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When campaign performance dips, people often look in the same places - leading them to say the same things:
“We need better analytics, insights and reporting.”
“We need to tighten audience targeting.”
“We need better dashboards.”
“We need to follow that X or Y trend that our competitors are doing.”
“We need more budget.”
Where some of those things are true - and they often are - most of the time they’re symptoms. They don’t get to the root cause. So what’s the real issue?
Performance marketing is not a channel problem, it’s a creative problem – it’s one the right creative partner can fix.
If your creative doesn’t stop the scroll, explain the value quickly, or at least spark real curiosity and give someone a reason to act, then everything gets harder for your marketing team: Costs rise. Engagement drops. Platforms can’t optimise properly.
And suddenly you’re blaming budget and targeting again.
You're good at what you do. You‘ve honed your skills across so many areas like budget optimisation, funnel refinement, and audience segmentation. Those levers were instrumental in driving progress before, but today, in 2026, they don’t - and won't - achieve the same results.
Why?
Because automation has redefined their leverage in pretty much every performance marketing channel:
The one big thing still in your control? The creative!
The creative assets you feed the machine determine whether it stops the scroll. Whether the value is instantly understood. Whether your message motivates action.
Weak creative creates weak results and you can’t outrun weak creative with audience or bidding tweaks. You’ll just end up spending more and performance will decline further.
Think to yourself: when you see a poorly attempted ad or organic piece of content, what immediately comes to mind? Does it create trust in the brand, its products or its services? Does it genuinely appeal to you? Do you actually want to act?
More often than not, you will quickly scroll past weak creative - you won't even hover over and stop to think about how bad the execution is.
Weak creative fails slowly - or on occasion, epically.
Performance often erodes slowly and is sometimes hard to detect but always far more expensive. Budgets creep up. Clicks stagnate. Conversions drop off. Platforms learn slowly whilst you feed and water them more money, time and effort.
Automation is no longer optional because it’s baked into every major platform. So your strongest, most sustainable lever is creative effectiveness.
Creative isn't a cost centre. It’s the differentiator, and the human-driven capability that enables performance marketing to directly drive measurable outcomes - and positive engagement at that.
Creative effectiveness is a catalyst for growth. It directly impacts ROAS, CPM, CPC, CPA, conversion rates, platform learning, cross-channel growth and long term brand strength.
Commercially, this translates into more revenue per campaign, better client acquisition and retention as well as better positioning of your brand as a growth partner (and one people feel is real), not just another vendor.
Once you establish creative effectiveness, it becomes repeatable, scalable, and systemised, enabling you to move away from a reactive approach that leads to continuous doom.
Automation runs the vehicle while your creative steers the direction. Your results are the product of what you feed the 'machine': weak creative equals weak outputs, whereas strong creative can create exponential performance.
In my own, and a lot of other peoples opinions, creative effectiveness is no longer optional for performance marketing. It’s the growth engine.
So before you adjust the budget again, fix what the audience actually sees - with better creative that actually works.
If you're looking for powerful creative that delivers the impact and performance your brand demands, speak to a member of the Made team today.
