Notes from a conference, one year on

Conference predictions are worth revisiting after enough time has passed to check them, which almost nobody does.

Held up

Creative became the main lever. Said constantly, and correct. As targeting automated, the controllable variable narrowed to what you make and where you send it.

Volume requirements went up, not down. Every efficiency in production was absorbed by the auction wanting more.

Did not hold up

AI replacing production teams. A year on, the tools sit inside pipelines rather than replacing them, and the constraint moved from making assets to knowing which to make.

Everyone moving off Meta. Diversification happened, wholesale migration did not.

The one nobody said out loud

That the landing page would become the bottleneck. It was barely discussed, and it is now the most common unexploited gap we find in an account. The whole industry optimised the ad and left the destination alone.

The lesson about conferences

The useful signal is rarely on stage. It is in what several people mention independently in conversation and nobody has written up yet.