For years, media agencies built their competitive advantage around two key deliverables: finding the right audience and buying media effectively, writes Shah Ghaffurian, CEO of media agency Magic.
Today, those core capabilities have become increasingly automated – machine learning now handles audience selection, bidding and campaign optimisation, while sophisticated targeting tools are available to almost every media agency.
The media agencies that succeed over the next decade won’t simply “buy” better media, they’ll turn to creative – the new primary lever in digital media.
It means we are moving to a creative-first media environment.
Creative now determines performance
According to Meta, half of its performance is determined by creative. For brands, that means half of every marketing dollar’s effectiveness is determined not by where advertising appears, but by the message people see.
Creative is now where brands win. Strong creative doesn’t just generate better results, it makes media more efficient by reducing wasted ad spend. Platforms like Meta and Google reward relevant, engaging ads with stronger quality signals, improving auction performance and reducing the cost required to reach customers. Put simply, better creative often means lower ad impressions and click costs and stronger conversion rates.
So, how can brands tap into the cost savings and performance lift of ‘good’ creative?
The digital environment has become increasingly competitive, with consumers exposed to around 5,000 ad impressions daily. Gone are the days of the print newspaper as the source of truth; now, advertisers are trying to stand out across multiple channels and challenger brands.
With the war for attention at an all-time high, the value of time spent on a creative asset can’t be underestimated. For example, brands can see a 10 per cent awareness lift if attention is held for 1.4 seconds - and each extra second adds an additional 11 per cent awareness.
So, we just need an ad that grabs attention, right? Well, not quite.
Distinctiveness turns attention into memory
We’ve witnessed the rise of “same, same” when it comes to brand identity. Categories like luxury sportswear, automotive and home decor increasingly rely on similar aesthetics, messaging and creative styles to resonate with audiences.
Sure, your ad might attract attention if it’s in-line with category sentiment, but if it looks like every other brand, consumers will struggle to remember your face among the crowd.
This is where distinctive brand assets become critical to cutting through the clutter. Distinctive creative and attention work collectively to build both immediate performance and long-term brand growth. Attention captures the audience, allowing brands to land a message, while distinctive, consistent assets build recall, prompting your audience to take action.
Creative now influences targeting
Creative assets no longer simply speak to an audience; they increasingly determine which audience is reached. This shift has been driven by machine learning, which has replaced platform-led optimisation with creative-driven targeting.
And now, the algorithm scans the creative to choose the right audience. Platforms analyse creative, alongside billions of behavioural signals and vast first-party and pixel data points, evaluating copy, imagery, video, landing pages and historical performance to predict which users are most likely to respond to content. This process effectively takes the work of manually defining audiences out of the media agency’s hands; instead, letting creative and ad intent determine targeting.
If creative now drives targeting, optimisation and pricing, it needs to be built differently.
Brands should look to diversify their creative, using a range of assets to build audience segmentation. Instead of creating one generic campaign, marketers should create multiple creative angles, each designed around a distinct buying moment, with different messages targeted to different mindsets.
Audiences are now forming around intent, not demographics. Utilising an intent mapping framework to devise content focuses on building ads around human moments, solving a customer’s tension points across every content stage.
The framework considers:
- Human moment: define the moment and the mindset. Begin with a real customer situation – identify the recurring problem, the desired outcome and the trigger that pushes someone into a buying mindset.
- Product solution: connect the human moment to the product, highlighting the feature that solves the problem, the benefits and the proof that demonstrates credibility.
- Creative angle: define the creative territory, particularly the broader customer moment the creative is built around, the core message and the strategic role the creative is designed to test.
- Execution: ensure the ad has a hook that identifies the trigger, a story that moves from tension to solution, a clear outcome and a call to action.
Every ad should be divided into parts that can be tested independently, against a defined metric. Creative isolates the underperforming module and optimises the part that’s failing, which prevents the need to reinvent the wheel.
Creative is now the core lever for media agencies, and used well in many guises, will be the difference between brands that win and brands that fail.
