Creative is underestimated, targeting overestimated
What if the most powerful performance lever was not targeting, but content? The data is unequivocal. According to the reference study Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness (NCSolutions and Nielsen, 2023), built on nearly 450 sales-effect studies, creative alone generates 49% of the incremental sales generated by advertising. It is, by far, the first factor of effectiveness. Yet advertisers and media agencies estimate that creative accounts for only 19% of the effect on sales (Advertiser Perceptions, 2024). This perception gap is exactly what the formula sums up: content is the new targeting.
Andromeda and the temptation of “produce everything, let the algorithm target”
In a previous article, we analysed how the Andromeda approach pushes advertisers to produce ever more content. As a reminder, Andromeda is the personalised ad retrieval engine introduced by Meta in 2024 (designed with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper chip and the MTIA accelerator). It selects, from tens of millions of ad candidates, the few thousand most relevant, and enables an increase in model complexity of the order of 10,000 times, in the service of ROAS. Combined with Advantage+ automation, this mechanism rewards volume and creative diversity: multiply content, go wide, let the machine find the buyer.
We have doubts about this logic. What matters is not so much deploying every possible narrative to interest everyone, but finding approaches singular and segmenting enough to create difference, impact, and therefore real interest among audiences.
Two opposing models
On one side, a start-up-in-scale-up model: produce everything, say everything, and let the algorithm dig up someone to buy, without built targeting. On the other, a brand approach that has built desirability: building a content proposition designed to interest and bring together as many of its commercial target as possible on common ground.
The difference is fundamental. In the first case, you can do everything to capture attention, but are you building brand equity, that is, lasting demand that will turn tomorrow into organic traffic because the brand is known, recognised and liked? Or are you only doing short term, making yourself even more dependent on media? Our field experience leads us to think that the first route is above all a way of being more dependent on media tomorrow.
Creative remains at the centre of performance
Criticising this logic does not mean dismissing the subject: on the contrary, creative remains at the centre of performance. The stake is not to deploy all the best practices platforms offer, but to question how the brand platform seizes each digital and social opportunity to generate impact. In other words, transposing the brand’s creative strength into a content proposition and strategy that maximise impact.
Our method: start from the audience, not from the platform
This transposition rests on a structured approach, which always starts from the audience to then build the platforms, then the content strategy.
First, understand the personas: who are the targets we want to address, what are their behaviours, on which platforms are they present, and which placements offer maximum impact?
Then, produce insight on a broadened benchmark: what are the most effective ways of writing for social and producing content: testimonial, embodiment, shoot, product staging? It is agency know-how: producing insight, integrating it into the creative, and backing it with a benchmark that identifies a priori what will or will not work.
Finally, the creative foundation: how to fit within a platform’s codes and usages while starting again from the brand. The aim is not to distort a brand that exists beyond social, but to integrate it into this ecosystem and give it a social touch that goes after engagement.
tigrz, sparring partner and accountable for performance
What remains is to find the right place for the social agency to influence the 360 content strategy, even the creative platform. tigrz positions itself as advertisers’ sparring partner, notably for very high-end, premium and luxury brands, to co-build the strategy and then maximise the impact of the budget.
Our conviction is simple: to be accountable for performance, and not to pass the buck by saying “the creative doesn’t work, it’s not our fault”. When creative accounts for half of effectiveness, the social agency cannot be content with buying media. It must be a full stakeholder in brands’ content strategy. That is where real performance is played out.
Going further: our Content & Influence expertise ; tigrz’s social media content strategy.
On the same topic: « Ad formats: the keys to building an effective content strategy » and « How creative AI changes the game: producing differently, not just faster ».
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