Meta's New Plan Will End Performance Marketing transcript

What's up, marketers? Creative strategy is about to change forever, and I truly think that brands and strategists are not ready for it. So, in today's video, I want to have a true one-on-one jam session with you guys to really just dive deep on what I am witnessing in this industry. I've been a media buyer and creative strategist for the last 10 years, and I have made individual pieces of ad creative that have resulted in millions for brands, and y'all after spending 2 days at the Meta Performance Summit, I've had a few realizations.

So, I want to talk about what this big shift is and the signals that I am seeing that indicate that this is absolutely going to happen. And I want to talk about how this is going to shape the role of creative strategy in the coming months, not years, months. And finally, [music] what creative strategists are going to have to do so that they can have job security. I still believe that this is the role with the most leverage and the highest possible earning power right now in e-commerce, but we're going to have to change a few things here.

So, this shift is really based on what Meta sees as the future of selling. My big takeaway from the Meta Performance Summit is that the vision that Meta sees is that selling is going to be done primarily by creators. People are not going to buy unless at some point in the funnel, in the customer journey, there was a creator endorsement or a creator piece of content that helped get them over the finish lines. And trying to sell with anything else, like statics or, God forbid, AI animations, which do crush, is like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight.

And I already hear your objections, but creators don't work for me. We don't have budgets for big influencers. Oh, it partnership ads didn't work for me. There is evidence that this is already happening. Number one, Meta has a new affiliate play for creators. Essentially, creators are going to be able to directly link out to products in their reels. This is huge. It's essentially a TikTok shop play, right? And I've heard a number of marketers get a little funny about it cuz they're like, "Oh my god, it's going to indeniate the entire platform with ads." I actually think Meta and Instagram and Facebook are way better positioned than TikTok ever was to handle this type of content.

And I also think that creators know at this point you can't do the direct response sale and expect to make a living as a creator. You have to really envelop your content and your selling strategy a lot more organically. Another big shift is when Meta shifted from traditional whitelisting to the partnership ads model. Now, the big difference here is that when you do a partnership ad, it is actually beginning that initial targeting seed audience from the creator's audience.

This is very important when you are trying to reach new demographics, trying to reach new personas, and ultimately trying to establish net new reach. Traditional whitelisting didn't have that. You were essentially just using the creator handle as a mask. Meta made this shift because they knew that they needed to start leaning [music] into the creator's distribution to actually get that performance. And I got to say, the performance gains on actually having a in-depth and cutthroat partnership ad strategy is super obvious to anyone who's ever really dove deep on this.

I think if you need a deep dive on this, be sure to watch my two Ad Spend interviews, the one that I did with Cody and the one that I did with Seed Health. In fact, the Seed Health interview, some of the conversations that we were having behind the scenes, they told me, you know, anytime that there are performance fluctuations and performance just isn't doing as well, that is when we just start spending more on our partnership ads content and performance almost always bounces back.

And this is something that was echoed in almost every single interview that I did in my ad spend series. These brands are able to operate at that level because they know that they need to have partners that they engage with on partnership ads. But listen, this video is not do partnership ads. I could have just wrote a tweet, right? I wanted to jam on this with you and like kind of do a heart-to-heart yap podcast-style video about it because I think this is a fundamental shift from brands and agencies needing to be creative strategy first to being creator first.

The fundamental shift here is going from making creative to working with creators that you see and engage with like they are true partners for your brand. Some good examples of this, right? Probably the most obvious one, the most talked about one, Poppi and Alex Earl, right? They could have just hired her to do some influencer deals, but they structured a very unique engagement which actually incentivizes Alex to post about Poppi organically and as much as she wants because she is invested in the growth of that business because she is an investor.

Another type of long-term partnership opportunity is actually one that I am personally a part of, right? So, Motion 5-6 years ago was one of my first sponsors on this channel. That's crazy, but I've been chief evangelist with Motion for the last 2 years where I really have helped them to develop their product, have helped them to developed a lot more of their education, and really have helped them distribute a lot more of their new launches through ads, through organic, you know, conversations even like this or in other videos of mine.

And we're able to do that because we don't actually operate on a traditional like sponsorship level. I am truly a part of that business. And the best brands are looking at influencers right now, not just "Hey, who can I hire to spend this budget that I have allocated?" They are looking at them as "Hey, who can I bring in to be a true partner?" Because now creators are able to solve three of the biggest problems that businesses have when they are starting to scale.

Number one, distribution. So, they solve the distribution problem, right? They have the audience that they want to tap into. And additionally, they have the actual creative. They have the production of those assets. It's actually kind of wild to think about it. Like, when I was at NYC Train Sign and making these videos and assets, I would have to hire an art director, hire a videographer, and a photographer. I would have to hire out an Airbnb.

It would be a whole song and dance. But now, the distribution and the production of those assets is solved within a single individual. That's actually quite revolutionary if you really think about it. And the third thing that these creators are now able to solve is velocity, right? Because there is not as many actors that are coming into play to make this content that is actually performing on these platforms. They are able to produce and show up and have content that is just more, more in volume as well as just more in performance.

