There is a shared sentiment across growth teams right now. Scaling paid media feels more fragile, more expensive, and more unpredictable than it did a few years ago.

This is not nostalgia. Structural conditions have changed, and they have changed in ways that reward a different kind of competence.

The competitive shift is about quality, not volume

While advertiser numbers have increased, the more meaningful change is that the average quality of advertisers has risen sharply.

Access to education, tools, templates, and automation has flattened the execution curve. Solid account structure, functional tracking, and sensible optimisation are now table stakes rather than sources of advantage.

As a result, auctions are tighter and less forgiving. Marginal gains are competed away quickly, and poor strategic decisions surface faster.

Scaling now requires something harder to replicate than clean execution.

Automation has commoditised tactics

As platforms take on more of the optimisation workload, traditional tactical levers have diminishing impact. Bid strategies, audience layering, and structural experimentation still matter, but they rarely unlock step-change growth.

What has increased in importance are the inputs platforms cannot automate:

• Clarity of positioning
• Strength of narrative
• Depth of customer insight
• Quality and intent behind creative

Scaling feels harder because the leverage has moved upstream.

Attention is the real constraint

Rising CPMs are often blamed for scaling challenges, but cost is a symptom rather than the root cause.

The real constraint is attention.

Audiences are exposed to an unprecedented volume of marketing messages and tolerance for generic communication is extremely low. Creative that is technically sound often fails simply because it does not earn a moment of interest.

In this environment, reach exists, but relevance does not automatically follow.

Where scaling still becomes possible

Despite these challenges, scale is not out of reach. It has simply become more deliberate.

Teams that continue to grow paid media effectively tend to do a few things differently.

They invest more time in understanding why customers buy, not just how they convert.
They build creative systems around clear narratives rather than isolated ideas.
They treat creative development as a core growth function, not an afterthought.
They accept short-term inefficiency in service of long-term signal and learning.

These teams are not chasing loopholes. They are building leverage.

A more realistic definition of scale

Scaling paid media today is less about pushing budgets harder and more about expanding what the system can respond to.

New messages, new angles, new audiences, and new contexts create new surface area for growth. That surface area is what algorithms can then work with.

The opportunity still exists. It just sits earlier in the process than it used to.

Scaling has not disappeared. It has matured.

Gal Gazit
Performore – Growth Marketing Specialist