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BOX SCALING PLAYBOOK

What scaling an ad account actually looks like, tactically.

by Brian McCreadie

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“What does scaling an ad account actually look like, tactically?”

This is a common question I get, and it's a great question for them to ask because scaling an ad account is the crux of the entire game we’re playing with our paid ads.

But when I was a paid social media buyer, before I pivoted into creative strategy, I had trouble answering this question.

I knew the ad platforms inside and out. I was on top of my optimizations and my reporting, and I understood what scaling looked like from a media buying perspective… But as the platforms started to automate media buying optimizations through algorithm updates, like Meta’s Andromeda update prioritizing broad targeting and Advantage+ campaigns, I started to realize that I had a skill gap and a bit of a nothing-is-actually-in-my-control…crisis.

As a paid social media buyer, I was losing the levers to optimize performance and effectively scale campaigns. I was racking up more years of work experience with the total ad spend I’ve managed creeping up to the 9 figure mark… but this was on paper. I felt as if the value I could bring to my team was going in the opposite direction.

I felt I needed to pivot.

So I did. I researched, I read. I started to hear quotes like “creative is the #1 lever for improving your paid ads performance” in YouTube videos and in articles and presentation decks from vendors.

And I already had an interest in creative projects, through writing music, short films & sketches in my free time.

So I landed on creative strategy for paid ads and fully committed, and so far it’s been the biggest unlock of my 10 year career.

Creative strategy for paid ads, or performance creative, is a newer field with positions starting to sparsely pop-up back in 2019. There are some great educators on YouTube, but it’s still largely undersaturated even in 2025 vs. the amount of content that’s out there around managing the platforms, structuring your campaigns, and navigating settings.

There’s a ton of great books and content on advertising, psychology & marketing, so the bones are there, but I felt the need to cast a wide net, educate myself from many angles and apply them to be more pinpointed and applicable to performance creative strategy (as well as explore and document my own theories and approaches). And as I self-educated and built up my portfolio, I started bringing creative strategy into my full-time and freelance roles, vetting what I was discovering with real in-market testing.

I became a media strategist who had an understanding of what scaling looks like from a media buying perspective, AND a creative strategist who had an arsenal of concepts and tactics that were actually actionable in affecting performance. Crisis averted, haha.

This playbook covers my guiding principles on how to scale with ad creative. It’s designed to help media buyers pivot into creative strategy like I did, and it’s supplemented by a full collection of playbooks that go into detail on more specific topics that make the loftier concepts more actionable.

I’m calling the method Box Scaling 📦.

Let’s get into it!

**From Media Buyer to Creative Strategist Media buying is becoming an “AND” position. The modern algorithms that power platforms like Meta & TikTok are automating lots of the previous day-to-day activities that media buyers used to need to stay on top of, like targeting and placement optimizations. Media buying is still a valuable skill, but as the algorithms continue to automate its becoming increasingly less valuable, because the means to affect performance is less and less in the media buyer’s control.

And for this reason, the industry is seeing the media buying function shift and fall under roles with broader scope, like managing conversion rate optimization (website & funnel), managing overall marketing, and managing creative strategy. And this is being fast-tracked with other industry trends of consolidating teams and bringing performance marketing practices in-house.

These days, there’s 5 main ways to improve your Meta ads performance:

  1. You optimize data integration. You make sure you’re optimizing for the right events, that you have a high event match quality score with high quality data flowing through. This is usually managed by a developer or an ads ops specialist.

  2. You optimize the website to either increase motivation to purchase or remove kinks in the flow, and this is usually managed by a conversion rate optimization specialist.

  3. You optimize your offer, usually done by marketing managers on the brand side as this requires cross-department collaboration and lots of number crunching and forecasting

  4. You optimize your lifetime value (LTV) through email, SMS nurturing, subscriptions, bundles, adjusting prices, improving your business model, and this is usually done by lifecycle managers, marketing managers and CMOs.

  5. You optimize your creative strategy.

This last way is where we come in as creative strategists and it’s what we’ll cover throughout the rest of this playbook (and through the bigger collection of playbooks).

The work that we do is in coordination with all of the other ways, for example your offers, bundles, and subscriptions are included in messaging, your ads need to coordinate with the landing page experience, and data integration is an increasingly important prerequisite to nail down as issues here will overall undermine paid ads performance.

Like I’ve already mentioned, this quote is everywhere: “Ad creative is the #1 lever for improving your paid ads performance”. This is one of the reasons why! It touches everything.

So let’s make sure we understand what scaling an ad account actually means, as thoroughly as possible!

There are four perspectives for scaling:

  1. Scaling from a media buying perspective
  2. Scaling from a lifetime value perspective
  3. Scaling from a conversion rate perspective
  4. Scaling from a creative strategy perspective

Let’s cover the first three before we focus on the fourth..

**Scaling through media buying

**The scaling cycle Our CPA, or cost per action, is the amount we are spending to get one “action”. For performance campaigns, this action is generally either a purchase (for eCommerce) or a lead (for b2b or b2c lead generation).

There is a positive relationship between your CPA and your budget, which means as budgets increase, your CPA tends to increase as well.

Let’s say your Max Allowable CPA (the most you're willing to pay for a purchase or lead) is $40. You’re currently spending $1,000 a day and hitting a $30 CPA. This is good. You are $10 under your max, which gives you room to increase your budgets.

So, you bump your spend up to $2,000 a day. Suddenly, your CPA creeps up to $42, above your max allowable CPA. At this point, you can’t scale further unless you can bring that CPA down again.

And let’s say that brings your CPA down to $35. You’re back under your $40 limit.

