Our team recently joined Meta’s Creative & Creator Summit alongside leaders across fashion, luxury, and retail. The morning wrapped with a great fireside chat between Meta’s Lauren Crandall and L’Oréal’s Neahle Jones, but one message came through loud and clear:
Creative has become the biggest driver of performance.
Meta shared that creative now accounts for 56% of campaign performance—more than targeting or budget. That’s changing the way brands need to think about their organizations. Paid media, organic social, influencer, and brand teams can no longer operate independently. The brands pulling ahead are building systems that make creative collaboration the norm.
Here are our biggest takeaways:
Creative Diversity Is More Than Making Multiple Versions of an Ad
One of the day’s biggest themes was creative diversity, but not in the way many marketers think about it.
Creative diversity isn’t five slight variations of the same asset. It’s a mix of formats, styles, and voices that work together across the customer journey: polished brand creative, lo-fi content, creator videos, UGC, and everything in between.
Meta recommends having roughly five distinct creative assets per ad set, refreshed regularly. There’s a reason why. Creative fatigue happens quickly—conversion rates decline significantly as frequency increases, and similar-looking assets tend to fatigue even faster because Meta serves them to the same audiences.
Start With the Customer, Not the Creative
One framework that really resonated starts long before the creative brief.
First, identify your customer cohorts.
Then, understand what motivates each audience to purchase.
Finally, develop creative concepts around those motivations using a variety of content formats.
When brands approach creative this way, diversification stops feeling like “we need more ads” and becomes a repeatable system built around customer behavior.
Think Vertical First
Video is no longer one piece of the media mix. It’s becoming the foundation.
Today, Meta shared that more than 60% of time spent on Facebook and Instagram is video, 4.5 billion Reels are shared every day, and 79% of surveyed users say they’ve purchased after watching Reels.
One of the most practical tips from the day:
Shoot in 9:16 first.
From there, it’s much easier to adapt into 4:5, square, and static formats. Trying to reverse that process usually creates more work and higher production costs.
Let Creators Create
The conversation around creator partnerships was equally refreshing.
Neahle Jones shared a simple philosophy: give creators the guardrails they need, primarily FTC requirements and brand non-negotiables, but avoid scripting every detail.
The best partnerships happen when brands choose creators whose existing content already aligns with their brand. Trying to reshape a creator into someone they’re not rarely feels authentic to audiences.
For larger strategic partnerships, co-creation becomes even more valuable.
Build Testing Into the Process
Meta continues making creative optimization easier.
Ads Manager can now identify when creative assets are becoming too similar and recommend replacements before fatigue impacts performance.
Creative Testing also allows brands to evaluate up to five creative variations within evergreen campaigns while preserving campaign learnings, making testing a much more scalable part of the creative process.
The Opportunity Ahead
The biggest competitive advantage today isn’t simply creating more content. It’s building an organization that consistently produces better, more diverse creative.
The brands winning aren’t necessarily spending the most. They’re aligning teams around customer insights, investing in creative variety, embracing creator authenticity, prioritizing vertical video, and making testing part of every campaign.
That’s where we see the biggest opportunity moving forward.
