Posted In: Digital by
Molly Winterbottom,
September 7, 2026
By Molly Winterbottom, Paid Digital Account Manager
Paid social has seen major changes in the last year, with huge shifts in targeting, tracking, and
how we measure results. We have entered an era where many granular interests are being
stripped as targeting options, and the platforms are pushing more and more for broad,
AI-powered campaigns. This does not mean that Meta no longer knows what music you like,
what magazines you read, or how long it takes you to go from consideration to purchase. And it
doesn’t mean that you have no control over who sees your ads and how you segment
audiences; it just means you do it differently now. The strongest lever for audience targeting is
no longer at ad set level, but instead it lies in your ad creatives.
Saying audience targeting has disappeared isn’t completely true, and actually you could argue it
has gotten better. Platforms now do a better job at analysing ad creatives and matching them to
the most relevant audiences, with the key recognition being that one product doesn’t mean one
audience. You have to consider the different motivations, buying habits, scrolling behaviour, pain
points, and even sense of humour. And that’s why creative can’t be ‘one size fits all’.
And, if creative now drives performance, platforms naturally want more of it. Platforms now
typically expect more creatives per ad set, multiple formats, multiple hooks, different styles,
different messaging. A once-a-season refresh just doesn’t cut it.
This has also changed the role of a paid social manager. We haven’t all suddenly become
creative directors overnight, and nor should we. But we do have to think more creatively. The
feedback loop between paid social and creative teams has become much shorter, because the
people analysing performance need to be feeding those learnings back into the people making
the ads on a larger and faster scale. Creative strategy can no longer be an afterthought
because creative has become one of the biggest drivers of paid social performance.
So how do you balance creative quantity with creative quality? Don’t worry, I am not going to tell
you to get a bigger team. Instead, you have to think in systems; one shoot should be able to be
transformed into multiple assets. For that one product shot of a rubber duck, you can frame it as
a collectable, a way to make bath time easier, a silly gift for a close friend, a holiday must-have.
Add motion and creative video, overlay reviews, trial different USPs, find the perfect hook
(a-duck).
Fortunately for all of this, AI is here to help; unfortunately, it won’t stop trying to help. Meta is a
particular pain for adding auto enhancements; you have to spend your time turning off the AI
backgrounds, tonally off music, and asset expansions that stretch and warp. The good news is,
it is getting much better, and there are plenty of tools that can really speed up creative output.
We just have to tiptoe around the contradictory messaging that platforms are emphasising
original/authentic content while simultaneously building more generative AI into advertising
workflows.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between quality and quantity; the best ongoing truth
in marketing is that your brand identity is pivotal in long-lasting success. So don’t throw the
brand guidelines away, but think about how they can be expanded for paid social channels. If
you are using UGC creators, it is not vital that they use exactly the same wording as you, but
that they hold the same values. If you have detailed buyer personas, think about who might sit
on the outskirts of that. The goal isn’t ‘quantity at all costs’ but to have a creative machine with
tight feedback loops that allows for ongoing learnings and informed testing.
Don’t just look at the bottom line; every metric tells a different story, and you need them all to
form a whole picture. Check out the thumbstop rate, hold rate, click-through rate, time spent on
site, post reactions, and whatever other data you can get your hands on. Here is where the
feedback loop sits. If the thumbstop rate is good but retention is low, re-test the hook and rebuild
the rest. If CTR is great but conversion is low, investigate on-site behavior. Use the data to
make informed hypotheses and feed them back for the next round of creatives.
Creative is no longer a one-off deliverable. Good, bad, or indifferent are all learnings that should
feed the next round, creating a continuous cycle of: Create → Analyse → Learn → Build the
next version.
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