There was a time when a good media buyer's edge was targeting. Layered audiences, careful exclusions, lookalike percentages tuned to the decimal, dayparting, bid adjustments by device the craft lived in the setup. That era is basically over. Performance Max and Advantage+ have absorbed most of those decisions into automated systems that now outperform manual targeting in the vast majority of accounts we touch. The platforms aren't asking marketers to target well anymore. They're asking for enough creative variety to let the algorithm find the audience on its own.
This is a bigger shift than it sounds, and a lot of brand teams especially in luxury and fashion, where campaigns have historically been built around a handful of hero assets haven't caught up to what it demands.
The algorithm doesn't need your audience insight anymore
Google and Meta's automated campaign types now handle audience discovery better than most manual setups, simply because they're matching against live signal at a scale no media buyer can replicate by hand. Feed them a narrow, biased signal like a single high-intent remarketing list and the system will happily optimize toward that narrow slice and nothing more. Feed it broad, varied creative and it will go find pockets of demand a manual buyer would never have thought to target in the first place.
The practical result: targeting sophistication has stopped being a competitive advantage. Two brands running the same automated campaign type, with the same budget, will get meaningfully different results based almost entirely on the depth and variety of creative they feed the system not on who set up smarter exclusions.
Creative volume becomes the actual bottleneck
Luxury and premium brands are used to a slower creative cadence a seasonal shoot, a handful of polished assets, reused across months. That approach starves an automated campaign of the variation it needs to keep finding new audience pockets. What performs now looks less like a single beautiful campaign and more like a constant stream of variations: different hooks, different formats, different pacing, different opening frames, tested and rotated far faster than a traditional creative calendar allows.
This is uncomfortable for brands that built their identity on a controlled, editorial aesthetic. It doesn't mean abandoning that aesthetic it means producing far more of it, in more configurations, than most teams are currently set up to do.
Brand safety and consistency now live in the brief, not the buy
When a media buyer manually chose placements and audiences, brand fit was partly enforced at the targeting level. Automation removes that layer of control. If the creative itself doesn't consistently encode the brand's tone, quality bar, and positioning, the algorithm will place it in front of the wrong context without knowing any better. Brand consistency has to be baked into the creative brief and asset production process now, because there's no longer a manual checkpoint downstream catching misalignment.
First-party data still matters just differently
None of this makes first-party data irrelevant. It still feeds the automated systems as seed signal for lookalike expansion and as a way to protect margin by suppressing existing customers from cold acquisition spend. But its role has shifted from "the thing a media buyer manually builds audiences from" to "the input that makes the algorithm's automated matching sharper." Brands with clean, well-segmented CRM data are quietly getting more out of PMax and Advantage+ than brands relying on platform defaults alone not because they're targeting manually, but because they're feeding the machine better.
What this means for how agencies and brands should operate in 2026
Running paid media at NOIR & BLANCO for luxury and fashion Shopify clients this year has meant a real restructuring of where the effort goes less time in campaign-builder targeting menus, far more time in creative production pipelines, testing frameworks, and CRM hygiene that feeds the algorithm cleaner signal. The brands adjusting to this are the ones treating creative output like a media budget line item in its own right, not an afterthought to the "real" work of campaign setup.
The skill that mattered most in paid media for the last several years is disappearing. The one replacing it disciplined, high-volume, brand-consistent creative production is going to separate the brands that scale efficiently in 2026 from the ones still trying to out-target a system that's no longer listening.
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