A fresh perspective on marketing

AI in creative marketing has well and truly become part of teams' daily work — from ChatGPT and Claude for research, to Midjourney, Flux, and Arcads for creative production. It helps with research, speeds up brainstorming, supports brief-writing, makes creative variation easier, and shortens the path from idea to first concept. The problem is that two extreme narratives still circle generative AI: either "it'll do everything for you" or "it's useless." The truth is somewhere in between. AI really can take work off a team's plate and speed up specific stages, but it doesn't replace strategy, it doesn't understand the business goal for you, and it rarely delivers a finished asset without iteration, fixes, and quality control.

Mistakes in Meta Ads creatives hurt campaign results more often than wrong settings, a poorly chosen budget, or off-target audiences. Very often the problem starts much earlier — at the creative stage. That's where it's decided whether an ad will carry a clear message, or just become another asset dropped into the campaign with no real role. Today, in a world of Meta Ads, automation, and systems that judge an ad's relevance faster and faster, the creative isn't an add-on to performance work. It's one of the most important elements shaping the result.

"Creative is the new targeting" — this slogan swept through the paid social world in 2026. Not so long ago, your edge in Meta Ads often started with the settings: precise targeting, campaign splits, exclusions, and placements. Today that centre of gravity has clearly shifted. Ad systems analyse more signals faster, earlier, and more broadly than before, and the creative itself is no longer just the "packaging" of an ad. More and more, it's the creative that tells the algorithm who this message is for, in what context it makes sense, and when it's worth showing.

The sales funnel no longer starts in the ad panel — it starts in the audience's head. Whether a customer stops on your ad, recognises their problem, comes to trust the brand, and finally buys depends more and more on what you communicate at each stage of their awareness. That's why an effective funnel is built today not only through targeting, but above all through creative.

Andromeda in 2026 is a hot topic, but plenty of half-explanations still surround it. That's exactly why questions like what is Andromeda, how does it work in Meta Ads, does it change targeting, and what does it actually mean for today's campaigns have become so important for marketers. The thing is, it isn't a new feature in the Meta Ads panel — it's part of a bigger shift in how Meta's ad system works. For advertisers, that means one thing: today, simply "setting up the campaign" matters less and less, and what matters more and more is the quality of the signals you feed the system through your creative, your data, and your overall structure.

Creative strategy in Meta Ads is now one of the most important foundations of an effective ad campaign. In a world of AI, Andromeda, and algorithms that judge ads faster and faster, simply producing graphics and video is no longer enough. For Meta Ads campaigns to be scalable, optimisable, and genuinely able to grow, you need a process: from research and hypotheses, through the brief and creative tests, all the way to insights and iteration. Today, creative strategy isn't an add-on to performance marketing — it's the element that organises your messaging, gives each creative a role, and feeds the algorithms the quality signals they need to act on.

The Meta Ads changes in 2026 aren't a cosmetic refresh of the Ads Manager interface — they're a fundamental shift in how the algorithm works. Not long ago, plenty of campaigns could be carried by a solid setup. A well-narrowed audience, a sensibly set budget, a few exclusions, the right campaign objective — and you were good to go. For Meta Ads in 2026, that's no longer enough. Not because settings have stopped mattering, but because they've stopped being the main source of advantage. Today's ad systems analyse more data, filter messages faster, and make more and more decisions before an ad even reaches the right person.