As a former social media manager, I have always believed in the power of digital content — not just to sell a show, but to build a community around it, sometimes long before the first performance. For years, I have asserted that we need early investment in the advertising budget for creative development. And, for as many years, that early investment has often been the first thing cut in favor of additional media spend. Historically, this trade-off made sense.
But now, we are operating in a new reality.
With Meta’s rollout of its Andromeda ad retrieval system, digital creative has never been more crucial. Andromeda dramatically reduces advertisers’ ability to target specific audiences and, instead, leverages AI to determine which content is most relevant to each user. In short: We’re no longer telling Meta who should see our ads, Meta is deciding that for us based on the creative itself.
This means you need a lot of creative assets and a wide variety of them. The days of relying on a handful of polished key art images or simple quote cards are over. Those formats don’t travel nearly as far as they used to, and your media dollars won’t work nearly as hard without a diverse ecosystem of content feeding the machine.
Now, in every media budget I build, I reserve a meaningful portion of the pre-production budget for a content shoot. That includes photo, video and social-first content that allows us to build out a complete creative library before the show is announced or shortly after. This early content foundation ensures three things:
