How Affiliates Can Still Win When Platforms Get Smarter

By: Shmuel Herschberg, CMO, Built To Scale – Growth Agency

I have a confession. I subscribe to Netflix almost entirely for Seinfeld. Sure, I’ll watch something else from time to time, but I always end up back in the early 90s, reliving my teenage years and chuckling to myself that almost every episode would be resolved in under a minute if they’d just had smartphones.

And if you’re a Seinfeld aficionado, then you’ll remember that George Costanza desperately wanted to be an architect (and a marine biologist).

The irony of the whole thing was that his character would’ve been the worst architect. Think about it. He was not good at planning.
He never stayed calm under pressure. And most of the time he was not in control.

Fast forward 30+ years, and those three traits... planning, composure under pressure, and being in control are no longer just for architects. Indeed, in today’s digital marketing ecosystem, affiliates buying traffic require all three disciplines, especially looking for the right traffic in our competitive landscape.

So where is the “right” traffic?

The Traffic Isn’t Gone. The Bar Is Higher.

Lately, a familiar narrative has been circulating in affiliate circles:

“You can’t win at scale anymore.”
“Meta’s targeting is broken.”
“Big brands get all the good traffic.”

From my vantage point, that diagnosis is simply wrong. The traffic didn’t disappear. The qualification standards changed.

Platforms like Meta have become extraordinarily good at understanding user behavior at scale. They know what people stop for, what they engage with, what they ignore, and what actively degrades the user experience.

Meta also operates under constant tension. On one side, it must protect the end-user experience to keep people scrolling. On the other, it must hit revenue targets fueled by advertisers. The only way to balance those competing incentives is through signal quality.

That judgment is built on trillions of dollars in historical ad spend, cross-advertiser learning, and real-time behavioral data.

So when you launch an ad set with four creatives and only one receives spend, that isn’t random.

It isn’t a glitch.

And it certainly isn’t Meta “playing games.”

That is the 2026 algorithm functioning exactly as designed.

The platform is not obligated to give every ad equal exposure. It is obligated to protect the feed.

And when you think like that, you’ll understand that ads that generate attention, engagement, and a positive predicted experience earn distribution. Ads that do not are quietly deprioritized.

Once you accept that reality, the rest of the ecosystem starts to make sense.

Meta Isn’t Broken. It’s Doing Its Job. Are You?

Many advertisers still operate under a flawed assumption: that Meta’s primary job is to serve their ads.

It isn’t.

Meta’s primary job is to keep users on Meta.

If your ad generates weak engagement, negative sentiment, or fatigue signals, the platform would rather not take your money. There is no shortage of advertisers waiting to replace you.

This is why one creative often takes off while others stall. The system is constantly making probabilistic judgments about user experience.

Meta does not suppress low-quality ads because it is ethical. It suppresses them because it is rational. That distinction matters.

This is an important shift in mindset:

❎ You are not just competing for attention.
✅ You’re competing for approval... from people seeing your ads and Meta.

“Winning Bids” Is the Wrong Mental Model

Many affiliates still frame success as a bidding problem:

Manual bid controls
Cost caps
Hyper-segmented audiences

That mental model is outdated.

In large verticals like health and wellness, the audience is massive. Most people want to sleep better, feel better, age better, and live healthier lives. You do not need to “find” the audience.

The algorithm already knows where they are.

Your job is to give the system something worth showing.

This is why broad targeting works.This is why creative has become the primary differentiator. This is why accounts with weaker bids but stronger ads often outperform.

You don’t beat Meta at bidding. You earn distribution by producing ads people want to watch.

Why Affiliates Lose When They Compete Like Brands

Affiliates don’t lose because they’re smaller.

They lose when they abandon their asymmetry.

Brands are constrained by:

Compliance requirements
Brand voice guidelines
Long-term reputation risk
Internal approval cycles

Affiliates are not.

Affiliates can:

Push harder angles
Frame problems more aggressively
Speak emotionally and directly
Test narratives brands will not touch

This is not a liability. This is the affiliate edge.

But when affiliates adopt brand-safe creative, brand-safe messaging, and brand-style framing, the platform sees no meaningful difference. And when that happens, the brand wins. It has better data, deeper margins, and more patience.

Affiliates regain leverage only when they operate where brands cannot... convincingly approaching the red line without crossing it.

This is where many affiliates misunderstand what “testing” actually means.

They think testing is about volume. In reality, it’s about structure.

Look, I’m not saying to go rouge. And if you know me, you may have heard me say, “Let’s go to the red line, but don’t cross it.” Affiliates have the best opportunity to put the fun in marketing.

Angle Arbitrage Beats Volume

Creativity without classification is gambling.

Winning affiliates do not rely on memory or instinct alone. They:

Categorize angles
Track which narratives consistently generate signal
Build creative libraries instead of one-off tests

Over time, patterns emerge. And patterns are what scale. And the speed that it occurs is dependent on your budget.

But remember, speed without discipline is chaos. Speed with structure is leverage. Every affiliate knows their CPA kill number. That’s the baseline.

More sophisticated operators go further. They establish upstream baselines:

Cost per 1,000 people reached (not just impressions)
Early CPC relative to historical norms
Engagement quality in the first spend window

Enter AI: Where Opportunity Still Exists

AI excels at optimizing predictable behavior.

Opportunity remains where behavior is messy, emotional, and difficult to standardize.

This includes:

UGC-style creative
Long-form hybrid advertorials
Non-polished, non-brand-safe formats
Voiceovers and narrative structures that resist templating

Brands are moving into these areas, but unevenly. Especially in regulated categories, many remain cautious. Affiliates who move faster are rewarded... until the format becomes normalized.

This is not a loophole. This is how every platform evolution cycle works.

Remember, don’t obsess over individual ads. Design the inputs the algorithm responds to. Understand which signals matter and build creative systems that reliably produce them.

Early indicators predict downstream performance. The affiliates who win are the ones who recognize those signals first... and act without hesitation.

Final Thought: Don’t Fight the Algorithm

AI didn’t kill affiliate marketing. It exposed weak systems.

The next generation of winning affiliates won’t complain about lost traffic. They’ll build better signal architecture.

This is exactly how we operate at Built To Scale. We catalog our creative intelligently, allowing AI to surface patterns the naked eye can’t see. We’ve seen ads with mediocre CTR but strong early engagement scale aggressively, while “pretty” ads with high initial clicks stall.

Don’t fight the algorithm. Design for it.

Wherever AI is going, one thing is certain... it’s going far. And for all vocations; from architects to marine biologists. But back to our world, the affiliates who thrive will be the ones who understand what the system rewards and align their creative process accordingly. So be sure to do exactly what it is designed to do and harness the full power and capabilities of it.

About Built To Scale:

Built To Scale partners with exceptional hyper-growth brands, helping them scale to the next level by implementing performance marketing strategies and systems that yield high ROI and maximize efficiency

Please log in to Facebook to access the comments section