Does ad creative matter more than targeting now?

On Meta, largely yes — modern delivery systems infer who should see an ad from the creative itself, so the ad is the targeting. The platform reads what your creative is about and who engages with it, then finds more of those people; manual audience settings matter less every year.

The practical consequence: budget shifts from audience micro-slicing to creative volume and variety. Distinct concepts, angles, and formats give the system more surface to find pockets of demand — one "perfect" ad is a bottleneck, not a strategy.

The same drift is visible across ad platforms, including Google's automated campaign types: inputs the machine can read (creative, feeds, conversion data) are the new levers, and creative is the biggest one you fully control.