Now you can scale again. You increase daily spend to $3,000… CPA bumps back up to $40. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a cycle: you scale → CPA increases → you optimize → CPA decreases → scale again.

Now, I know this is a very tidy example. In the real world, things are messier. CPAs jump around based on the day, the platform, the targeting fatigue, even random events or events you can’t control like seasonality and shifts in demand. The increases aren’t always linear, going from $2k to $3k might be fine, but $3k to $4k could blow everything up. And scaling budgets usually happens in smaller day-by-day increments rather than in big jumps like in this example.

**Media Buying Scaling Tactics **Keep Below Your Max Allowable CPA If your max allowable CPA is $40, and you’re at $39, don’t scale yet. There’s no margin for error. Start increasing budgets when your CPA is at ≤ 80–90% of your max allowable CPA.

You should use a 7-day range rather than just looking at yesterday’s numbers, meaning you should wait until your CPA averages ≤ 80–90% of your max allowable CPA across the last 7 days.

With this understood, if your Max Allowable CPA is $40, your Target CPA with the 80-90% buffer would be $32-$36.

**Scale In Increments Looking at a Blended Target CPA When you increase budgets, increase slowly in increments. Most media buyers will either scale budgets by 10% per day, or by 15-20% every 3-4 days. Bigger increases tend to kick your campaigns back into algorithmic learning modes that result in temporary performance dips.

After each increase, did your CPA stay around the target CPA? If yes → increase again. If no → wait a few days then roll back to the last stable spend level by incrementally decreasing budget.

You should be scaling based on blended target CPAs, “blended” meaning the CPA across your entire campaign, or the campaigns supporting a specific product, service or category of products/services.

Some ads should go after lower awareness levels and have naturally higher CPAs, and some ads should go after higher awareness levels and will have naturally lower CPAs. But those lower awareness ads are needed to move your customers into the higher awareness stages, so both ends of the spectrum are necessary. The higher awareness stages ads are powered by the lower awareness stage ads.

They work together, and for this reason, use an overall, blended CPA to make budget scaling decisions.

If the awareness level portion is new or confusing, don’t worry! We’re going to cover this in detail once we get into creative strategy scaling tactics.

**Setting Your CPA Goal All of these media buying scaling tactics are predicated on you knowing what your max allowable CPA should be. You can back into the number from a profit perspective, by understanding your ratio of Lifetime Gross Profit (LTGP) to your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), or through a revenue perspective looking at your Lifetime Value (LTV) to CAC. The ideal metrics and ratio you use (e.g., LTGP 3:1 and LTV 2:1), should react to the stage your company is in and acceptable scenarios you forecast.

This is a big topic that pulls attention away from the focus of this playbook, but it’s covered in detail and with calculators and worksheets in the Goal Setting & Reporting Playbook.

Okay, let’s get into the next bit.

**Scaling through Lifetime Value

If media buying is about keeping your CPA under control, scaling through lifetime value is about raising the ceiling of what you can afford to pay for a customer. The higher your LTV, the more wiggle room you have. Increasing your lifetime value can stretch that $40 CPA up to $50 or $60, easier to achieve numbers, without hurting profitability.

There are a few main levers here:

**Price

Price is the most direct lever. A small price increase across all purchases can add up to a large difference. If your product is $40 and you raise it to $50 without killing conversion, you just lifted LTV by 25% instantly. Dips in conversion rates should be expected with price hikes, so it relies on testing and scenario modeling to determine if it’s the right move.

**AOV

Average Order Value (AOV) is about capturing more revenue per transaction. This incorporates price, but tactics here also include bundling, upsells, and downsells offered at checkout, as well as cart thresholds like free shipping at $60 that nudge people higher. Cross-sells also are also a move here, like selling accessories, complementary add-ons, or even adjacent products and services. If you can move your AOV from $40 to $55, you’re growing LTV without needing new customers.

**Continuity

Turns a one-time purchase into a subscription or membership that locks in recurring revenue and predictability. Subscriptions, auto-refills, or exclusive membership brings in recurring cashflow and increases LTV.

**Repeat Purchases

Not every product is subscription-friendly, but you can still increase frequency by retargeting your audience with new reasons to buy again. Think seasonal launches, new flavors, limited editions. Strong post-purchase nurture flows can email/sms marketing are common tactics that bring people back in. If customers buy once every 6 months instead of once a year, you’ve doubled their value.

**Retention

If you have a continuity play, but people churn (like cancelling their subscription), you’re leaking value. Retention comes from delivering a product that works, building strong post-purchase education, creating loyalty programs, and keeping customers engaged through email, SMS, and community. The better the experience, the longer they stay, and the higher your LTV climbs.

**LTV Summary

The big idea here is that every improvement in these areas feeds back into your allowable CAC. If you can increase what each customer is worth to your business, you can raise your max allowable CPA and target, spend more and beat out your competition through scale. For eComm this can completely change your growth ceiling, and for lead generation the reality is that CPLs don’t vary too dramatically by category if your creative and lead form is dialed. So if your CPLs are meeting category benchmarks but consistently leading to low ROAS, it often isn’t a creative strategy problem. It’s more of a lifetime value constraint. You don’t need cheaper leads, you need more money per customer.

This decision making typically falls at the CMO or marketing leadership level, with marketing managers and product teams responsible for the strategy and planning. Media buyers and creative strategists can optimize ads all day long, but if you’re seeing strong CTRs, hook rates, hold rates, and good conversion rates across your funnel while CPAs still remain unacceptable, then the issue usually isn’t creative or media buying. The constraint is LTV. And even if your creative or conversion isn’t perfect, LTV optimizations will help.

