The way brands think about Meta targeting has changed.

A few years ago, performance marketers were obsessed with audiences. Interests, lookalikes, demographics, exclusions, stacked targeting. Finding the right audience was often the biggest part of the strategy.

Today, Meta is much better at doing that work itself.

The challenge is increasingly about what you put in front of the algorithm.

Your creative tells Meta who your product is relevant to.

A protein brand might create one ad around convenience, another around high protein, another around weight loss and another around taste. Each one can attract a completely different type of customer, even when they're all running against the same broad audience.

That's because the creative is doing more than selling the product.

It's helping Meta understand who should see it.

This is why we think creative testing has effectively become a form of targeting.

If you're only running one or two ads, you're giving Meta very few signals to work with. You're also limiting the number of reasons someone might buy.

More creative means more angles, more messages, more hooks and more opportunities for Meta to find pockets of demand within a broad audience.

And it doesn't necessarily mean producing completely different ads every week.

Small changes can create entirely different propositions: a different problem, benefit, use case, customer type or reason to believe.

The brands that win on Meta aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated targeting structure.

They're often the ones that understand creative is the targeting.

So before creating another interest stack or rebuilding your campaign structure, look at your ads.

Are you giving Meta enough different messages to work with?

Because sometimes the audience isn't the problem.

You just haven't given the right person a reason to stop scrolling yet.