has become harder in an environment where creative effectiveness is deteriorating faster than ever. What performs well in one month may flop the next. The audience is the same, but the creative has stopped cutting through.
When this happens, optimising budgets, bids and audiences will not necessarily improve results. Given that everyone is using the same automated targeting tools, refreshing creative assets becomes one of the most powerful levers available to your brand. But the challenge that most brands are wrestling with is producing creative executions that stand out at a time when most digital users are fatigued by the thousands of ads they see in their feeds every day.
Brands need to rapidly and constantly produce fresh creative that surprises the audience with personalised, and interesting messages. Forward-thinking brands are increasingly adopting a portfolio approach to creative. Rather than betting on a single campaign concept, they continuously test, learn and iterate. Instead of trying to launch with perfect creative, they aim to learn fast and constantly adjust to the audience’s needs and expectations.
Generative AI transforms the creative pipeline
Generative AI is, for that reason, becoming one of the most valuable tools at a brand’s disposal. These tools are transforming creative production, enabling brands to produce significantly more creative variations than traditional workflows ever allowed. Images, video concepts, copy variations, headlines, calls to action and personalised messaging can be generated in hours rather than weeks.
Responsible advertisers will not use generative AI to replace the human touch because that is the key to creative that stands out and resonates with the audience. Creative people will still drive the big ideas, refine output and ensure brand meaning and emotional nuance remain intact. But AI can accelerate production via concepts such as dynamic creative optimisation (DCO).
This refers to how platforms like Google and Meta can automatically combine different creative elements (including headlines, visuals, descriptions, formats, and calls to action) to generate thousands of possible variations. This allows campaigns to adapt in real time based on audience response rather than users constantly seeing the same static ad in their newsfeeds.
This allows you to move beyond finding the best audience for your message toward identifying the best creative combination for each user. This is a shift every marketer should embrace at a time that Google and Meta are stressing that that Performance Max campaigns and Meta Advantage+ only perform well with high volumes of creative variations. Brands that do not provide ad platforms with more creative variations risk falling beyond the curve.
Platforms like Meta are already forcing Advantage+ Creative Enhancements on campaigns and not every brand likes how these tools adapts the creative. These enhancements are switched on automatically when you create a Meta campaign. We thus recommend that our clients turn each those enhancements off and provide platforms with enough creative variation to drive performance.
The rise of creative analytics
The emergence of creative analytics as a strategic discipline is a related and important trend. For years, marketers primarily analysed media metrics (reach, frequency, cost per click, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend). These metrics remain important, but it is also key to understand why some campaigns succeed and others underperform. Creative analytics analyses visual elements, messaging themes, emotional triggers, pacing, formats and audience responses to help marketers identify the characteristics that drive performance. This gives marketers a more data-driven and objective way to assess creative.
From targeting intelligence to creative intelligence
The future of paid media will not be won by those with access to better targeting tools, but by the brands that develop stronger creative intelligence. These brands will be able to generate more ideas, test faster, learn continuously, decode audience behaviour, and, ultimately, translate insights into better creative. This is, in many ways, a reversal of the model that dominated the last decade. Technology has commoditised targeting. Human insight is becoming the differentiator.