It’s good to keep this in mind. Media buyers and creative strategists report on the success of the paid ads campaign, so blame for poor CPA performance is commonly planted on those positions. If your media metrics and conversion rates are looking okay, but CPA performance is still bad, it warrants having conversations up the chain of command and pushing for increasing your CPA ceiling through LTV optimizations.

Looking at industry benchmarks is an extremely helpful way to arm yourself in these conversations, and we cover how to research those in the Goal Setting & Reporting playbook as well.

**Scaling through conversion rates

**The Machine Think of your website or funnel like a machine. You fuel it with traffic, and its job is to convert that traffic into energy, whether that is purchases, leads, or booked calls. Your fuel is going to waste if the machine is low functioning or broken!

The “machine” is your funnel. It’s your conversion rate optimization work, which includes sales teams for if that’s a part of your funnel (usually for services and higher-ticket offers) or through landing pages, checkout flows, and lead forms for eCommerce and lead gen. Improving the machine’s efficiency means generating more output from the same amount of input. In marketing terms, just like with LTV, this means lowering your CPA without having to increase your spend. And when your CPA drops, you create more room to scale. You’re increasing your leverage, so with more efficient conversions, you are ad creative works harder, you acquire more customers at acceptable CPAs, and you have more room to expand into higher awareness level audiences your competitors might not be able to profitably touch.

CRO is a whole in depth practice, but here are the high-level conversion rate levers:

These closely tie into the Fogg’s Behavior Model, which is a famous overarching behavior economics model that says that behavior happens when three elements converge at the same time: motivation, ability, and a prompt. Ability translates to how easy it is to take the action. Motivation translates to how desirable it is to take the action, and prompts are touch points (like an ad). Behavior happens when the action is easy to do and highly motivating, so both ends work together to raise the likelihood of conversion when your audience sees an ad.

**Reducing Friction **Friction is any obstacle that makes the desired action harder to complete. Every unnecessary form field, extra click, or distracting element reduces ability. Reducing friction means streamlining checkout flows, shortening forms, improving page speed, and making it obvious what to do next. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are helpful for diagnosing issues in site development that create invisible friction, such as poor loading times or unoptimized code.

CRO unlocks often come from removing distractions and designing with a clear priority around your goal. Everything “above the fold” (the part of the page immediately visible without scrolling) should focus on getting the user to take the next step. “Below the fold” (the part of the page that requires scrolling to view) is better reserved for visitors who are not ready to convert yet and still need to move through their awareness stages, which we will cover in more detail later. In paid ads we are mainly looking for two types of behavior: either converting now, or moving forward in awareness until they are ready to convert once they are more educated.

Friction also relates to synergy between your ad and your landing page. Think of your ad as a promise, with the landing page being the payoff. If there is too much dissonance between your ad and your landing page (in terms of branding, messaging, or design), it comes off as a broken promise and creates drop-off. In the CRO world, this concept is called message match, and it’s a known lever to improve conversion rates and reduce bounce rates (meaning people quickly leave the page after they click). It is also sometimes called ad scent, which refers to keeping the “trail” of consistency from the ad into the landing page so that visitors feel they are in the right place.

**Adding Friction **In some cases, especially in lead generation, adding friction is a good thing. If your funnel is bringing in unqualified leads that waste sales team resources, then increasing form length or requiring additional qualification questions can filter out the unqualified. For example, a short name and email form may deliver a high lead volume, but many will not be serious buyers. Adding fields like budget, company size, or purchase intent creates friction, but improves lead quality and ultimately reduces your cost per qualified lead. This can be paired with nurturing strategies like automated email and SMS sequences, that have personalized messaging informed by your lead qualification questions, can warm up qualified prospects over time, so the added friction will create an increase in your CPLs, but better returns and allow the platform algorithms to optimize towards higher quality audiences.

Another form of friction is pre-sell pages (PSP). This is a landing page that acts as an extra step between the ad and the product details page (PDP) for eComm or the lead gen form or appointment setting form for lead generation. Pre-sell pages include more context and education and are especially effective when targeting audiences in higher awareness stages who are not ready to buy immediately and need more education or trust building. They warm people up and prime them to take action, and should generally be filled with messaging that aligns with the same problems, desires, and characteristics you targeted in your ad creative. A common practice is to design the pre-sell pages in the style of an advertorial (a page that looks and feels like an article but is designed to sell) and as a video sales letter (VSL, a video-driven pitch that walks the viewer through a persuasive sales narrative).

**Increasing Motivation **Even with a smooth funnel, people still need a reason to act. Increasing motivation means making the offer feel more urgent, more relevant, and more rewarding. This can come through clearer value propositions, stronger copy, better positioning of the benefits, or social proof like testimonials and reviews that reduce doubt. Motivation can also be boosted with urgency and scarcity, such as limited-time offers, countdown timers, low-stock indicators, or seasonal campaigns that create pressure to act now rather than later. Guarantees and authority callouts also play a role in making the action feel like the obvious choice. The more motivating the offer, the more likely traffic will convert.

**Brand Building **Brand building is another way to increase conversion rates and build leverage. A strong brand makes every element of your advertising, from ad creative to conversions, more impactful because people already have positive associations tied to your product before they ever click. A brand is a set of associations, hopefully positive ones, that connect your product to the outcomes your audience aspires to. When people associate your brand with trust, quality, or transformation, the entire funnel benefits from higher motivation and smoother conversions.

