2025: The year performance marketing flipped (quietly)

Elevating the Game takes place right at the start of the year for good reason: to provide a space to reflect on what we learnt in the previous year, and what it means for growth (and performance) this year.

For the world of paid media, a lot changed in 2025. In fact, as Leaf CEO Gil Corrales explained in his presentation on the day, 2025 was the year performance marketing flipped entirely (and you might not have even noticed).

Here is a summary of Gil’s key points, and what they mean for DTC brands scaling in 2026.

Creative isn’t the problem

Over the past few years, brands have been told (explicitly and implicitly) that 'creative is king'. Invest more in creating really cool content. Let the platforms optimise. Trust Advantage+, PMax and automation to do the rest. Boom, you’ve got a high-performing ad campaign and your ROI is through the roof.

Gil didn’t argue against the importance of creative. He just reframed it.

“Creative sits at the top of the iceberg, but there is a whole foundation underneath it.”

The issue isn’t that creative doesn’t matter. It’s that creative can’t compensate for weak foundations.

“Without the right type of signals, without the right feedback loops built into the channels, creative can only take you so far.”

When teams rely on creative alone - without the data and structure beneath it - they lose both performance and control.

The quiet flip: automation changed where control lives

The biggest change in performance marketing hasn’t been a single platform update. It’s been the cumulative shift towards automation.

Campaign structures, bidding strategies and audience logic that were once human-led are now increasingly machine-driven.

“We’ve moved from human-led optimisations to a world where robots are making those decisions.”

That doesn’t mean control has completely disappeared - it means it’s moved. Today, platforms optimise based on the signals they receive, for example those that communicate the actions customers take on your site (like viewing products, adding to cart, or purchasing).

“If you’re not sending those feedback loops, then you’ve pretty much wasted your ad budget.”

In other words: platforms don’t need more button-pushing from performance teams. They need better signals to power the algorithms.

Better tracking matters more than ever

With recent updates like Meta’s Andromeda, algorithms now optimise less on surface engagement (views, likes, comments etc.) and more on real actions - what people actually do once they’ve clicked through to your site. That means performance is increasingly decided by what the platform can “see” after the click.

When those signals are missing or unreliable, the system can’t learn properly. It spends more budget testing, takes longer to find buyers, and costs rise as a result.

At the same time, the amount of data available to marketers is shrinking. As Gil explained, attribution and measurement are becoming “more and more of a black box” because we’re steadily losing access to data - driven by privacy changes and ad blockers.

“We’re playing cat and mouse with Apple and the ad blockers.”

That’s why first-party tracking has become so important, and the quality of the signals you’re able to feed into platforms has never mattered more.

Back to basics - or lose control

Gil’s conclusion was blunt. 2026 is not the year of sneaky shortcuts or surface-level optimisation.

“This year you cannot hide behind hacks.”

As automation increases, weak foundations are exposed faster. Brands that invest in complete data and clear feedback loops give algorithms something useful to work with. Brands that don’t are left reacting to results they can’t explain.

Performance marketing hasn’t died, but it has flipped.

And in 2026, the brands that win won’t be the ones chasing the cleverest tactics - they’ll be the ones that quietly, relentlessly get the basics right.

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Leaf Signal establishes, monitors and maintains accurate tracking - so paid media stays profitable.

Get in touch to learn more.