Most media buyers try to scale before they have the foundation.
They see a creative get some traction and immediately start duplicating campaigns, increasing budgets, and expanding to new audiences.
Three weeks later, performance crashes and they’re back to square one.
The Foundation-First Approach
What works for one business won’t work for another.
What works for a $50 AOV won’t work for a $500 AOV.
What works for millennials customers, won’t work for Gen Z.
Before you scale anything, you need these 3 foundational pillars:
Pillar 1: Proven Creative-Offer Combination
Not just “creative that works”. Creative that works with your specific offer, for your specific audience. You need creative that resonates at scale, an offer that converts consistently, and a landing page with strong conversion rates.
Pillar 2: Account Structure That Fits Your Business
Stop copying other people’s account structures. Your structure should reflect your LTV, average order value, sales cycle, audience type (B2B vs B2C), and customer journey length – not someone else’s case study.
Pillar 3: Repeatable Testing System
You need a systematic approach to finding what works before you scale what works. This includes your weekly creative testing cadence, budget allocation, decision criteria for killing vs scaling, and process for iterating on winners.
How To Know When You’re Ready To Scale
Only scale when you can confidently answer “yes” to all three pillars:
1. “Do I have a creative-offer combo that consistently works?”
- Your best creative works for weeks (maybe even months), not days.
- Your conversion rate is stable day-to-day.
- Your ROAS doesn’t “randomly” swing wildly day-to-day
2. “Is my account structure optimized for my specific brand?”
- You can easily identify what’s working and what isn’t.
- Your account structure matches “your” business model and customer journey.
- Campaign organization makes sense for your AOV and purchase cycle
3. “Do I have a system to keep finding new winners?”
- You have a weekly creative testing schedule.
- You can consistently generate new winning creative.
- You have clear rules for when to kill underperformers and promote winners
If any answer is “no” or “maybe” – don’t scale. Fix your foundation first.
How To Scale Once Your Foundation Is Ready
Now that you’ve built a solid foundation with proven creative-offer combinations, optimized account structure, and repeatable testing systems, you have two paths to scale:
Path 1: Vertical Scaling – this means increasing budgets on your existing winning campaigns. When you find a campaign that’s consistently profitable at $1000/day, you gradually increase it to $1500, then $2000, then $5000.
You’re feeding more money into the same proven system. This works best when you have campaigns that have been stable winners for weeks or months, not just a few good days. The risk is that you’re putting all your eggs in fewer baskets
Path 2: Horizontal Scaling – this means creating more campaigns using variations of your winning pillars. Instead of increasing one campaign from $1000 to $5000, you create four additional campaigns each running at $1000.
You might duplicate your winning campaign but change the audience, or use different creative angles that address the same customer problem, or test different ad placements. It takes more time to manage, but it builds a more resilient advertising system.
The biggest scaling secret: The brands that scale fastest don’t have better creative or bigger budgets. They have better foundations.
Most media buyers scale their first winner.
Elite media buyers scale their best winner.
Try This
Before your next scaling attempt:
- Audit your foundation by rate each of the 3 pillars above from 1-10
- Fix your weakest pillar first (resist the urge to scale)
- Only scale when all three pillars score 8+
- Choose vertical, or horizontal scaling based on your specific brand needs
Stop trying to scale before you’re ready. Start building foundations that can actually support sustainable growth.