You can also borrow brand by partnering with authority figures, influencers, and established players who already have strong associations that transfer onto your business. This is called Brand Borrowing. Brand building and borrowing makes the machine stronger by stacking the odds in your favor before the conversion process even begins.

Brand building is done through all elements of your marketing, like organic social, PR, email marketing, etc., but it can also be delivered in tandem with your performance marketing. Brand building is a slow moving/longer-term play, and not the focus of what I cover with performance creative focus of these playbooks, but there are hybrid strategies of designing ads to drive performance and build brand in the same swing.

Too much of an emphasis on brand (which is a common misfit that we cover in the Pitfalls Playbook) can undermine performance, so paid ads teams often separate performance campaigns (i.e., direct response) from brand awareness campaigns and measure them differently and with different goals. But brand builds leverage that benefits your performance, so mature companies often emphasize brand building as a key part of their overall growth strategy.

**Conversion Rate Summary **Improving conversion rate is about making your machine more efficient. The same budget, same traffic, and same CTR now generate more conversions, which lowers CPA and expands your capacity to scale. In eCommerce this means higher purchase rates from the same number of sessions. In lead generation it means more qualified leads without additional spend, and stronger closing rates for sales teams. If your ads are performing well with strong CTRs, hook rates, and hold rates, but CPAs are still unprofitable, the constraint is often conversion rate.

This type of work is usually owned by marketing managers, CRO specialists, or product teams, with media buyers and creative strategists reporting on funnel performance. Media buyers can drive high-quality traffic, but if the machine is not converting, CPAs will remain too high. When you improve conversion efficiency, you not only reduce CPAs, you also gain leverage over competitors who are stuck operating less efficient funnels. And for lead generation specifically, we cover more detailed tactics for optimizing conversion rates inside the Lead Generation Playbook.

**Scaling through creative strategy

Okay! Now let’s transition into creative strategy. In the Scaling Through Media Buying section we walked through the positive relationship between CPAs & budgets, how CPAs increase as budgets increase. The core reason for this lies in your ad creative, so let’s kick this section off by understanding why this relationship exists.

There’s two main reasons:

  1. Targeting Fatigue
  2. Creative Fatigue

**1. Targeting Fatigue In 2025, your creative determines your audience targeting.

Back in the day, a big part of the media buyer’s responsibilities was testing and optimizing targeting settings, like age, interests, behaviors, lookalikes, & retargeting. But with Meta’s modern ad platform algorithms, targeting now happens at the creative level.

The algorithm looks at the content of your ad (the visuals, the copy, the script) and uses that to decide who to show it to.

Let’s say your ad says:

“Attention Dog Moms with Golden Retriever Puppies.”

At first, and in theory, the algorithm will deliver it exactly to that audience: dog moms with golden retriever puppies. That’s hyper-specific, and it’ll probably convert really well because of how specific it is.

But as your spend increases, that super-specific audience starts to dry up due its lack of audience size. So the algorithm starts to broaden:

As the audience gets broader, your message becomes less relevant. A guy with a 12-year-old Great Dane isn’t going to click on an ad for golden retriever puppies, but that specific messaging isn’t relevant to him. So your performance drops, and your CPA goes up.

The more specific your messaging is, the quicker it will run out of relevant audiences to target.

But specificity drives performance (for reasons we’ll discuss later in this playbook), so the key is to make your creative specific enough to resonate, but broad enough to scale. It’s a balance.

**2. Creative Fatigue The second main reason is creative fatigue. This is when your ads are being over-served to your audience, and they are so many times that they start to ignore it. Even if it worked great at first, it stops pulling its weight over time.

People rarely convert after a single ad. They need repeated touchpoints that build awareness and move them toward consideration. The way to do this is by serving a variety of ads, because once someone has seen the same ad too many times, it blends into the background and gets ignored.

Meta understands this well, and while Meta doesn't release nuances around how their current algorithm works, it’s very likely that Meta deprioritizes ads that are live too long, meaning the creative is fatiguing because audiences are ignoring it and because Meta is artificially increasing CPMs and delivering the ad to less relevant audiences.

How can you spot if this is happening to you? Two main ways:

This is particularly relevant to ads that target existing customers or lower funnel audiences. If you’re going after audiences that are in lesser aware awareness stages, you're going after bigger audience pools and your ads typically have a longer runway. Lower awareness stage ads, like short, offer focused ads or image ads, tend to heavy up on lower funnel audiences, which means the runway is shorter and ads exhaust faster.

Again, we’re unpacking this concept of awareness stages later in this playbook.

The solve for creative fatigue is with creative diversity. Lots of ads with different angles and approaches.

You need fresh angles, new visuals, new creators, different hooks. The more diverse the better. If your ads look the same, but have slightly different copy, it won’t be enough for your audience to recognize the difference, so with the latest meta algorithm, bigger variations between ads is the move.

Personify the algorithm. If you quickly glance at your ads and can’t spot the difference, the algorithm isn’t likely to consider it a broad enough variation.

Alright, we’ve talked about the why behind rising CPAs, the relationship between budget and performance, and how creative plays a central role in all of it.

We’ve explored two problems, and they’re both two types of fatigue, Targeting Fatigue & Creative Fatigue.

Both of these problems are solved by the same thing: smart, creative strategy work.

And that’s exactly what we’ll explore over the rest of this playbook!

**Box Scaling

Here’s how I think about scaling ad accounts 2025 — I call it Box Scaling 📦.

Imagine your creative strategy as a literal box. If we want to scale (to grow performance, push more spend, and still keep CPAs under control) we need to make that box bigger and heavier.

And there are three dimensions we can expand:

Let’s start with width.

