Published on: November 5, 2026
As automated ad delivery takes on more audience selection, creative variety matters more. Harshit Arora, founder and CEO, Growster explains why brands need a steady pipeline of distinct, performance-led ads, and why festive campaign production should start early.
For years, performance marketing followed a familiar playbook. Brands built audience segments, combined interests, created lookalikes and excluded people who had already converted. The assumption was simple: find the right audience first, then show it the right ad. Targeting was the engine, and creative was the vehicle.
Then came Meta’s Andromeda, the ad retrieval system it introduced in December 2024 to process a much larger pool of potential ads and personalise delivery. Meta reported an 8% improvement in ad quality on selected segments after deploying it. As automated delivery takes on more of the audience-selection work, the creative options a brand gives the system matter more and more.
This does not make audience strategy irrelevant. It changes where brands need to put their effort. The platform can identify which ads are likely to interest different people, but brands still need to give it meaningful ideas to test.
Every ad offers the algorithm a different way to identify a potential customer. A video addressing fit issues can connect with shoppers facing that problem. A gifting-led ad can reach people looking for presents, while a price-focused creative can appeal to deal-seekers.
Performance at scale depends on producing enough meaningfully different creatives for the platform to test. Changing a headline while keeping the same concept does not necessarily open up a new audience. Brands need variety in hooks, angles, formats, personas and customer problems.
“Changing a headline while keeping the same concept does not necessarily open up a new audience.”
Volume alone is not enough. Creative becomes a continuous pipeline of testing and learning rather than a collection of assets produced for individual campaigns.
Even business-as-usual (BAU) campaigns need creative volume. A monthly shoot followed by a handful of new ads each week may no longer be enough to sustain testing across a growing account. As creatives fatigue, accounts that stop introducing fresh options risk reaching a performance plateau.
Festive campaigns add another layer of pressure. Brands need to communicate offers, gifting ideas and occasion-led messages within a shorter sales window, while competing for consumer attention.
Google and Ipsos’s Shopping Moments Study of last year’s festive season found that Navratri and Diwali shoppers ran an average of 8.3 online searches and watched 7.7 videos during their shopping journeys. And 70% made a spontaneous purchase. Each of those moments, from first interest to the final decision, needs creative that fits it.
A plan built around one hero campaign and a few cutdowns leaves the media team with limited options to test. More media spend cannot automatically make up for a shortage of distinct creatives. The constraint can shift from media budget to creative supply.
“The constraint can shift from media budget to creative supply.”
Planning must therefore begin with production capacity. How many distinct concepts can a team deliver each week? How quickly can it respond to performance data? Can it introduce new ideas while the campaign is running?
According to the ET BrandEquity–Ipsos State of Digital Marketing in India 2025–26 report, digital advertising accounted for ₹49,000 crore, or 44% of India’s total advertising expenditure, in FY2025, growing 20% year-on-year.
Production must keep pace with that growth. Briefs should test specific hypotheses rather than simply fill placements. Media buying must evolve alongside production, with teams organising creative tests, reading results and identifying which ads deserve further investment. Creative and media teams need to work together so that performance data shapes what gets produced next.
Why the UGC Model Can Struggle at Scale
User-generated content (UGC) has become a popular way to source videos quickly. The format feels native to social platforms and can seem an affordable route to higher output. However, more content does not automatically translate into better advertising performance.
The bigger concern is the gap between making a video and building an ad designed to convert. A creator may know how to make engaging content without having experience in top-of-funnel communication, purchase behaviour or return on ad spend (ROAS).
Paying premium rates for content that looks right but lacks a clear performance hypothesis can become expensive when brands need far more creative output. UGC still has a role, but it cannot replace creative strategy.
“UGC still has a role, but it cannot replace creative strategy.”
Brands need creative teams that combine production efficiency with data literacy. Efficiency makes volume affordable, while data literacy makes that volume useful. A team
that studies account data, works out why a hook works and turns that insight into the next ten briefs does more than deliver videos against a calendar. It becomes an extension of the marketing team.
The goal is not simply to produce more ads. It is to build a repeatable system for producing conversion-focused creative at scale. For festive campaigns, that system needs to be ready before the sales window opens. The advantage lies in giving the algorithm a steady supply of distinct ideas, and learning from what works to make the next round stronger.
