Let’s have a real talk—founder to founder.
You’ve got a product people love. Your retention is solid, your site is optimized, and you’ve hired a media buyer who knows their way around Ads Manager like the back of their hand. But for some reason, you’re hitting a wall. You try to push the spend, and your ROAS falls off a cliff.
Your first instinct? Fire the media buyer. “The targeting is off,” you think. “They’re not hitting the right ‘interest’ groups.”
But here’s the hard truth I’ve learned after being in the trenches with dozens of DTC brands: In 2024, the algorithm is smarter than any human media buyer. The days of “ninja” hacking and complex audience segmentation are dead. Today, Facebook and TikTok find your customers based on who interacts with your ads. Which means if you can’t scale, the problem isn’t the person pulling the levers. It’s the creative.
The “Algorithm is the Audience” Era
Think of your creative as the salesperson. If you send a salesperson into a room and they say the wrong things to the wrong people, it doesn’t matter how many rooms you put them in—they aren’t going to close deals.
When you upload an ad, the platform looks at the first few thousand people who stop scrolling. If your creative is generic, it attracts “window shoppers” who never buy. The algorithm sees that and says, “Cool, I’ll find more people like that.” Suddenly, your CPA skyrockets because you’re paying for views that don’t convert.
If your creative is the reason you can’t scale, it’s usually because of one of these three things:
1. You’re Boring Your Customers
We see it all the time—beautifully produced, high-budget brand videos that look like a Super Bowl commercial but have zero “stop” power. In the feed, “polished” often equals “ignored.” If you don’t hook them in the first 1.5 seconds, you’ve already lost the auction.
2. You’re Solving the Wrong Problem
Most creative fails because it focuses on features instead of feelings. Your customer doesn’t care that your supplement has 500mg of Ashwagandha; they care that they’ll finally stop feeling like a ball of anxiety at 3:00 PM. Scale happens when your creative speaks to a specific pain point so clearly that the customer feels “seen.”
3. You’re Not Testing Enough
Scaling isn’t about finding one “winner” and riding it into the sunset. It’s about a relentless testing engine. You need to be testing different hooks, different visual styles (UGC vs. Studio), and different angles. If you’re only giving your media buyer two new videos a month, you aren’t giving them the ammunition they need to win the war.
Creative is the Variable of Success
I know it’s frustrating. It’s much easier to blame a dashboard or a strategy than it is to look at the content you spent time and money producing and say, “This isn’t working.”
But once you realize that Creative is the Targeting, everything changes.
Instead of asking your media buyer why the ROAS is down, ask: “What feedback is the market giving us on our hooks? Which visual style is driving the highest intent traffic? What do we need to build next to beat our current best performer?”
At the end of the day, scaling a brand is about building a bridge between your product and the person who needs it. Your media buyer builds the road, but your creative is the vehicle that actually makes the trip.
If the car has no engine, it doesn’t matter how good the road is.
Let’s stop tweaking the settings and start making things people actually want to watch.