**Width ↔

When we talk about width in the context of creative strategy, we’re essentially talking about going after a wider pool of personas.

Let’s say we’re seeing targeting fatigue, where we can no longer scale against, again, Dog Moms with golden retriever puppies. Our owner with the 12-year old great dane is getting served that ad, and he’s ignoring it because it’s not relevant to him.

One way to scale is by adding in ads that go after that dog owner with the 12-year old great dane. We’re going wider. We’re expanding the persona segments we’re building creative for.

And when I say “personas” I don’t mean personas like this: “The Tech Savvy fashionista” a mom who has $300k HHI, spends 3 hours a week shopping on Instagram and loves Starbucks coffee.

Old school personas used to look like this, but they’re largely unhelpful because they have lots of details which won’t actually fit into our ad creative.

The better way of approaching personas, is to break them down into two types of segments:

  1. Problem/Desire Segments
  2. Characteristic Segments.

These two segment approaches cut through the noise and zero in on the details that matter most for resonating with our audience through ad creative: the problems people are trying to solve for and the characteristics they identify with.

Let’s start with Problem/Desire segments.

**Problem/Desire Segments Every great product solves a problem. Often, it solves many. And on the other side of every problem is a desire, the outcome someone is hoping for. The problem/desire is a pairing.

Since solving problems and fulfilling desires is the very reason people buy, it’s also the most powerful way to resonate with your audience.

Pain points is another term I like to use interchangeably with problems.

Take Dr. Squatch Soap, for example. It doesn’t just clean your body, it solves for multiple pain points:

  1. “I smell bad” → “I want to smell amazing.”
  2. “Most soaps are expensive” → “I want great soap without overpaying.”
  3. “I don’t trust soaps with chemicals” → “I want something natural.”
  4. “I don’t feel attractive” → “I want to feel confident and desirable.”

Each of these problem/desire pairings is a different segment that we can target.

Your ads should generally focus on one core problem/desire at a time, although this is a rule of thumb that can be broken if your testing is pointing you in that direction.

Resonating with this segment should often be the focus of your hook and the main focus of the beginning of your ad.

Oftentimes, the best performing hooks are just simply stating the problem you're targeting as a “yes-question”: Hooks like “Do you want great soap without overpaying”, have performed great for the brands that I’ve worked with.

Quick side bar…

Since the problem/desire are two sides of the same coin, you should also experiment with messaging that reflects both sides. We have Stick Language and Carrot Language.

The approach that will work best for you depends on the brand, the target persona, and should always be discovered through testing. But keep in mind humans have an inherent negativity bias (which we’ll cover more in the Psychology playbook).

Take a look at what headlines get the most news coverage, the Instagram posts that go the most viral, and the comments on those posts that get the most attention. They lean towards negativity (although I often wish they didn’t). For this reason, I tend to lean towards stick language based on what I’ve seen work best with my clients.

Brand teams often try to push ad teams towards positive messaging, but when the goal is driving performance through creative I often need to educate and sell through stick messaging approaches to unlock performance improvements.

Back to problem/desire segments…

Some of these problem/desire segments are larger, or more pressing than others, and you will discover which problems you should focus on based on the results of your ads. If performance is very good, even when you scale your spend to higher spend levels, you know you’ve found a scalable problem/desire segment to continue investing in and optimizing for.

2nd side bar…

There are two types of problems: functional problems and aspirational problems

  1. Functional problems are straightforward and easy to communicate with direct messaging. "Our soap smells amazing and doesn’t have harmful chemicals." We’re focused on the functions the product or service fulfilled, like features, benefits and the outcomes that those features and benefits bring.

  2. Aspirational problems are rooted in ideal identity and ideal lifestyle. They tap into who the customer wants to become, how they want to be seen, and what kind of life they want to live. "Be the kind of man that smells amazing, feels confident, and attracts the right people into his life." This type of messaging goes beyond the product’s utility and connects to ambition, status, and belonging.

The best brands don’t just solve functional problems. They also solve aspirational problems.

Dr. Squatch is a good brand to watch for examples of this. Rather than just messaging their soap’s function benefits, their messaging emphasizes how their soap will make you feel more rugged, primal, and attractive. Rather than just making you smell good, the products help you achieve or improve sexual companionship.

Our strongest motivators are primal human desires, and a book called Ca$hvertising by Drew E. Whitman (that I consider a legendary advertising book) refers to these as the Life Force 8. Here’s a list of them.

  1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension
  2. Enjoyment of food and beverages
  3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger
  4. Sexual companionship (Dr. Squatch’s angle)
  5. Comfortable living conditions
  6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses
  7. Care and protection of loved ones
  8. Social approval

These primal desires, and other aspirational desires, are very powerful as they tap into our evolutionary psychology, or what we care about as a species.

Problems and desires should come from customer research. Look at your product reviews, your comments, your competitor reviews, their comments, etc. This is covered in detail in the Research Playbook.

To sum this section up, problem/desire segments define your personas by the core reason people are buying. But people aren’t just trying to solve problems with a product in general. They want something specifically designed for them, and that is where the next section of scaling with Width comes into play.

**Characteristic Segments Another way to widen your creative strategy box with new personas is through segmenting by your audience’s characteristics. Characteristics like age, gender, location, lifestyle, or stages of life.

Let’s start with why this is important.

**The Cocktail Party Effect The most effective hook in the world is seeing someone in person and saying, “Hey, {Insert Your Name}”.

This is targeted to a characteristic that represents you and only you, so it’s highly specific and relevant.

There’s a concept called the cocktail party effect. It’s a psychological phenomenon that explains how our brains filter out background noise while focusing on a conversation.

