For years, the skill in paid social was in the targeting. You built careful audiences from interests, behaviours and lookalikes, layered them, excluded the wrong people and then showed each group a suitable ad. Good media buyers were proud of their audience structures, and rightly so.
That world has mostly gone. Meta and TikTok now do better with broad audiences and let their delivery systems find the right people. Privacy changes took away a lot of the data that detailed targeting relied on, and the algorithms got good enough that narrow targeting often just gets in their way.
So who decides who sees your ad now? Increasingly, the ad does.
How the ad does the targeting
When you run a broad campaign, the platform shows your ad to a small mix of people and watches what happens. Who stops? Who watches to the end? Who taps through? Who converts? It then finds more people who behave like the ones who responded.
That means the content of the ad shapes the audience it ends up reaching. A video about retirement savings presented by someone in their sixties will find a different crowd from the same offer presented by someone in their twenties. An ad that opens with “Tired of renting?” attracts different people from one that opens with “Upgrading your family home?”
You haven’t told the platform who to target. The creative has told it for you.
What this means for your creative brief
Brief by buyer, not by format
A lot of briefs still ask for “three statics and two videos”. A more useful brief asks for an ad for each type of buyer you want. The first-time buyer, the upgrader, the person who’s been burned by a competitor. Each one has different worries and responds to a different opening.
Make the concepts genuinely different
Ten versions of the same idea with different background colours will all find roughly the same people. Five concepts with different angles, different people on screen and different first lines will find five different pockets of the market. The second approach gives the algorithm far more to work with.
Let the first seconds do the qualifying
If you only want homeowners, say so in the opening. “Homeowners in Kent, this one’s for you” will lose some viewers, and that’s the point. The people who keep watching are the ones you want, and the platform learns from them.
Read your results by concept
Once creative is doing the targeting, your reporting needs to follow. Instead of asking which audience performed best, ask which concept performed best, and with whom.
Tag every ad with its angle, its persona and its hook, so you can compare like with like across campaigns. Over time you build a picture of which messages reach which buyers, and that becomes the most valuable thing your account holds. We cover how we structure this in our piece on building a creative testing framework.
Targeting still matters, just less
This doesn’t mean audience settings are irrelevant. Exclusions still matter: existing customers, people who’ve already converted, regions you can’t serve. Location and language settings still matter. Some categories, like credit, housing and employment, come with their own targeting restrictions anyway, which makes the creative even more important.
What’s changed is the balance. Fiddling with interest stacks rarely moves results much now. Adding a genuinely new creative concept often does.
Why this suits an in-house studio
If creative is doing the targeting, then the people making the ads and the people running the account need to be talking every day. A media buyer who spots that a certain angle is finding cheap, high quality leads needs a new version of that angle next week, not next quarter.
That’s why we keep our creative studio and our media team in the same place. It isn’t about efficiency for its own sake. On today’s platforms, it’s simply how targeting works.