Move Over Big Budgets: AI-Powered Creative is the Biggest ROI Lever in Modern Marketing
Success in marketing can no longer be bought – AI-powered social platforms like Meta and TikTok have reshaped performance marketing, driving an increasing demand for quality content within advertising.
Below, we explore why creative assets are now the #1 lever in social media advertising success, and how brands can use creative + AI to maximise creative performance to stay ahead.
Ben Morrison
Ben is Open Partners' Creative & Strategy Managing Partner, leading the agency's Creative and Strategic proposition to build brands social-first.
According to Marketing Week, 47% of marketers are facing shrinking budgets. Meanwhile, social algorithms are getting hungrier by the day, with Deloitte predicting that the demand for content will increase 10x over the next two years.
Faced with the pressure to deliver more with less, brands are turning to social media, using platforms like Meta and TikTok to achieve unmatched reach, scale, and record performance at a fraction of the cost of paid media.
Unlike channels like PPC, Social Media’s AI algorithms operate creative-first, not budget-first, marking a seminal shift in what determines marketing success in 2025.
Below, we detail what this shift means in practice, covering how brands can capitalise on these changes to drive consistent, compounding profit and growth through creative-first advertising.
What’s Changed? Marketing Success Can No Longer Be Bought
In the TV era and the earlier days of online advertising, the performance model was simple: throw money at the problem.
Big media agencies leveraged hefty client budgets, promising scale and performance through channels like TV (which previously offered unmatched access to consumers), as well as Google Ads, where brands could effectively pay to maintain their dominance.
But with the rise of social media and AI, marketing has evolved. Social media is now the most mainstream channel, providing the broadest reach with the biggest impact for advertisers. In fact, more than 78% of shoppers use social media to research products, and 58% discover new brands through these platforms. Social media also outperforms traditional channels in ROI, especially when leveraging formats like influencer content, user-generated content (UGC), and short-form video.
Despite this, many brands are sticking with their performance media ads, hoping that with a little bit more spend and a little more tweaking, they’ll hit those ROI figures they once saw. Not only is this wasteful, but it’s an impossibility – in 2025, bigger budgets alone will not equate to better performance.
The Real Performance Fuel in 2025: Social Media + Creative + AI-Driven Testing and Optimisation
Social media platforms are incredibly effective for advertising, and it’s the reason that creative assets are now the #1 lever in advertising effectiveness, responsible for over 50% of ad auction outcomes and 70% of video ROI (Meta).
Powering the social rocket ship, of course, is the rocket fuel – otherwise known as the algorithm. Determining who sees what, algorithms prioritise ad relevance, quality, format, engagement levels, and even consider user intent to return the best possible ad experiences. They’re trainable and intelligent – enough to evolve and improve over time, largely through continuous testing and optimisation.
The bottom line is that buying power is now achieved through creative testing at scale and speed.
The most successful brands know this, and as a result, they are relentlessly testing their creative ecosystem and feeding those insights directly back into their production pipelines. In fact, brands that take this approach are seeing up to +30% higher conversion rates. Further to that, brands that invest in creative diversity can increase efficiency by +32% and unlock +9% more reach—without spending more.
At Open Partners, it’s one of the reasons our clients are seeing unmatched levels of growth while competitors are facing diminishing returns from performance media.
+43%
Increase in Click-Through Rates (CTR)
+160%
Increase in Leasing Application Starts*
-24%
Reduction in Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Making The Transition to a Creative-First Strategy
To successfully deliver testing and creative production at the speed and scale demanded by today’s AI-powered, creative-first strategies, brands must tap into integrated expertise across media, data, and creative. Without strong capabilities in all three areas, even the most well-resourced in-house teams or performance-driven agencies will hit stumbling blocks.
With proprietary solutions built creative-first and a model built to seamlessly connect media, data, and creative, Open Partners helps brands execute with the speed, precision, and innovation required to stay competitive.
Whether brands fully outsource or blend in-house and external expertise, what matters most is having the right talent and tools across disciplines—because without it, the transition to a creative-first approach will fall short, and brands risk losing ground in an increasingly fast-moving market.