Imagine you're at a bustling cocktail party, locked into a conversation with someone. The room is filled with chatter, but all the background conversations blend into an indistinct hum that you drone out and are not paying attention. However, if someone across the room suddenly mentions your name, your attention instinctively shifts, pulling you away from your current conversation as your brain zeroes in on the conversation that mentioned your name.

This is the cocktail party effect. It demonstrates how much we care about things that are specific to us.

​The cocktail party effect shows just how powerfully our attention is drawn to what feels personal and specific to us.

​**Types of Characteristic Segments With characteristic segmentation, we’re grouping our audience by age, gender, location, situations and other characteristics in order to craft a specific and personal message. The more personal and specific the better, but keep in mind that we have to balance specificity with broad messaging so that our ads are specific enough to resonate and broad enough to reach audience size large enough to give our campaigns ads to scale.

With that said,​ here are categories to consider segmenting your audience by:

Characteristic segment categories can be communicated in two ways: directly through the script and text of the ad (tell), and indirectly through the creator or model we feature (show). For example, a line of copy might explicitly speak to parents, while the choice of featuring a mom with her kids in the creative shows that same characteristic without saying it outright. Seeing someone who mirrors your own identity in an ad makes the message feel more relevant, believable, specific and personal, and it is a big part of why characteristic segments work. We dive into this a bit more in the Trust Building Playbook.

Some categories, like age, gender, or parental status, can often be expressed easily in both tell and show formats. Others, like household income, are harder to message directly and instead need to be conveyed indirectly through lifestyle cues, environments, or the way a product is positioned. A high-income persona, for example, may be best represented by showing an aspirational setting or elevated lifestyle rather than spelling out income in the script. The goal is to align the language, visuals, and casting so that the audience clearly sees themselves in the creative.

**Characteristic Segments & Problem/Desire Segments **Problem/desire segments and characteristic segments can be stacked to create more precise and resonant messaging. By pairing the reason someone is buying with the traits they identify with, you’re now speaking directly to both their needs and their identity.

For example, instead of treating them separately like this:

You can stack them into a single audience:

This persona now represents both who they are and what they are struggling with.

Again, remember my note about balancing specificity with broadness! This will narrow your audience, but if you choose your core audience characteristics with your core audience problems/desires, it’s very possible to find personas with stacked segments that fit this balance – and finding a balanced stack can bring fantastic performance

My general approach is to prioritize problem/desire segments. Once I have a winning problem/desire messaging, I test stacked variations by layering in a characteristic segment.

That said, some products are inherently tied to a characteristic segment. Prenatal supplements, for instance, are only relevant to pregnant women, so characteristic-focused messaging is essential right from the start and needs to be included as a default. The same often applies to local advertising, where the product is only relevant to people within a specific location.

Callout hooks, hooks that label and callout to your target persona, particularly the form of a yes-question, like “Are you a dog mom who hates brushing your dog’s teeth” is a general framework that tends to perform great. We cover this in more detail in the Hooks Playbook.

**Definitions And one last note here, to clear up any confusion around definitions. I consider
Segments are the building blocks of the overall audience avatar targeting.

Personas are the final avatars we target. We’ll soon cover how every ad is speaking to a specific awareness stage, whether you are speaking to it intentionally or not, so every characteristic segment, problem/desire segment, and stacked segment is paired with an awareness stage segment to build a persona.

For this reason, I use “personas” to define the full audience we are targeting, with segments being defined as the building blocks.

This will make sense as we transition into the next section.

**Width Summary Okay…

So we’ve talked about width: expanding your creative strategy by targeting a wide range of problems, desires, and audience characteristics.

When we have exhausted scale against one persona with targeting fatigue, this is a way of broadening who you are reaching and finding new persona pockets within your total addressable market.

But our north star as performance marketers is to do MORE of what’s working (covered in the mindset playbook). If you have a persona that’s driving performance, you want to squeeze as much juice out of it as you can.

So even when you feel like you’ve exhausted your characteristic, problem/desire & stacked segments, there’s usually more to squeeze.

And this is what we’ll cover with the next dimension of box scaling: DEPTH.

**Depth ↕

Not everyone in your audience is in the same mindset. Some people don’t even know they have a problem yet. Others are actively researching product or services options. And some people one click away from buying, they just need a nudge.

Depth is essentially another way of segmenting your audience, but now we’re segmenting our audience by the level of awareness that they have of your product or service. These segments are called awareness stage segments, and they help us tailor creative to where someone is in their journey.

Awareness stages look like a funnel, but let’s make a distinction on the type of funnel we’re talking about. Most marketers reference a funnel that looks something like this:

Awareness --> Consideration --> Purchase

It's a solid representation of how customers through the journey, but not very helpful for creative strategy because it’s not as intuitively prescriptive of the type of messaging we need to resonate with each stage.

A more helpful funnel for making Facebook ads looks like this: Symptoms → Problems → Solutions → Product → Offer

These are actionable stages than traditional funnel stages, as they direct you towards the type of messaging that should be included in your ad.

**Symptom Stage People need to connect the surface-level signs that something might be wrong to a deeper problem. Messaging here should highlight relatable struggles and patterns they’re experiencing.

**Problem Stage People recognize they have a specific problem and feel the pain of it. Messaging should agitate the pain and show why it matters.

**Solution Stage People are aware of the problem and need to learn more about the solutions that exist and are actively researching categories or approaches. Messaging should position your solution category as the best pathway forward.

**Product Stage People are aware of the solutions and need to learn more about the products/services and compare them to alternatives. Messaging should highlight features, benefits, and us vs. them comparisons.

