The death of demographic targeting: Why your creative is now your best targeting tool

Ever felt like you're spending too much time perfecting your Meta audience settings? You might be right.

The world of digital advertising is undergoing a quiet revolution, and it's challenging one of marketing's most sacred cows: the precisely defined target audience. Recent insights from Meta's own connections planning team suggest what many advertisers have suspected – obsessing over demographic targeting might actually be hampering your results.

The old way: Demographic straightjackets

For decades, advertisers have operated under a simple premise: define your audience as precisely as possible, then deliver ads only to those people. It made perfect sense in traditional media where you had to choose specific TV shows, magazines or billboards.

But digital platforms don't work that way anymore.

The truth? Those carefully crafted demographic fences might be costing you money and preventing you from reaching actual buyers. Research consistently shows that real purchase behaviour stretches well beyond our neat marketing personas. For instance, 36% of people who purchased beer in the last month were women – a segment many beer brands might exclude from their targeting.

The new way: Freedom to find buyers

Here's where things get interesting. Meta's ad platforms are designed to optimise for outcomes, not demographics. When you select 'conversions' as your objective, the system is working to find people most likely to convert – regardless of whether they fit your target profile.

What does this mean for your campaigns?

1. Broader audience targeting often delivers lower CPMs – you're no longer competing for the same narrow audience segments
2. The platform will find buyers your targeting might have missed – potentially opening up new customer segments
3. Your creative becomes the real targeting mechanism – different ads naturally attract different audiences

Creative as targeting: The new frontier

This shift brings us to perhaps the most revolutionary concept: "creative as targeting."

Two campaigns with identical audience settings but different creative approaches can reach completely different people. Why? Because the platform's algorithms are hunting for the people most likely to respond positively to each specific piece of creative at the lowest possible cost.

This means your ads themselves are now a more powerful targeting tool than your audience settings. A quirky, humorous ad naturally attracts different people than a serious, information-heavy one – even when both are technically targeted at the same audience.

What this means for your marketing

To be clear, strategic audience definition remains crucial for many aspects of marketing:

• Product development
• Brand positioning
• Creative briefing
• Marketing strategy

But when it comes to buying media on platforms like Meta, the rules have changed. The most effective approach is often:

1. Define broad audience parameters (don't exclude potential buyers)
2. Create diverse creative that speaks to different segments
3. Optimise for business outcomes (awareness, conversions, leads etc.)
4. Let the platform find your future buyers

The creative diversity challenge

And here's where most brands hit a wall.

Creating diverse, high-quality creative at the scale needed to properly test this approach is, frankly, a nightmare for most marketing teams. When you're already stretched thin handling everything from strategy to execution, who has time to develop 10, 20, or 50 creative variations?

The old solutions don't work:

• Agencies are brilliant but slow and expensive
• DIY tools give you quantity but sacrifice quality
• Internal teams get burned out trying to keep up

This is exactly why we built Cuttable. We've bottled decades of advertising expertise into an AI platform that generates agency-quality creative, instantly and at scale.

How Cuttable helps you win at "creative as targeting"

With Cuttable, you can:

1. Generate dozens of ads in a few clicks – test different tones, messages and visual approaches without the usual creative bottlenecks
2. Maintain brand consistency – even with diverse creative approaches, your brand identity remains intact
3. Test and learn rapidly – quickly iterate based on what's working without waiting weeks for new creative

For brands embracing Meta's new targeting reality, the advantage goes to those who can generate diverse, quality creative at scale. The days of perfecting a single ad and running it to a precisely defined audience are over.

Instead, smart advertisers are creating varied creative that speaks to different segments, then letting the platforms find the right people for each execution.

And with tools like Cuttable, you don't need a massive team or budget to do it. Great advertising isn't just for the 2% anymore.