After Meta's Andromeda update, creative IS the targeting—scaling paid spend now requires hundreds of new UGC creatives per month, and the best-performing ads come from diverse creator programs rather than media-buying optimization.
Matt explains that Meta's algorithm update removed manual audience targeting in favor of analyzing creative to find the right people. At Victor and Whisper, this means running hundreds of UGC creators producing varied demos, use cases, and hooks—at $100K monthly spend you need 400–500 new creatives per month to avoid plateau. ✦ AI generated
Matt Swulinski · 20VC · 2026-08-15 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 15:36
“How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels?”
There's an update in meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. We're going to analyze the creative and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy... If you, let's say you have 100K meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau.
verbatim transcript · starts at 15:36
15:17>> How much should I spend on creative for these paid channels? Like if we're going to do Instagram marketing, we should do we need we need a video. We need you creative. We need to How much should I spend on that? Cuz that can't be an afterthought. >> Yeah. Uh I mean I I would say you probably want to be spending not at scale but in the beginning as
15:36much in ad spend on creative because creative is everything in today's environment where uh and like people have you know heard this buzzword thrown around. There's an update in meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. we're going to analyze the creative
15:59and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy. So, in the beginning, and that's like you you'll see this for for for Victor as well as Whisper. Um, we
16:19have hundreds of creators that are doing, you know, different demos, different use cases to different audiences. And that's the only way you can scale spend. Like, if you, let's say you have 100K meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau. You're going to get outco competed. >> How do you do 400 to 500 new creatives a
16:42month? Uh you have a creator program where like uh at at you know at Victor we have uh we work we have our own creator program where we give a percentage of ad spend to people to essentially create ads for us. We obviously you know have some storytelling and they use the product. So it takes you know a little bit to to acquire them but once they do that they
17:00create three to four videos a week and we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies. We also have our in-house creative team. Uh so again ecom model ecom has been doing this for over a decade. That's that is how the entirety of ecom has functioned. UC creator programs hundreds of thousands of variations of creative and they've been doing that and that's like in their