**Offer Stage People know your product and just need an incentive to buy — a discount, urgency, guarantee, or risk reversal. Messaging should push the final nudge.

This concept is inspired by Eugene Schwartz’s legendary book Breakthrough Advertising (1966). The book is so sought-after that original copies resell for around ~$500. Schwartz outlined the stages as Unaware, Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, and Most Aware, and I’ve adapted these into Symptom, Problem, Solution, Product, and Offer to make them more intuitive and directly actionable for ad messaging.

A person needs to be aware of their symptoms, to become aware of the underlying problem. And they need to understand their problem before learning about the solutions. They need to understand the solutions before they'll consider specific products, and they'll need to understand everything before they'll respond to an offer.

So, going back to our Dr. Squatch example, if our problem is “I smell bad”, your messaging broken down by awareness stage could look like this:

**Problem: “I smell bad”

These are hooks that directly reflect their respective awareness stage. This is one hook framework that performs well, but there’s many other ways of approaching hooks that we’ve outlined in our Hooks Playbook.

If a person is already educated on their symptoms, the core problem, and solution, all they need to be sold on now is the product features/benefits/outcomes and the offer. The person doesn’t need to hear a story about the symptoms, problems, and solutions because they’re already aware of all of that. They are at the product stage and need a product ad.

And if a person in the symptom stage is served an offer ad, it won’t resonate with them because they have yet to understand that they have symptoms that point to a problem that your product, which you have a great offer for, can solve.

**Nested Approach The messaging for each one of these stages broadly looks like this...

Think of it like Russian nesting dolls. Every ad ends with the offer, but the earlier stage ads also contain the layers that come after them. A symptom ad is the broadest and longest, wrapping all the other stages inside it. As you move down the funnel, the ads get shorter and more focused, until you reach the pure offer ad, which is the smallest doll containing only the final incentive.

Side note

This nested approach is a high-level guide for how your messaging should look. Keep in mind that rules can be bent. Sometimes a longer, offer-focused ad will outperform shorter variations. You might find winning problem ads that skip the product stage and jump straight to the offer, or skip the product and the offer.

Each stage also has a wide range of building blocks that help fill out each stage with more specific messaging. For example, the product stage often includes building blocks like features, benefits, outcomes, competitor comparisons, testimonials, and authority callouts. These blocks give you options for how to layer messaging within each stage, and we cover them in detail in the Ad Structure Playbook.

Back to the section.

The format (video, image, or carousel) is also dictated by stage.

Images ads are often seen as “minimal viable executions” by inexperienced advertisers. They are fast and cheap to make, so many advertisers make the mistake of using them as their only format when testing personas. This works to an extent with lower funnel ads, but pairing those image ads with symptom or problem aware messaging (a mistake I’ve seen over and over again) creates a mismatch between the target awareness stage and the format. This is a misfit mistake that I cover in more detail in the Pitfalls Playbook.

**Where to Start and How to Scale When launching campaigns, I recommend starting with a mix of lower funnel ads (product and offer) and midfunnel solution ads. This combination lets you capture low-hanging fruit and get quick wins while also testing angles that can scale into larger audiences. In funnel terms, product and offer ads sit in the lower funnel, solution ads sit in the midfunnel, and symptom and problem ads sit in the upper funnel. Lower funnel ads often deliver the lowest CPA because they reach people who already have high intent and convert at the highest rates, but they exhaust quickly due to small audience sizes. Solution stage ads balance this out by providing midfunnel reach that can both scale and maintain solid performance.

It is inevitable that you will run into audience fatigue if you only lean on lower funnel ads, so you eventually need to expand up the funnel. That means testing into problem and symptom stages to unlock scale. A smart tactic, especially on smaller budgets, is to test creative angles with lower funnel and solution ads, then scale the winners up and down the funnel with variations that match each stage’s messaging, structure, and format. And if you find a winning ad, regardless of the stage, test it in both directions across the awareness funnel to discover new pockets of scale and performance.

Testing is the key here. Through testing, you’ll discover that certain personas can scale into upper stages while maintaining acceptable performance, while others fatigue quickly. Certain personas also have larger lower funnel audiences, which makes them easier to scale, while others are more limited.

The ability to scale across upper, mid, and lower funnels is also shaped by your category, brand maturity, and the specific problem, characteristic or stacked segment you are targeting. For example, a category like deodorant already has high awareness of its core symptoms and problems, such as body odor, which makes symptom and problem messaging less needed, and maybe completely unnecessary. On the other hand, new categories or new brands often require more education around both symptoms, problems, solutions, and the product itself, which makes a full-funnel approach more essential. Testing is how you discover the mix that works for your brand. We have more on this in the Testing Playbook.

**How Awareness Stages Work Together It’s important to understand that lower funnel and upper funnel ads work together. The goal of advertising is to change behavior, either by moving people through the awareness stages or driving them to purchase or become a lead. Investing in educating your upper funnel and mid-funnel unlocks scale for those the lower and higher CPA performing stages

This ties back to the media buying scaling section, and it’s the reason why we often allow CPAs in upper awareness stages to rise above our max allowable CPA. As long as the overall campaign is hitting the target CPA holistically, the investment in higher CPA upper funnel ads powers the scale of our lower CPA offer ads. Driving volume at the bottom is only possible if you are filling the top, so performance should be evaluated on a broader level.

