By Makenzie Hancock, Associate Director of Client Strategy & Service
Our team recently attended Meta’s Creative Summit alongside leaders across fashion, luxury, and retail, and one message came through above everything else:
Creative is now the single biggest driver of Meta performance, and the brands pulling ahead are reorganizing around it.
Meta shared that creative now accounts for 56% of campaign performance, more than targeting or budget.
That changes the mandate for marketing leaders. Paid media, organic social, influencer, and brand teams can no longer operate independently. Instead, they’re building operating models that make creative collaboration the norm.
Across the sessions, five themes emerged that every marketer should be thinking about:
- Start with the Customer, Not the Creative
Everything begins here.
The strongest creative strategies don’t start with a brief. They start with customer understanding.
First, identify your customer cohorts. Then, understand what motivates each audience to purchase. Only after that should creative concepts be developed around those motivations across multiple formats.
Approaching creative this way shifts the conversation from “we need more ads” to building a repeatable system rooted in customer behavior. - Treat Creative Diversity as a Mix of Formats and Voices
One of the day’s biggest themes was creative diversity, but not in the way many marketers interpret it.
Creative diversity isn’t five slight variations of the same ad.
It’s a mix of polished brand creative, lo-fi content, creator videos, UGC, and other formats working together throughout the customer journey.
Meta recommends maintaining roughly five distinct creative assets per ad set and refreshing them regularly. The reason is simple: creative fatigue happens quickly. As frequency increases, conversion rates decline, and similar-looking assets often fatigue even faster because Meta delivers them to the same audiences.
The goal isn’t simply producing more creative. It’s producing more varied creative. - Think Vertical First
Video is no longer one part of the media mix. It’s becoming the foundation.
Meta shared that:
More than 60% of time spent on Facebook and Instagram is video
4.5 billion Reels are shared every day
79% of surveyed users say they’ve made a purchase after watching Reels
One of the most practical recommendations from the day was simple: Shoot in 9:16 first.
From there, it’s much easier to adapt assets into 4:5, square, and static formats. Trying to reverse that process typically creates more work, longer production timelines, and higher 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 creators into someone they’re not rarely feels authentic to audiences.
For larger strategic partnerships, co-creation becomes even more valuable, allowing creators and brands to develop content that feels native while still supporting broader marketing goals. - Build Testing Into the Process
Creative optimization continues to become more sophisticated.
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 experimentation a scalable part of the process rather than an isolated initiative.
The Opportunity Ahead
The biggest competitive advantage today isn’t producing more content.
It’s building an organization that consistently produces better, more diverse creative.
The brands winning on Meta aren’t necessarily the ones 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.
As creative continues to drive a greater share of performance, the organizations that treat it as a strategic capability, not just an output, will be the ones best positioned for long-term growth.
