Your 2024 Digital Strategy Needs to Know This: Creative is the New Targeting.

We have been told by Meta to think of ad creative as the new targeting, which is great in theory, but when it actually comes down to it, what does that actually mean? And how do you make sure your ads will get cut through in an increasingly saturated market. 

Using creative as our ad targeting is really changing the game for the last year. It’s a hard one to stomach in many ways, because it means handing the reins over to Meta, and hoping that that your ad gets off the ground. Personally I am still on the fence about how much control we give Meta, and how much we retain ourselves. What is clear though - if you’re not looking at your creative with a more critical eye as we head into another year of declining ROAS and CPAs climbing - you’re missing opportunities. 56% of all auction outcomes can be attributed to creative, so with those stats, it’s a big miss to not stop and think twice about what you are putting out there. 

Performance marketing is going through a pretty radical shift. I’ve spent so much of my career strategising the best demographics and targeting segments to find customers (and getting excited when I found new and even better data, with even more targeting options), and then bang.  In comes a stack of new privacy legislations and Apple’s depreciation of user identifiers and we’re all struggling in this brand new world.

After many glorious years of being able to follow every single person anywhere around the internet (remember being able to target down to a single person on Facebook?), we’ve all realised that a little bit of privacy is a good thing - and the tech space has responded accordingly.  Less and less information is being collected about individual users' activities online, meaning they’re sending fewer signals back to the advertising platforms we’re all spending our budgets on.  Outside of that, the big players including Meta and Google are putting more and more of their advertising inventory into a big black box - those of you using PMax and ASC would know the struggle.  It’s working, but we’ve got no idea really how, what, who or where.

This trend is only going to continue.

So if you can’t tailor your creative to speak to specific demographics in the way we would like, how do you get cut-through with specific customer you want?

Really. Damn. Good. Creative.

Great content gets attention.  People stop, they view, they share, they interact.  It matters less about who they are, and more about the interest signals they are sending to the machines behind the platforms.  Those little AI bots love when someone stays in platform, and they know that the quickest way to retain their audience’s attention is by serving them an endless stream of engaging content.

As someone who has worked inhouse for over a decade, I can tell you ad creative isn’t alway easy to get right, there are these seemingly invisible boxes that need to be ticked in order for that creative to get cut through, and communicating that back to creative teams can be tough. Here’s what I tend to follow when thinking about creative, and thinking about how it will resonate.

Here’s a few points 

Creative Diversification.

If creative is too similar, Meta’s system doesn't recognise it, and therefore it delivers the same ads to the same audience, or it doesn’t do much at all with it, and we end up optimising it off rather quickly. Not great for ad spend and definitely not great on the bottom line. By diversifying your creative you make it easier for the algorithm to match to the right people. When you are thinking about your creative, guide your creative teams to think about diversifying the visual direction, as well as the messaging. 

It’s no longer good enough to just apply a CTA to a great image, and hope something sticks - instead you need to focus on forging genuine connections and sparking emotions that resonate. We are starting to see low-fi content take off massively across all platforms, with 84% of young consumers agreeing that they like it when brands aren’t perfect, and 79% of young consumers saying they were tired of seeing perfect polished images in advertising.

Start with authenticity.  

The closer your content speaks to who you truly are as a brand, the more relatable and approachable it will be.  Don’t do a big brand photo shoot if that’s not your jam.  If you’ve always shot on an iPhone, keep shooting on an iPhone. Or if you have never shot on an iPhone before, well I would suggest giving it a go. We are a sceptic society, and authenticity is the currency that builds trust and loyalty. Users want to know who you are as a brand, so get them as close to who you as possible.

Get emotional. 

Forget telling someone why your products are so great, tell them which of their pain points it solves, while at the same time making them feel something emotional jolt from what you do. We want an emotional response to our ads, even if it’s for a split second. My rule of thumb is to look at all the ads in one visual display, and if you don’t feel too much from them, then go back to design. 

Be ready to adapt. 

Thanks to our mates over at TikTok, content has never had a faster use by date - so staying relevant means staying part of the conversation.  The best part?  We all now expect low-fi, single-take, minor edits content - and so it’s never been easier or quicker to be part of whatever is trending online. Some of the best performing content I am seeing currently has been thrown together on an iPhone.

Think beyond clicks. 

I get it - those metrics help justify how things are tracking and you’re absolutely not going to get away without including them in the reporting decks.  But you need to go beyond thinking clicks and views. Instead start tracking your thumb stop ratio, and hold rates, this actually informs how the creative is resonating. Don’t pat yourself on the back with 1000 video views, if your thumb stop ratio is .1%. All it means is yes users saw your video, but no they didn’t watch your video, and they probably can't recall your brand's name.  Strategise what’s going to drive engagement, and get that emotional response, then the clicks will come, I promise.

Use Creators.

They create authentic and original content, with their own point of view. They can tell the story that your brand can’t, and they are innately trusted by their audience. They are relatable and personable, and can unlock an audience you might not have access to.

A/B Test everything. 

Twice.  Maybe three times.  Many very wise people have said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, and I absolutely agree.  When you’re building a brand, working for a brand or supporting a brand, you’re so far in the middle of what you want the world to see your brand as, it can be really hard to figure out what the world actually wants to see.  Try new things.  Even if your content is working, keep changing it up until you break something (because we all know the next algorithm change is going to break it anyway - might as well be ready).  I guarantee you’ll find something incredibly unexpected that will just *land* with your online audience. The downside to testing is that you need more of a budget typically, and can only test a few ads at a time, but the insight you can get, can really propel you forward, and save your ad budget going into the future.

The future of paid performance is less about ‘who is my target audience’ and more about how can I create the right type of creative, that sends the right type of signals to the machines, that then in turn lands the right type of customer.

Now go forth and create some really damn good creative.  (And if you need some help, reach out! )