**The Big Picture Offer ads convert at the highest rate but scale the least. They deliver quick wins and strong CPA performance, but you cannot build a whole account on them alone. Upper funnel ads, symptom, problem, and solution, do not convert as efficiently, but they expand audience size and fuel long-term growth. Every ad speaks to a specific segment, and when you combine characteristic, problem or desire, and stacked segments with an awareness stage, you create the full avatar, which we call personas.

**Perfect World Let’s imagine a perfect world. In theory, there are two lofty goals we would aim for with width and depth if we had unlimited budget, bottomless audience sizes, and performance so good that we could endlessly scale. These goals are impossible to reach, they act as a conceptual finish line for what we are trying to accomplish with scaling through creative strategy.

Of course, no brand can (or should) actually create ads for every possible segment at every funnel stage. This is where strategy comes in. Strategy is another way of saying “prioritization”. Through testing and learning, we identify which awareness stages, characteristics, problems or desires, and stacked combinations drive the best performance and have enough scale, and then we prioritize the winners and deprioritize the losers.

**Data Integration **The last thing I’ll mention in this section is that getting your data integration in order is an important prerequisite for building a high-performing width and depth strategy. Meta’s algorithm optimizes by learning who responds to your ads and then delivering future ads based on those insights.

Apple’s iOS 14.5 update introduced App Tracking Transparency, which let people opt out of tracking across apps. When people opt out, Meta has trouble collecting pixel data from iOS devices which causes loss of event coverage. To offset this, Meta recommends using server-side integrations, known as Conversion API or CAPI. The optimal setup uses both pixel and CAPI together to maximize event coverage.

Events also pass back parameter data to Meta so they can match conversions to the right users. These parameters can include click ID, email, phone number, and other identifiers. It is important to ensure the correct parameters are being passed so Meta can optimize properly toward your goal event, such as purchases or leads. Meta provides an Event Match Quality score (EMQ), rated out of 10, to diagnose how well events are being matched, and an EMQ of 8 or higher is generally considered strong.

Deduplication is another common issue. This happens when a single conversion is counted twice because it was recorded by both the pixel and the server-side event, and it failed to deduplicate. In reality, it was only one purchase or lead, but Meta sees two. This double counting throws off the algorithm and makes it think campaigns are performing better than they really are. Meta’s Event Manager dashboard includes metrics and flags to help diagnose these issues.

Modern algorithms that power these ad platforms now handle much of the optimization work that media buyers used to manage manually. If your data integration is poor, it’s like hiring an inexperienced media buyer who is too green to know how to optimize. If you prioritize getting your data integration in a good place, the algorithms will do a much better job of delivering on your creative strategy by increasing the likelihood that your ads are reaching the right audience and having the best chance of driving results. Troubleshooting data issues is typically handled by developers, ad ops specialists, or Meta account teams if you spend enough to get that level of support.

**Width & Depth Summary **Width and depth help you find the right audiences and match your messaging to their stage of awareness. But even if you discover the best personas and awareness stages, you won’t scale far if your ads themselves are weak. This brings us to the third dimension of box scaling.

**Weight 𝄂𝄂—𝄂𝄂 Weight is the last dimension of box scaling, and it is the simplest, overall concept to grasp. Weight is just making your ads… better. By “better” Each ad you launch against a persona carries more impact. More weight.

Lower CPMs, higher CTRs, higher hook rates, higher hold rates, longer average watch times, higher conversion rates, lower CPAs, & better ROAS.

Making your ads better comes from testing, learning, and iteration. It is the process of taking what works and applying those learnings to your next creative builds. This is an exercise in doubling down on what drives performance.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs in building weight come from shifts like these:

And above all else, weight is unlocked by making lots of ads. Volume and variety feed the latest algorithm, and the more at bats you have, the faster you learn. An average “hit rate”, which is the % of tested ads that decrease your overall blended CPA, is 20%. So the more you test, the faster you will learn, the better your ads become, the lower your CPAs will be, and the more budget you can profitably spend.

Weight is a simple concept to understand conceptually, but the full scope of making better ads is massive. There’s a ton of concepts and tactics to apply to making better ads, but that’s the point of the rest of the playbooks in this collection.

Here are the playbooks that will unlock scale through weight:

And this playbook that you’re reading now is the Box Scaling Playbook. Think of it as your compass. It shows you the three dimensions (width, depth, and weight) and points you toward the other playbooks that give you the tools and tactics to actually build them.

There’s a concept in the marketing world called More, Better, New, and it’s a helpful mental model for how to prioritize your creative work.

The general prioritization follows that order: more, then better, then new. Every time you test something new, you are taking a bigger risk because it is unproven. If you already have a winning concept, it is usually harder to find a brand new winner than it is to keep squeezing more performance from what is working. That is why “more” and “better” are your first lines of attack, and “new” is where you take a bigger swing once you have the budget and insights to support it.

Keep this in mind when implementing box scaling. Testing ads with no signals is often an expensive way to learn, and comes with lower hit rates. Applying learnings, iterating on winners, and grounding “new” tactics in insights coming from your customer research should keep your hit rate higher and your performance more predictable.

And that’s the **Box Scaling Playbook! We covered the 3 dimensions:

Your goal with box scaling is to discover the personas that have the most scale, while maintaining target performance, and maximize the impact that each ad has by making them better, and then execute on this through your media buying SOP. It’s a challenge! It requires lots of testing, and lots of ad creative.

Remember that everything I’ve laid out is theory based. Rules can be broken! Doing more of what’s working should be your north star and should trump any sort of “best practice”.

But when you get the question, “What does scaling actually look like tactically?” box scaling through width, depth, and weight are your sharpest weapons.

Thanks!

Brian McCreadie

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Questions, or want to talk shop? brian@brianmccreadie.com