By Angela Mertz, EGC’s VP of Integrated Media For years, the basic formula for Meta advertising was straightforward: media finds the audience followed by creative delivering the message. We selected interests, behaviors, demographics and lookalikes to tell Meta who we wanted to reach. Then we served those people the creative content. That line is getting a lot blurrier. Signals as Seen by Meta As Meta continues to lean further into AI-driven delivery and Advantage+ audiences, the platform is relying less on the narrow audience definitions advertisers once obsessed over and more on signals that help it determine who is most likely to respond. And one of those signals is the ad itself. Meta can interpret the words used in your copy, the context of the message, the imagery and video, and ultimately who engages and converts. In other words, what you say in your ad can help influence who Meta believes should see your ad. That changes the conversation. Imagine we’re advertising a college business program. Traditionally, the media team might build an audience around interests related to business, entrepreneurship, finance, and higher education. But now consider the creative. One ad says:“Turn your interest in business into a career.” Another says:“Thinking about transferring? Finish your business degree at a college built around career outcomes.” Same school. Same program. Potentially very different signals to Meta about the person most likely to respond. This means that creative can’t simply be developed and handed over to media anymore. Media strategy and creative strategy have to start together. Stronger Bond Between Media and Creative Teams If the media team understands who we’re trying to reach, that insight needs to make its way into the creative brief. What matters to this audience? What problem are we solving for them? What language resonates with them? And ultimately, what is going to make them stop and pay attention? And creative needs to understand that those choices aren’t only about making a compelling ad. They’re increasingly helping the platform understand who the ad is for. This doesn’t mean we stop thinking about audience strategy. It means audience strategy is expanding beyond the targeting box in Ads Manager. The audience lives in the targeting. It lives in the data. It lives in the creative. And it lives in the message. The better media and creative teams understand one another, and the sooner their collaborative work begins, the more useful signals we can give Meta to do what its algorithm is increasingly designed to do: find the right person for the right message. And that may be the biggest takeaway. On Meta today, creative isn’t just what we show the audience. It’s becoming part of how we find them. In Closing As AI advances, complemented by Meta’s quick adaptation to these advances, the rules of advertising on the platform are in a constant state of change. To accommodate these current changes, media and creative teams must maintain close communication and be ready to jointly adjust or even pivot to effectively deliver their client’s brand message. At EGC Group, our media team and creative team are always “in sync” to give our clients added peace of mind. Visit our website to learn more about how we operate.
