Creativity really is the new targeting…for now

In the past week or so, two people have told me unprompted that ‘creativity is the new targeting’.

I dismissed it the first time. I’d seen Meta use the slogan in an advertorial for its AI ad products, and I didn’t want to look like a rube by giving editorial space to a message that a platform is paying* to put in front of brands and agencies.

After the second time, however, I started asking around, and it turns out that this mantra is fast becoming accepted practice within the industry.

The gist of it is that online platforms have become so sophisticated at serving users relevant content that advertisers don’t need to stipulate which audiences they want to target; they just need to design ads that appeal to certain types of people, and then trust the algorithms to find them.

It didn’t originate with Meta, of course. It was TikTok’s interest graph that first demonstrated the potency of an algorithm that shows people content based on what they like, rather than who they like. Now, almost every major platform’s got one, and the copycats keep coming.

But not every platform with a TikTok-style algorithm is sophisticated enough to find a brand’s audience without targeting. The people I spoke to mentioned TikTok, Meta and YouTube, and also Google and Amazon outside of social media. (LinkedIn is a bit of an anomaly because the personal data users give the platform — job title, experience, etc — is valuable for B2B marketing and safe from the various privacy laws and protocols, so it still makes sense to target people granularly there, even if you have to shell out for the privilege.)

Not every kind of brand should let their creative do the targeting, either. If a company can’t afford to spend significant amounts of money on advertising on a regular basis, it’s unlikely to ever reach a broad enough audience to feel the benefit of it.

But when this approach works, it really works. ‘And the more pointedly the creative speaks to a specific group, the more its delivery skews towards that group,’ says Aengus Boyle, a senior director at VaynerMedia London. ‘To the point that we’ve seen things with no targeting delivering pretty much entirely to a specific age demographic.’

Even when the algorithms don’t work as intended and deliver the message to an unexpected audience, ‘there can be really interesting insights that come from that,’ adds Boyle.

You could almost imagine a future in which brands don’t need to think about targeting at all for this kind of work — but not quite.

One reason, says Carat UK’s chief strategy officer, Matt Willifer, is that the platforms are black holes for data, and if clients don’t have the audience information to know why a campaign has succeeded, it’s not really their success to replicate. Then there’s all the optimising to do after the campaign’s gone live.

Within these environments, audience targeting is an even more vital part of the creative process, too. In some cases, that means pointing out to creative agencies what kinds of content people choose to interact with on the platforms. In others, it’s creating broad interest groups that are relevant to the brand out of subcultures and trends.

It’s more diffuse work, not less, says Callum McCahon, Born Social’s executive strategy director. ‘Rather than relying on one big unifying insight about the audience,’ says Callum, ‘you need tons of micro insights**, and you need to do a lot of testing and learning.’

To get it right, media and creative agencies must work hand in glove, but that’s exciting, says Willifer, and logical. When people are getting brand messages from influencers, widgets and experiences, the distinction between media and creative is largely an artificial one, anyway.

So far, so good, then. The only thing that I’m not sure about is how much ‘creativity is the new targeting’ relies on everyone treating impressions as more or less fungible.

Professor Felipe Thomaz, from Oxford’s Saïd Business School, has been arguing for a few years that not all reach is equal, and now he’s working with Wavemaker to find out why, by analysing over a million purchase journeys across various markets and categories.

Thomaz and Wavemaker’s paper is supposed to be published later this year. If it shows how an impression on one platform has a different effect on someone than an impression somewhere else, and it’s compelling enough to overcome industry inertia, then attitudes to targeting may shift again, quite sharply.

As Thomaz said on a podcast released on Tuesday, ‘There’s been an over simplification of the media planning and buying process […] Media planners have known this forever.’

James Swift, editor, MediaCat UK

* For the avoidance of all doubt, Meta has never paid MediaCat UK to promote the idea that creativity is the new targeting. We’d probably be the ideal place to put an advertorial campaign like that…but whatever.

** Is this more evidence that the future of brand building is ‘lots of littles’?

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is one of the most lucrative entertainment properties of all time, generating $8.5bn of revenue for publisher Rockstar Games since its release in 2013.

After waiting for more than a decade, fans of the game are finally going to get their sequel in the autumn. Rival games studios are terrified that their new titles will be ignored amid the frenzy for GTA VI. Marketers should be thinking hard about how they can be a part of it.

According to Midia Research, GTA players make for a desirable audience. They use social media more hours per week than a typical person, and more than other gamers. They spend more time on other types of media entertainment (TV, podcasts, video and music), too. They’re also receptive to influencers, as long as they’re the right ones.

Rockstar doesn’t put real ads into its flagship games (just satirical ones), so in-game advertising will likely be off-limits for GTA VI. But that still leaves plenty of wiggle room for brands that know how to think outside of the (X)box.

Christian Perrins, head of strategy at Waste Creative, says the launch date is probably the most fertile opportunity, especially those that know how to link their products to that link to the setting of the game, which includes a fictionalised version of Miami called Vice City.

‘Think about how you can enhance the GTA VI player experience, or take part in the conversation’, he says. ‘Fashion brand? Time for an exclusive Miami-style tropical beachwear range. Pizza company? Time to perfect the Miami Feast deal, with seafood toppings and Key lime pie dessert.’

