At the time, campaign success was driven mostly by the power of the platforms themselves: algorithms that optimized in real time, extensive targeting that found exactly who you wanted, and an audience that was quickly adopting social commerce. If your targeting was sharp and your spend was steady, you could still drive results, even if your creative was considered below average.
Fast forward to today, and a lot of that has changed. The platforms, the users, and the algorithms have all evolved, and creative is now the biggest lever you can pull.
Why Poor Creative Now Means Poor Performance
As the landscape continues to evolve every moment, creative now plays a much larger role in determining performance. Here’s why:
1. Consumers are Oversaturated
Every scroll, swipe, and tap brings another ad. Platforms are competing for user time and attention, and algorithms are trained to surface content that feels native, that fits seamlessly into the feed and doesn’t immediately read as an ad. That means creative has to do more than look good. It has to feel right for the platform, the moment, and the users’ mindset.
2. Automated Campaigns Changed the Game
From Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaign to TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaigns and Pinterest’s Performance+, every major platform now offers some version of an automated, machine-learning-driven campaign structure.
These setups rely less on detailed audience targeting and more on behavioral signals like how users engage, what they click, and what holds their attention. Instead of manually selecting who sees your ad, you’re trusting the algorithm to find the right people based on how your creative performs. That shift means your creative is now your targeting strategy.
3. Creative Drives Auction Performance, and You Can’t Opt Out
Even if you’re not running fully automated campaigns, you’re not off the hook. Algorithms across all major platforms prioritize creative performance in auctions. So even if you’ve opted out of features like Meta’s Advantage+ Audience Expansion, your ads still compete in an environment where engagement and relevance are everything. If your creative doesn’t connect, your cost to reach (and convert) will go up. Because creative now drives so much of performance, best practices have evolved too. Meta, for instance, recommends having at least 10 active ads within Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns to maintain variety and delivery.
This Shift Isn’t a Threat: It’s an Opportunity
At first, this can feel daunting. For years, performance marketers didn’t have a reason to push creative boundaries; the algorithms and audience did a lot of the heavy lifting for us. Performance and competition didn’t require investment in creative strategy, but now the data is telling us to take calculated creative risks.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s an invitation to collaborate more closely with creative teams, to use our strategic lens to guide testing, and to make creative decisions that directly impact business outcomes. You don’t have to become an art director. But as strategists, we do need to apply structure and discipline to how we test and measure creative impact.
Turning Strategy Into Scroll-Stopping Creative
It’s one thing to say “creative drives performance.” It’s another to actually implement that insight. The best creative strategies don’t just look good; they’re built on audience understanding, budget discipline, and structured testing. Here’s how we bring strategy to the creative process:
1. Through an Audience Lens
Strong creative starts with understanding who you’re talking to and where they are in their journey. That means creating diverse concepts tailored to each audience and stage of the funnel.
When launching a new product, don’t settle for one universal ad. Instead, develop three unique creative concepts that highlight different selling points; just as you would when building distinct audience personas. Consider creating separate remarketing versus prospecting creatives to speak to different levels of familiarity and intent.
Coder Tip: Diversity is king. Giving the algorithm a variety of distinct creative concepts increases the chance that it will find the perfect match between your message and the right user.
2. Through Smart Budget Pacing
The shift to creative-first performance means more ads live at once and that requires smarter budget management. Similar to how you ensure your daily budgets are sufficient, you’ll now need to account for higher daily budgets to ensure ads get enough spend to indicate performance. Beyond daily spend, you will need to balance always-on performance budgets with a defined budget for creative testing.
Coder Tip: Don’t treat every new concept like a full launch. Test creative innovations in smaller, controlled budgets to see how they perform before scaling spend.
3. Through Testing and Measurement
Testing creative effectively isn’t about running endless A/B tests: it’s about creating a structure that supports continuous creative refreshes while allowing enough time in market for meaningful creative learnings and insights. Define a rhythm for creative testing that fits your business cycle. Some ideas will need fast iteration, while others benefit from longer observation periods to collect qualitative insights that inform your next production cycle.
Coder Tip: Go beyond traditional A/B testing. Platforms like TikTok’s Smart+ now make it possible to test multiple creative variables, such as copy, text overlays, and voiceovers, all within a single concept at scale.
Then: Test, Learn, and Scale
Once the foundation is in place, you can start to methodically uncover your creative performance sweet spots:
- What’s the optimal number of ads live for your budget level?
- What’s your creative cadence:how often do you need to refresh before fatigue hits?
- What’s the best mix of ad types (carousel, Spark Ads, shoppable formats, video)?
- What hooks and openings drive scroll-stopping engagement?
- Which creative formats consistently perform strongest—static, product, or video?
No two brands will have identical answers, but that’s the beauty of testing: each client develops their own creative playbook grounded in data. Just as paid social strategy has never been one-size-fits-all, neither is your creative strategy. The only way to find what works is to keep experimenting, testing, and learning. In a world where algorithms decide what gets seen, creativity decides what gets remembered. Now, let’s go make something memorable together!