How many ad creatives do you need for Meta ads?

Why do Meta ads keep getting more expensive?

Usually because there isn’t enough creative in the account. A brand runs a handful of statics and a couple of videos, they fatigue quickly, costs creep up and revenue slips below target.

For over a decade, the fix for expensive or underperforming Meta ads has been the same. Make more content, make it better, and make it feel less like an ad. The better the content, the cheaper your ads, basically. Meta rewards content people actually want to watch, and it charges you less to show it.

I’ve spoken at Meta’s offices, and their own product people confirmed what I’d been teaching for years. So before you touch targeting or budgets, look at your content.

So how much creative is enough?

More than feels sensible. Most founders think they need a couple more statics or one more video. You probably need to 10x that volume of creative for your baseline. You need a hundred statics. You need ten videos coming through every week.

Build that bank before you scale, so you never have to stop and taper spend while you wait for new ads to arrive.

There’s a floor too, for smaller brands that aren’t pushing hard yet. I aim for about four ad packs of five ads each month, where every pack is a genuinely new angle rather than five tiny tweaks of the same idea. Creative diversity matters more than raw volume. At the very least, you need a couple of banger statics and a couple of banger videos every month, and your email momentum kept up.

Why does Meta need so many different ads?

Creative is the targeting. Targeting doesn’t matter anymore.

Meta reads everything in your ad: the primary text, the headline, the words on screen and the voiceover. All of that is basically SEO. Meta has its own internal SEO, and it uses those signals to decide who sees each ad.

So when you build a cluster of content on one topic, across statics, video, talking heads and creators, you’re building a body of messaging that Meta can match to the right people. Each genuinely different angle gives the platform something new to find buyers with. Tiny variations of the same ad give it nothing new.

Part of this comes down to privacy. Years ago I could upload lists of phone numbers and emails and tell Meta exactly who to show an ad to, or who to leave out. As the privacy rules tightened, Meta and TikTok lost that individual-level targeting. Now they show ads broadly and lean on their algorithms to find likely buyers, and your creative is the main signal you’ve got.

How do you reach a new audience, then?

Make content that speaks to them. If you want a new group of customers, write and film for their situation and their stage of life, instead of fiddling with targeting settings.

The same goes for local businesses. It’s no longer drop a pin on the street address and only show an ad to someone in there. Meta shows your ad to whoever it thinks might be in the area or interested. So the targeting has to live in the ad itself. Name the suburb. Film in the suburb. Call out the people who live there, so the right ones put their hand up and everyone else scrolls past.

How do you make that much creative without burning out?

Find one repeatable format the founder can film and edit alone, with no editor in the loop. Once your creative volume doesn’t depend on booking a shoot or waiting on an editor, it stops being the bottleneck.

Then brief in packs. Each pack is one new angle, five ads deep, and each one gives Meta a fresh set of signals to work with. Ramp the pace up heading into Black Friday and the holiday period.