Live streams will be valuable real estate, too. Twitch users watched 1.4bn hours of GTA V content in the past year — more than a decade after the game’s release — ‘just imagine how big the explosion in streaming will be when VI drops’, says Perrins. ‘Think beyond Twitch and YouTube ads, too — consider partnering with creators in playful, unexpected ways, so that you’re part of the content, not window dressing’, he advises.

Community spaces, where fans come together to talk about the new game, will also be a deep well from which marketers can draw. Reddit, which has a good offering for targeting users and a broad suite of ad formats, is a good bet, according to Perrins.

You probably won’t have to clamber over other brands to get noticed, either. Most marketers’ gut instinct will be to avoid GTA VI because it’s a chaotic and violent game. That’s fair enough, but we reckon the risks of backlash are slim. People are too concerned with mayhem on social media to care about rampages in Vice City.

Itaú Bank, the largest banking institution in Latin America, turned to football when trying to drive traffic to its online marketplace (Itaú Shop) during Black Friday last year.

More specifically, it transformed pitch hoarding ads into interactive touchboards that revealed discount vouchers whenever the ball made contact with them.

The campaign drew 20 million people to the marketplace, driving a 400% increase in first-time users as well as a 35% increase in customers making their first purchase.

Africa Creative, the agency behind the campaign, discussed the media strategy with MediaCat: ‘We used a media format in a different way but we also had a lot of supporting media talking about it. We used social media during the day before the game, which was at 9pm in Brazil. On the day, we used the bank’s social media to tell fans, “Pay attention, you’re going to have a surprise if the ball goes out of the field tonight.” We also used OOH media around the stadium, informing people about the campaign.’

The Touchboard Discounts campaign took place during one of the deciding matches of the Brazilian Championship to guarantee a full stadium and ensure maximum reach.

Netflix announced during its Q4 2024 earnings call this week that it had doubled its ad revenue year-over-year, and it expects to do it again in 2025.

The streaming giant wrapped up the year with 302 million subscribers, 19 million of which were added in Q4. Surprisingly, ad-supported plans are becoming increasingly popular — accounting for 55% of new subscriptions in the last quarter.

Engagement on these plans was also healthy, with view hours per member reportedly being similar to those on the ad-free plans.

Netflix further expects to ‘transition from crawl to walk’ in 2025 — and its own ad stack is hailed as ‘a big part’ of this transformation.

‘The biggest initial benefit we have of using our own ads server is just enabling us to offer more flexibility, more ways of buying for advertisers, fewer activation hurdles, just improving the overall buyer experience. And of course, that is meant to drive increased sales and the ease of transacting with Netflix,’ Gregory Peters, co-CEO, president and director of Netflix, said.

The ad tech platform will bring even more opportunities for advertisers in the future as it continues to enhance its data collection, measurement and reporting.

The number of employees in media agencies in the UK, according to the 2024 IPA Agency Census, up from 11,932 in 2023.

The proportion of executive positions held by women in media agencies increased from 37.7% to 41%, but the proportion of C-suite jobs held by people from non-white backgrounds fell, from 11.6% to 10.4%. And both the gender and ethnicity pay gaps widened.

The average gender pay gap in media agencies was 19.7% in 2024, up from 8.6% in 2023, and the ethnicity pay gap has increased from 23.6% to 32.7% over the same period.

Hybrid working is still the norm, or at least it was when the survey was carried out in September, with only 7.5% of agencies saying that their staff were in the office four days a week or more.

By Svilena Keane, content and social media editor, MediaCat UK

I must begrudgingly admit that I do — on occasion — find Google’s AI search snippets useful. Only for quick information, not proper research. But even this feels like a betrayal to journalism.

Referral traffic from social media to publishers is already dwindling; the Reuters Institute found that aggregate Facebook traffic to news has dropped by 67% in the last two years and traffic from X is down by 50%.

And now, it says, ‘publishers are worried that search traffic may be next to fall’ as AI-generated summaries gradually takeover.

Aggregate traffic from Google search isn’t declining yet, but traffic from Google Discover — the AI snippets and select news links that appear at the top of the search page — has grown by 12% in the last year.

Rather than fight, some publishers are striking deals with AI companies. News Corp, Reuters, the Associated Press, Financial Times and LeMonde have all signed agreements to license their content to OpenAI, and Agence France-Presse has accepted millions of euros to allow Mistral to access its articles.

Other key players that are likely to further disrupt media consumption habits are Perplexity and ProRata — with the latter launching the beta version of its AI-search engine (gist.ai) last month and the former adding a discovery feature that offers users a personalised news feed. A tailored news service could easily attract even more readers, especially those who value quick access and convenience.

In the end, TikTok only shut down in the US for 14 hours last week. It was as confusing as it was anti-climatic. Here’s the state of play at the time we’re going to press (24 January)

• On Monday, after making assurances to the platform, President Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok 75 more days to either comply with a national security law that requires it to either sell its US operations or cease operating in the country. There appears to be some disagreement about whether this executive order can be relied upon.
• TikTok is once again online for people in the US that have already got the app.
• TikTok is still not available to download from the Apple or Google app stores.
• Other apps owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, have also been removed from app stores.
• TikTok users in the United States cannot receive updates for the app.
• YouTube creator MrBeast apparently wants to buy TikTok’s US business. Trump has said that he’d be happy to see either Elon Musk (who already owns X) or Tesla CEO Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison buy it.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back with another newsletter in a fortnight, or 24 TikTok shutdowns.

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