Google, Meta and TikTok now run the targeting and read your creative to decide who sees your ads. Industry estimates put creative at around 70% of campaign performance. The lever moved, and most marketers are still pulling the old one.
Audience targeting used to be the craft. Now the algorithm owns it, and the only lever left in your hands is the work itself.
The platforms took targeting away from you. They handed you creative instead. Google's Performance Max, Meta's Andromeda system and TikTok's delivery algorithm now decide who sees your ads, and the main signal they use to decide is the creative itself. The headline, the image, the video. Pick the audience boxes all you like. The machine reads your ad and finds the people it thinks will respond.
This is a genuine shift in where the lever sits. Industry estimates now put creative at roughly 70% of campaign performance, the single biggest factor an advertiser controls. Meta's Andromeda update, introduced in late 2024, flipped the old playbook by treating the advertiser's creative as the primary targeting signal rather than the demographic settings marketers used to obsess over.
Why it matters
For years the skill in paid media was the targeting. Layer the audiences, build the lookalikes, exclude the wrong postcodes. That skill is being automated away. What is left is the thing that was always harder and always mattered more. Can you make something worth watching?
This is good news for businesses that can make strong creative and brutal for those that cannot. If creative is 70% of the result, a thin brief and a stock image are no longer a minor weakness. They are the whole problem. The platforms will happily spend your budget delivering a bad ad to a perfectly chosen audience.
Creative's estimated share of campaign performance now that AI platforms run the targeting.
What to do about it
The craft moved. The marketers who keep treating targeting as the job will keep losing to the ones who learned to make the ad earn its place.