Meta remains the strongest acquisition channel in performance marketing, but standing out now takes more than a media buying budget. It takes the right Meta ad creative strategy. According to Deividas Tokaris, Founder of Triple Scale, a Meta-focused agency, the real differentiator has shifted almost entirely to creatives.
Tokaris has spent seven years as a media buyer for e-commerce brands. He managed roughly $30 million in ad spend since starting in 2018. This was a time when both Meta and e-commerce looked very different. He built Triple Scale after years of working solo, a transition he says came down to overdelivering for early clients until referrals outpaced what one person could handle.
“Media buying can still move the needle”, Tokaris says. However, what sets gaining $1 million to $10 million in annual revenue apart is the work of creatives. Brands that understand how their creative maps to each stage of the funnel are the ones seeing it pay off. The days of running generic ads to generic landing pages are over because pre-click and post-click experience now need to work in sync: a strong offer, high-converting creative, and a frictionless landing page.
Meta’s Andromeda update has also changed how advertisers approach creative testing. Small tweaks no longer work the way they used to. Meta now rewards entirely new concepts over micro-iteration. That said, creative teams need to keep generating fresh ideas rather than refining what already exists.
AI has undeniably changed how creative strategists work. It gives them faster ways to research audiences and pull insights that once meant digging through reviews manually. But Tokaris is clear that “AI has not replaced human judgment”. The strongest creative briefs are still written by hand. This is so because AI tends to miss the human logic that makes a new concept land.
The same applies to the media buyer’s role more broadly. AI can now handle reporting and pull performance data directly from platforms. This shifted the job away from manual account management. But Tokaris does not see this as the end of media buyers. It is rather a redefinition of the role into media strategist: someone who understands attribution, tracks and interprets data, and judges whether an offer is actually strong. Automation will continue to improve, particularly for smaller brands, but someone still needs to own the strategy behind it.
Tokaris points to two recurring gaps. First, brands test creative without tracking a win rate, so they have no benchmark for how well their creative system is actually performing. Second, many still judge every ad purely on ROAS or CPA. What happens is they miss how top-of-funnel creative fills the rest of the funnel even when its own direct numbers look weak.
His advice for brands navigating a volatile year on Meta comes down to two things: build a resilient ad creative strategy and stop relying on one platform. Because whether brands like it or not, diversifying ad spend beyond Meta is now becoming a requirement.
Get your ticket today and hear more from Deividas Tokaris and other industry leaders at the newly launched Affiliate Grand Slam, bringing 50+ expert speakers to Rome, 02–05 November 2026.
