By: Eva Keller
For most of the last decade, performance marketers treated audience targeting as the whole game. Layer enough interests, lookalikes, and demographic filters onto a Meta campaign, and the algorithm would find the buyer. Krista Karpan, CEO and co-founder of Milked Media, says that instinct is now actively working against advertisers.
“What works is really just keeping your targeting as broad as possible,” Krista says. Her agency, which has spent close to eight years running paid social, search, and email marketing for e-commerce brands in fashion, jewelry, beauty, and home, has largely abandoned interest-based targeting as standard practice, not as a test, but as the default setup on nearly every account it manages.
That’s a harder pivot than it sounds. Interest-based targeting and lookalike audiences were the primary lever advertisers had for years, and letting go of that lever feels, to a lot of marketers, like giving up control. Krista’s team tried holding onto it. “We used to be much more granular with our targeting, leaning into interest-based targeting or lookalike audiences,” she says. “That simply doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work.” The exceptions are narrow: gender splits, sometimes an age band, occasionally geography for a brand with real local name recognition. Everything else runs wide open.
The reason isn’t a shortcut. It’s a shift in what actually does the targeting. “We keep the targeting super broad, but we’ve let the creative and the messaging in our creative essentially tell Meta who to serve this ad to,” Krista says. If an ad’s messaging is written for a mom audience, or for Gen Z, that’s what pulls the corresponding buyer out of a broad pool. The audience selection work marketers used to do in the ads manager has moved into the script and the storyboard. Get the creative wrong, and no amount of targeting precision fixes it. Get it right, and Meta’s algorithm finds the right person inside an audience that was never narrowed to begin with.
That shift puts more weight on the creative side of the business than most agencies are built to carry, which is where co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Nicolette McIntyre‘s role comes in. Nicolette, who came up through fashion design, styling, and creative direction before co-founding Milked Media with Karpan, oversees the creative work that now effectively functions as the agency’s targeting mechanism.
Three things back up the shift beyond the theory.
First, format bias doesn’t hold the way the industry assumes: Nicolette says the tired and true static image remains a top performer across a lot of her clients’ accounts, sometimes with messaging as simple as “new arrivals.”
Second, the definition of “good creative” has moved with Meta’s own algorithm. Nicolette says that six months ago, UGC and creator partnerships were treated as close to mandatory only for beauty brands. Under Meta’s newer Andromeda algorithm, which favors partnership ads, that’s no longer category-specific, and Milked Media now builds UGC into the creative mix across nearly every account it runs.
Third, and most concretely: Milked Media’s campaign for client Heretic Parfum, built around the brand’s Nosferatu-themed fragrance collaboration with Focus Features and led creatively by Nicolette’s team, won the 2025 Meta Agency Award for Best Performance Campaign of the Year in the Boutique Agency category, later featured in AdWeek. The strategy wasn’t a targeting breakthrough. It was a gothic, film-accurate creative built for an alternative audience the campaign never explicitly targeted. “It really is the creative that sold this,” Krista says. “The film is creepy and scary, so we leaned into that. It resonated with a gothic, alternative audience, and Meta’s algorithm saw that and was able to scale the ads to that audience.”
The obvious pushback: doesn’t “broad targeting” just mean throwing spend at the wall and hoping the algorithm sorts it out? Krista’s answer is that broad targeting isn’t the absence of strategy; it’s a different strategy that lives in measurement instead of setup. Her team still watches cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, whether Meta is allocating more budget to a given ad (a signal it’s winning), purchase volume, and frequency, which flags creative fatigue before it tanks performance. When a new client account needs traffic beyond straight sales campaigns, Milked Media doesn’t run that broad either. It tightens to a 1% lookalike of existing purchasers and optimizes for landing page views instead of link clicks, because broad-and-unqualified traffic on a non-sales campaign just wastes spend. Broad targeting is the default. It isn’t the only setting.
The implication for founders and CMOs is a rewrite of where the marketing team’s attention should go. If creative is what’s actually doing the targeting, then a weak ad brief is a targeting failure, not just a production problem, and the fix isn’t a tighter audience; it’s a sharper script.
Before locking a campaign structure, the more useful question isn’t “who should we target,” it’s “what does the messaging need to say to pull the right buyer out of a broad pool.” For an industry that spent a decade building targeting expertise as its core skill, that’s a real repositioning of where the strategic work happens, and most accounts still aren’t set up for it.