The best brands have already realized that influencer marketing was growth marketing. And now, creative strategists, I think, are really going to have to reformulate how they are thinking about their overall creative plans to have a much, much bigger slice of that pie be entirely creative focused. So, how is this going to shape the creative strategist role, right? What do creative strategists need to do to ensure that they have job security and candidly keep on making that sweet, sweet money because creative strategists have the best leverage on growth teams.

They're making their brands tons of money, and they need to be compensated in turn. So, how can they make sure that we aren't just like bypassing creative strategist to get to the creators? Because trust me, you're still going to need creative strategist, but you're going to need a certain type of creative strategist. So, one thing that I see happening, right, is influencer marketing is going to be on the growth teams moving forward.

When I was brand side at a big nine-figure brand, there was a celebrity team, an influencer team, and a growth team, and a performance creative team, and the future of that, all in one. The best growth teams are going to have a head of growth, a head of influencer, and a head of creative or content. This is truly going to begin the dissolving of performance versus brand. In the future, there's just going to be content teams.

I really don't think there will be these silos anymore in the next two to three years. Another mind-shift change that creative strategist need to have is they aren't just creating content for paid ads land. In fact, like I told a creative strategist earlier this week, "Congratulations, you are creating for the platform, not just for Meta ads." Again, this is the further development of those content teams. And in fact, even when I am developing creative strategy for the brands that I work with at the agency, me and my team, we are not analyzing competitor ads and going through these problem-solution frameworks.

No, no, no. We are actually looking at the type of content that is gaining steam on organic Tik Tok, on Reels, and how the creators that our customers love, what type of content they love to consume organically, and we're having additional creators reflect that in those types of storytelling frameworks and the content that we are then producing for paid social assets. So, we're not running a ton of ads like this unless we need some more middle-bottom-of-funnel massaging.

No, we are running ads that look like this and still getting great results from it. Insert results. And the other big thing that I'm talking about with some of my creative strategy groups is like, "Hey, we need to be creator first." The most important person that you should be making friends [music] with if you are in-house at a brand and you're a creative strategist is the partnership manager or the influencer managers, congratulations, you have a new best friend.

This is also, I think, reflected in many of the best brands and agencies that I know who are making creator hires internally. This is something that we saw with Packed in that amazing interview that I did with their chief brand officer. They don't have a creative strategist on on staff anymore. They have a creator and I saw a lot of your comments. You guys were like, "Oh, this is just a creative strategist with another name." How many creative strategists do you know that are looking at motion in the morning, writing a script right before lunch, and then shooting and editing that content in the afternoon so that it can be deployed before people log off for the day.

I'm sorry, but that is typically not what a creative strategist does. But I see more and more brands moving to hire those types of people versus the traditional creative strategists. Also, great creative strategists, very hard to hire. A little bit easier to hire creators, actually. Which is why creative strategists who can also create content are some of the most lethal hires that are people are making [music] right now.

That entire team is expected to contribute. And something that I like talking about, too, with teams and founders, cuz you know, sometimes I'm speaking with founders and they're like, "You know, the content that performs best on Meta is content with me in it, but I I'm a CEO. I don't want to always make content." And I hear that. But actually, in many ways, some of the highest leverage activities that a founder or people on the team can do is to actually contribute to that content and make that content.

I know reporting and, you know, managerial issues and whatever, they tend to rise to the top, they tend to seem more urgent. But especially when a brand is in that seven to, you know, mid-eight-figure range, being laser-focused on the content that you are creating and developing content that is truly converting both on organic and paid, and developing those scalable systems, that's the highest leverage activity that you can do until you get to nine figures.

Okay, so let's try to land this plane, right? Is the role of creative strategy going to be wiped out by AI? No. I hope that if you've gotten to this point you're like, "No, no, creative strategist still super necessary." But the focus and the slight shift and reframe needs to be that the creative strategist really needs to focus a lot more in the coming months on creator partnerships and really understanding how to develop the right types of briefs and how to source the right individuals to make this content.

It's so interesting cuz I think if you would have asked me a year ago, you know, who's the most important person on your team? Bar none, the creative strategist. But right now, there's a part of me that's like the creator talent manager, the person who is selecting the creators. That eye is a new thing that I am training on at my own agency and when I'm working with creative strategist right now. And I've seen tradi- tionally that creative strategist often aren't the ones that are selecting or choosing the types of creators to work with.

And I do think that this is something that is going to shift more to creative strategist so that they can really speak acutely to that process cuz suddenly now the influencer manager or the creator partnership manager, whoever is in charge of selecting the creators, they're the new person that I'm very, very focused on training cuz being able to select the right creators, the right partners is bar none the number one skill that brands and agencies need to master in 2026.

Fight me in the comments, I guess, but to my creative strategy girls, love you. >> [music]