When speed and scale was king

A year ago, I shared a piece about how success in marketing can no longer be achieved through budget alone and that creative was now the primary ROI lever in modern advertising.

I explored how the AI enabled production of creative assets (ones that are built, tested, optimised and deployed at speed and scale) is the key to feeding hungry social algorithms.

That was true then, and it’s still true now, but there’s a couple of caveats. The difference is that AI creative production at scale is now commoditised, and updates like Meta’s Andromeda and products like Meta Advantage+ and TikTok Smart+ have fully automated the mechanics of distribution.

Every competitor has access to the exact same targeting efficiencies and production capabilities, meaning scalable creative production in itself is no longer a differentiator for brands, and media execution is no longer where performance is won or lost.

Now, in 2026, the creative itself is the targeting; the differentiator. That’s where the strategic focus has to be.

Quality now firmly trumps quantity

We’ve always said quality was critical, and stressed the importance of operating firmly within brand guardrails. But the reality is, from the algorithm’s perspective, speed and scale used to trump quality and meaning, and many brands used that to their advantage.

The result is that all of our feeds have been relentlessly flooded with what we’ve all come to know as AI slop, and why Gartner survey data revealed that 49% of consumers believe generative AI has actively degraded content quality, driving some widespread marketing skepticism and consumer fatigue.

Today, the pendulum has swung firmly back toward creative quality, narrative framing, and emotional impact. The algorithm cares less now about how many assets you give it, instead reading the creative payload itself, using immediate engagement signals to map out who cares.

To understand why quality wins, it’s important to understand how ad platforms and their products evaluate content today. Programmatic ad platforms used to operate on a two stage process: a manual retrieval phase, where media buyers manually configured demographic targeting, lookalikes, and interest tags, followed by a platform ranking phase that auctioned ads against that cohort.

Today, native AI infrastructure runs the entire pipeline autonomously, while deep neural networks break down and extract structured meaning from the creative assets themselves, almost creating a fingerprint of what your creative is showing, saying, and ‘feeling’. That fingerprint is then compared against real time user behaviour to route the asset automatically.

This is happening across all the platform products that are driving growth for successful brands today: Meta’s Andromeda and Advantage+, TikTok Smart+, Google Performance Max and Demand Gen, and Amazon Performance+.

Now, it is critical that your creative says and means something. That it’s relevant, high quality, and carries that critical humanity element that will not deter, but engage consumers in the right way.

Creative is still the primary ROI lever

As I said at the top, my main point from last year still holds up: creative is the primary ROI lever in today’s advertising landscape (after brand size). But because the operational side of media is commoditised, true, structural creative differentiation, i.e. a distinct persona target, a new problem framing, or a unique emotional entry point (hook), is arguably the only remaining scalable lever to drive impactful, profitable growth.

Starting with the impact with consumers, when a brand invests in high craft, coherently distinct creative, the returns increase across the entire funnel. Great creative doesn’t just drive an immediate click; it builds long term consideration, deepens brand equity, and builds intent in the mind of the consumer long before they decide to buy / enquire. Something that makes them stop scrolling because it speaks directly to their lived experience and makes a brand memorable instead of just scrollable.

Then there’s the algorithm ‘tax’. Bad creative is no longer just ineffective, but is actively penalised by platforms. Across the AI powered product suite, the algorithm’s job is to protect user attention and keep people on the platform. If brands are feeding the product engines generic, poor quality AI creative iterations, the algo will read those early signals like instant swipes, low watch times, and negative feedback and run with it. They get flagged as low relevance background noise, driving up CPMs and reducing reach.

Bad creative = ineffective, costly advertising.

So today, the real challenge for brands is having the infrastructure in place to ensure data insights, human intelligence, and strategic thinking are thoroughly baked into the creative process from the very start. To then unlock the power of diverse creative thought to delight both the humans and machines.

How we approach Creative at Open Partners

As The Agency of Next, we have been relentlessly focused on the future for our clients, and have intentionally built an operational model that is capable of rapidly adapting as best practice changes in real time.

That model is OP:OS, The Open Partners Operating System, a sophisticated build on our existing integrated model (Media, Data, and Creative) that now consists of three disciplines and nine agentic products that operate as a sequential system, where Data identifies audience signals and commercial metrics, creative delivers the strategic human hooks that drive engagement, and media platform mechanics act as a real-time execution layer and feedback loop.

Focusing on the creative element, this operational model ensures that all of our creative strategies begin with data, not guesswork, defining precisely which audiences matter, which products drive true profit, and what attitudes we need to shift. Human intellect then turns those parameters into genuine quality.

Instead of relying on machines to invent strategy, our strategists and creative teams use those data signals to craft distinct narrative framings, sharper persona hooks, and emotional entry points that stop consumers from scrolling. Data provides the map of where to win; human craft builds the message that actually converts.

Naturally, the agentic side of the model also releases our creatives from unnecessary admin, allowing more time for strategic, creative thinking. The critical human element that separates bad creative from great creative.

To recap…

AI production delivers the scale, but a data backed, human led creative strategy and ideation process is what guarantees the quality. That’s what matters in today’s crowded advertising landscape.

Reaching the right audience (Data) with the right message (Creative) at the right moment (Media) gives native platform engines the high quality signal they need to deliver rapid, profitable, incremental growth.