Are you optimising everything except the advert?

A digital campaign isn’t delivering the results you expected. So, what do you do?

You adjust the audience. Add another interest. Exclude an age group. Change the placements. Move some budget around. Perhaps duplicate the campaign and give the platform another chance to find the right people.

It feels productive because something is changing. But what if the campaign settings aren’t the real problem?

What if it’s the advert?

We’ve done it too

Let's be candid. We've sometimes reworked targeting and placements while leaving the same creative in place, even when we suspected it wasn't strong enough.

Those changes were quicker. They didn't need another photoshoot or more design time, and they didn't mean asking a client to invest more in a campaign that wasn't yet delivering.

Sometimes the adjustments helped. But when the creative wasn't connecting, changing the audience could only do so much. We were optimising how the advert was delivered without asking whether anyone cared about the advert.

Marketers underestimate the effect of creative

This isn’t just our experience.

In February 2026, Advertiser Perceptions asked 304 marketers and media agency professionals to estimate how much five factors contributed to advertising sales: brand, creative, reach, recency and targeting.

The respondents estimated that creative accounted for around 23% of the overall sales effect, with targeting close behind at 22%.

Circana research based on nearly 450 sales-effect studies tells a different story. It attributes 49% of incremental sales to creative quality and just 11% to targeting.

Those figures come from US consumer goods advertising, so the balance will differ by sector and platform. But the size of the gap is hard to ignore. Marketers give targeting far more credit than it earns and underestimate what the advert itself contributes.

Targeting can deliver an advert. It can’t make it persuasive

Targeting still matters. Good targeting reduces waste and gives an advert a better chance of reaching people who might be interested. But it only creates the opportunity to be seen. Creative decides what happens next. Reaching exactly the right person achieves very little if the advert is unclear, forgettable or looks like everything around it.

There’s also a danger in targeting too narrowly. People aren’t fixed audience profiles and they don’t always behave as marketers expect. The person who looks unlikely to buy today might become a customer next month. Someone outside the assumed target audience might influence the decision.

Precision can make a campaign look efficient while quietly limiting its potential to grow.

Advertising platforms are taking more control

There’s another reason creative deserves greater attention.

Advertising platforms are increasingly making decisions that marketers once controlled directly.

Google's Performance Max automates bidding, budget allocation, audience discovery, placements and asset combinations. Meta is steering advertisers towards broader audiences and more automated delivery.

These tools can be useful. Platforms have access to signals no advertiser could realistically process by hand and can respond to changes as a campaign runs.

But when every business has access to the same campaign types, objectives and automation, none of it is a competitive advantage. 

What your competitors can't easily replicate is a distinctive idea, a clear proposition and creative that connects with your customers. 

The more the platforms control delivery, the more your contribution comes down to the creative you give them to work with.

Why we keep fixing the cheaper part

Campaign settings are attractive because they’re relatively quick and inexpensive to change.

New creative needs copywriting, design, photography or video, and it can mean approving more investment before knowing how the new work will perform. That's a difficult conversation when money is already being spent.

But avoiding that conversation doesn’t remove the cost. It simply moves it somewhere less obvious.

The creative cost appears clearly on a proposal or invoice. Wasted media spend disappears gradually, a few pounds at a time, every time an ineffective advert is shown.

Weak creative doesn't get cheaper because you leave it alone. You just keep paying to show it to more people.

Better creative doesn’t always mean a bigger production

Investing in creative doesn’t have to mean commissioning an expensive shoot every time performance starts to slow.

Yes, sometimes it does mean producing new photography or video. But it can also mean thinking harder about the idea before anything is produced.

That could involve:

• Testing genuinely different messages rather than minor wording changes

• Focusing on different customer needs, frustrations or motivations

• Making the brand clearer and more recognisable

• Creating assets specifically for each platform and placement

• Refreshing the creative before people become tired of seeing it

The important distinction is between changing an asset and testing a new idea.

A different background colour technically creates another advert, but i’s unlikely to tell you whether a different proposition would make more people care.

How to tell when the creative needs attention

There's rarely one metric that proves the creative is at fault, but there are warning signs:

• The campaign reaches the intended audience but generates little response

• Performance keeps declining as the same adverts are shown repeatedly

• Several audiences respond similarly poorly to the same creative

• The branding is so subtle that the advert could belong to almost anyone

• The campaign gets clicks but not the right enquiries or sales

None of this means targeting should be ignored. It means the creative deserves the same scrutiny as the settings.

Before changing the targeting again

The next time a campaign underperforms, pause before opening the audience settings and ask:

• Would this advert get my attention if I didn't already know the brand?

• Is the main message immediately clear?

• Does it address something the audience cares about?

• Is there a strong reason to act or remember it?

There will still be times when targeting, bidding or campaign structure needs to change. But sometimes the answer isn’t another campaign adjustment.

Sometimes you just need a better advert.