When Kevin Simonson, CEO of performance agency adMixt, advised a beauty brand client to cut its Facebook and Instagram ads from more than 1,000 per month to 200, the results ran counter to years of digital marketing orthodoxy. Customer acquisition cost fell 25%, and performance improved.
For years, brands flooded social platforms with thousands of creative iterations, letting algorithms sort out which ads worked best. Generative AI accelerated that approach by making creative production nearly free. But agencies say AI is now pushing the industry in the opposite direction: toward fewer, more distinctive ads backed by stronger ideas and context.
"This whole idea of creating a million variants of an ad is bad for brand building," said Andrew Lipsman, independent media analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce. "The cultural relevance you create is not through personalization; it's about having a common cultural reference point that everybody understands."
How the pendulum swung toward quantity
Simonson traces the quantity era to Apple's April 2021 release of iOS 14.5, which let iPhone users opt out of cross-app tracking. The privacy change disrupted ad targeting and measurement, and Meta responded by pushing brands to feed its automated campaigns more creative assets so its systems could find winners.
"It went from, 'You need dozens of ads a month,' to 'hundreds a month,'" Simonson said. That approach worked for several years, but performance plateaued for many brands. Some responded by pushing more than 1,000 distinct ads per month into their ad sets - with marginal returns.
"Brands do need lots of ads, but the pendulum swung way too far," Simonson said. "It's much easier to get people to spend more on your platform by telling them to invest in more creative." He now advises brands to make fewer, more calculated bets. "Meta is able to distinguish between ads easier when there are fewer of them."
Lipsman goes further, recommending brands scale back to a dozen or fewer assets per ad set. "If you're creating only a select handful of variants, there is going to be more substantial differentiation," he said. "It's going to be a better test of what's resonating with the consumer versus slight AI-driven variation."
Algorithms reward distinct creative
Meta's AI-driven delivery systems are reinforcing the shift. Jack Johnson, vice president of social innovation and growth at performance agency Tinuiti, said Meta's systems now consolidate ads that look similar under a single entity ID. Advertisers producing five ads where four are near-identical may find the platform treats them as one option, not five.
"In the past, marketers could A/B test a large volume of creative assets that had only slight differences," Johnson said. "In today's environment, if content pieces are viewed as similar, the algorithm will consolidate them under a single entity ID."
Mike Margolin, a former EVP at RPA who now runs Margolin + Systems, said platforms are also getting better at distinguishing relevance from engagement. He pointed to research published this year by Walmart's ad science team finding that relevance predicts ad performance better than engagement metrics like likes and clicks.
"When the platforms themselves demote engagement as a training signal, pumping out fifty near-identical variants solves a problem the platforms have already solved," Margolin said.
AI's "ocean of sameness"
Adam Ortman, founder and CEO of agency Kinetic319, expects AI-generated advertising to make distinctive creative more valuable precisely because AI output tends toward the average.
"AI does a very good job of meeting in the middle, which means it does a great job of just providing the average," he said. The result will be an "ocean of sameness," he predicted, in which originality becomes scarce. "The competitive advantage is going to come when you are bringing that newness. You're going to be bringing that art into creative."
The quality premium also extends to how brands show up in AI chatbot responses. As consumers use LLMs for product discovery, brands are exploring generative engine optimization (GEO) - creating content structured to surface in chatbot answers. Success depends on detailed, accurate responses to specific queries rather than SEO keyword volume.
"Long-tail content gets rewarded by GEO - the stuff that's past the proverbial third page of results in Google, but could answer very specific questions for LLMs," said David Berkowitz, founder of the AI Marketers Guild. He cited a consumer searching "I want a lawn mower that's electric powered and won't scare my dog" - a query a small brand with pet-friendly content could win, even against competitors selling through major retailers.
Media context matters too. Ortman argues the placement of an ad shapes brand perception as much as the creative itself. "Your creative does have a projection of you as a brand," he said. "And that also translates into the inventory or the placements in which those ads live." Research suggests ad environment materially affects impact, making creative quality and media quality hard to separate.
Why this matters for creatives
For creatives, the takeaway is direct: the skills that matter are shifting from volume production to differentiation. The ability to generate 1,000 ad variations is no longer a competitive advantage - AI handles that. What remains scarce is the judgment to identify a strong idea, the craft to make it distinctive, and the strategic sense to know where it belongs. Creatives who can articulate why an ad works, not just produce more of them, will find their value rising as the cost of average work approaches zero.
For those adapting to this shift, resources on AI for Creatives and AI for Marketing can help professionals understand how AI tools change creative workflows and where human judgment still matters most.
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