#213 - The Creative Briefing Is Now a Media Decision

Overall, what's really becoming clear is that creative is a key driver of performance.

And sure, it's always been a part, but now it's actually one of the leading ways that we're getting the results, we're getting to the right people.

We're driving the things that we want out of campaigns.

And it's not even exclusive to just one channel.

A lot of the industry is moving that way.

And we see maybe one or two start to go in a direction that makes these the kinds of things that we start to employ from a creative perspective.

But I think very much we're seeing creative be a significant driver that can't be ignored.

And I think that's exactly why we need to be talking about what that means for the ways that we develop and the ways that we run our campaigns.

And people think media strategy, media buying is the targeting settings that you're using and how you structure the campaigns and the ad groups and the themes and geo-targeting and audience.

But it's so much more than that.

You can do all those things really well.

And if you don't have the right creative strategy, you could totally take the performance.

Yeah, ultimately, targeting used to be the thing that we focused on.

We had narrow targeting with a lot of control many years ago in the past, and that's certainly not the case anymore.

It's far too broad for that.

And really, targeting in platforms like Meta, for example, have been so reduced to lean on either optimization signals and or creatives.

And the creative that we have there really ultimately helps to drive that targeting in ways that I think a lot of people don't actually understand.

And that means that we're pulling the wrong levers to try to drive that performance.

So that part has certainly shifted, and particularly since there have been a lot of updates in the past year.

Yeah, and I know some of the platform updates, like what's going on with Meta, fill us in, what are the major changes that are driving this?

The big one that people will talk about, of course, in the last year is Andromeda within Meta and the mechanism for ad retrieval within the Meta ad platform.

And it's one of many steps, but it's the first step to determine who actually sees your ads.

And when you pair that with the fact that there's broad targeting, many have heard of Advantage Plus, of course, which has been around for quite some time.

But when those are paired together, what actually happens is the targeting itself is not what you think it is.

It's very broad.