In this op-ed, Shah Ghaffurian, CEO of Magic, argues that the future of digital performance doesn’t lie in ever-narrower audience segments, but in the psychology of creative. As platforms lean harder on AI and automation, it’s the human touch in messaging, emotion and framing that gives brands their edge.
Creative, not interests targeting, is the key to finding your audience digitally and driving performance thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms.
In a world dominated by self-serve advertising and saturation of messages, creative cut through has become more important than ever in not just discovering the right audience, but capturing their attention as well.
Our newest whitepaper, The Science of Connections, delves into the psychology of consumer motivations and unpacks how different messaging can be the decisive lever in driving performance.
The Rise of Creative Targeting
Facebook once appealed as the birthplace of precise individual-level targeting and hyper-specific audience segmentation. But in more recent years, due to privacy changes and more sophisticated machine learning, digital platforms have evolved to use your creative as the foundation of its learning.
Meta, TikTok and YouTube now read your ad. They scan imagery, captions and text overlays to infer who should see it.
What does that look like? Well for me, it means I am routinely served spots that open with “Hey agency owner…” despite no interest audience existing for that category. The algorithm finds me purely from the creative cue. This makes product angles, status, security, ease and so much more increasingly influential when trying to unlock a fresh pocket of demand.
Messaging Fatigue and The Importance of Creative Testing
In addition to types of messaging, fatigue is also present with audiences tiring faster than ever. Average on-screen attention has fallen 31 percent in the past two decades (Golden Steps ABA, 2025 March 4) and an asset that looks fresh on Monday can feel like wallpaper by Friday.
Unless brands raise content velocity, creative fatigue will drag results down long before the media budget is exhausted.
The Coming Wave of AI Built Ads
Meta’s latest roadmap goes further: soon advertisers will be able to upload a single product image and budget, and its AI will generate copy, visuals and targeting in one click. The promise is speed, but two realities temper the hype…
It’s not here yet and it will still require the right direction to be relevant.
Full generative campaigns remain in closed testing and the reality is most advertisers will still craft their own assets for the foreseeable future.
Additionally, when this feature does launch, it will rely on the prompts you feed it. Hooks, tensions, and unique benefits will all decide whether the output sings or flops. One brand’s AI-assembled ad will outperform another’s only if the human brief behind it is richer.
So What Does This Mean For Brands/Marketers?
Our white paper breaks down the building blocks of high-performing ads so you can brief the AI tools of today and tomorrow with more refined precision.
With a focus on consumer psychology, motivational framing, heuristics and cognitive biases, we expand on messaging methods that drive attention to different need states at different moments of the purchasing journey.
The output of this framework is a modular creative engine built for testing multiple formats and increased volume.
AI may soon handle the some of the mechanics of production and delivery, but imagination stays human. Brands that master the psychology of attention, and supply a broad palette of feelings, frames and formats, will give the machine more to remix, test and learn from.
The Science of Connection is our viewpoint of that future; showing how to turn emotion into scale and scale into a durable advantage. No matter how fast the platforms automate the rest.
