Why creative strategy beats targeting (every time)

In paid media, there's a persistent myth that targeting is the secret sauce. Get your audience segments right, layer enough interest stacks, and the sales will follow.

This isn't wrong, exactly. But it's incomplete — and for beauty and lifestyle brands, it's often what's holding growth back.

The uncomfortable truth about targeting

Meta's algorithm has gotten exceptionally good. Broad targeting — even something as vague as "women 25–45 in South Africa who like skincare" — will find your buyers if you give it enough signal to learn from.

The signal? Creative performance.

When your ads generate clicks, adds-to-cart, and purchases, Meta's algorithm learns who responds positively to your content and finds more people like them. The creative *is* the targeting signal.

What this means in practice

If your creative is generic, your algorithm learns generic things about who responds to generic content. You end up targeting the bargain shoppers, not the buyers you actually want.

If your creative is sharp — rooted in the specific desires, anxieties, and aspirations of your ideal customer — your algorithm finds people who respond to *that*. People who are more likely to buy, more likely to come back, and more likely to tell others.

The creative strategy gap

Most brands we audit have the same problem: their ads look like their organic posts. Beautiful, branded, consistent. And flat.

Paid creative needs to do something different. It needs to interrupt the scroll, make a specific promise, and give a clear reason to act. That takes a creative brief that starts with the customer's psychology — not the brand's aesthetic preferences.

Where to start

Begin by asking: "What does my ideal customer believe about their problem before they discover us?" Then build creative that speaks directly to that belief.

Winning ads are built from insight, tested with rigour, and scaled with intention. That's creative strategy — and it matters more than your targeting stack.