How Meta’s AI push is changing ad creation

Mark Zuckerberg has laid out a vision for the future of Meta’s core business: One day, advertising on the company’s platforms will be as simple as inputting a credit card number and a business goal. AI will take care of the rest.

The company has reportedly said that day could come as soon as the end of 2026, according to a Wall Street Journal report last year. But media buyers and marketers we spoke with say it’s likely much further off, and reviews of the latest AI tools are mixed.

Meta has been moving aggressively toward AI-powered automation and personalization in recent months. Its new Andromeda ad retrieval system has overhauled the way ads are matched to users. Some advertisers said they’ve begun to notice Manus—the AI agent Meta acquired in December—surfacing in Ads Manager as well. Meta has also continued to add to its Advantage+ AI tool suite, which spans functions like creative, targeting, and budget optimization.

For marketers, the proliferation of AI features has meant ceding more control to Meta’s “black-box” systems when it comes to targeting, budgeting, and even the creative process, though some brands draw the line on that.

“Meta has been trying to automate media buying through simplifying the process, keeping audiences broad, giving advertisers less control and levers to restrict our targeting, and recommending less ad sets per campaign,” Aaron Edwards, founder and CEO of marketing agency The Charles Group, told Morning Brew. “All of this is enabled through smarter algorithms that Meta says favor larger data sets to let the algorithm have more play.”

Often, marketers are opted into these new AI features and updates whether they want them or not. “We’re constantly having to go through and play Whac-A-Mole to figure out what’s the new thing they didn’t tell us about that they’ve turned on, so that we can more precisely test it and know what we’re getting ourselves into,” Hayley Owen, SVP and group media director at Deutsch, told us.

Meta spokesperson Alisha Swinteck said that as of this March, Meta has introduced features to ensure that advertisers who opt out of Advantage+ creative will have that preference saved for future campaigns rather than returned to a default opt-in.

Algorithmic overhaul

Meta’s new Andromeda ad retrieval system, which has been rolling out since late 2024, has shifted the way ads are placed on Meta’s platforms, marketers say.

Meta advertising has traditionally involved targeting a fixed ad campaign to just the right segments of users. Andromeda instead incentivizes uploading a greater diversity and, sometimes, volume of creative content and showing it to a broad audience, marketing agencies say. Meta’s AI then determines which messages, formats, and angles are most likely to resonate most with different sets of users.

Edwards said marketers often think the new system means they need a huge number of minor variations of the same ad concepts. But what actually works best is several fully distinct concepts and stories, he said.

The updates to Meta’s ad systems have also led marketers to produce creative assets at a much greater volume than they had previously. For instance, a recent task from a client called for “300 unique [creative] assets that are all under the same concept.” By the time Edwards’ team gamed it out across four different target personas with five new concepts each, the job required 1,000 creative assets, he said.

AI wariness

Producing that volume of creative material would seem to call for AI tools. But while the Charles Group uses AI agents outside of Meta to help iterate the copywriting for those assets, most clients are worried about the legal risks of undisclosed image generation. “There’s a lot of hesitation as to using GenAI specifically for ad creative right now,” Edwards said.

Other media buyers confirmed that big brands are skittish when it comes to using AI-generated creative. Owen said she’s encouraged some clients to test the creative tools within Meta’s Advantage+ AI tool suite, but she’s yet to come across a brand that’s interested.

“Most of our clients want to retain control because they put so much time and effort into crafting what their brand is,” Owen said. “Last year, we were bringing this forward to clients, saying, ‘These are the ways we should use the Advantage+ creative AI solutions to enhance what you’ve done, but it won’t ultimately change your full creative’…I haven’t yet come across a client that said, ‘You go for it.’”

She said she has felt pressured to try out at least some of the “lower risk” Advantage+ suggestions, which have included tweaks like overlays and contrast adjustments.

“We always try to find that balance of—even if it’s not something we love or really want to do—how far are we comfortable pushing it so that we don’t get dinged and the performance suffers,” Owen said.

Meta’s Swinteck said “advertisers are not penalized for opting out of AI features. Our delivery system optimizes based on the specific objectives you set, regardless of the tools used to get there. While Advantage+ is designed to maximize performance, using it is not a weighted factor in how the algorithm delivers your ads.”

“If manual controls are applied beyond certain thresholds, the campaign may switch to ‘Advantage+ off,’ signaling that some automation benefits may be reduced,” Swinteck said. “The system may prompt advertisers to re-enable automation to maximize efficiency and outcomes. This approach is intentional, as our data shows that automation delivers stronger results for most advertisers.”

Performance gains

Much of the revenue case for Meta’s big spending on generative AI has centered on increased performance from ads, a constant theme in the company’s earning calls. Marketers said they have seen performance gains from certain Meta automation tools, but noted that those tools have their limits.

Daniel Johnson, founding partner at growth marketing agency We Scale Startups, said he’s seen performance gains from some of Meta’s non-creative automation tools, but he considers the platform’s numbers to be directionally, rather than specifically, useful. Johnson said he now produces AI-generated creative with very specific brand guidelines through third-party systems.

Johnson said he’s found that Meta’s creative AI tools perform worse than the systems he uses. “We do experiment on a regular basis with the pre-existing functionality and just consistently see worse results,” Johnson said.

Swinteck said changes made to Andromeda in Q3 of last year have resulted in a 14% improvement in ads quality on Facebook, and the company continues to update it.

“We continue to broaden Andromeda’s adoption across our ads systems and are focused on further enhancing performance and efficiency for ads retrieval across all surfaces,” Swinteck said.

Jeremy Schulkin, Hawke Media’s SVP of services, said in an email that Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns now account for 60% to 70% of the agency’s Meta spending, but “it has not yet replaced a full account structure as many brands are testing.” Schulkin said the agency has mostly focused on Advantage+ for audience placement and budget optimization, but the tools have a habit of steering ads toward “low-quality placements.” Schulkin has also experimented with Manus and found it to be “bare bones.”

“At the end of the day, the issues we continue to see are overspend in lower quality placements, low engagement demographics and regions, and the lack of proper set-up at the ad level,” Schulkin said. “There is going to be a level of human interaction needed for brands, in our opinion, for quite some time.”