Lately I’ve been feeling that Meta is getting a little too comfortable making decisions for our brands.
My own experience with Advantage+ has been nothing but frustration and I’ve been hearing more and more complaints from both agency and in-house folks about Meta’s Advantage+ features being enabled by default across custom audiences, ad set targeting, and even worse… creative. On the surface, it sounds helpful… just let the algorithm optimize everything, right? Right?!
In the end, brands are losing control of their own creative. We’re talking about Meta automatically adding music, backgrounds, and text overlays to carefully crafted brand content. No consideration for brand guidelines, visual identity, or the brand world you’ve spent years building.
Imagine spending months developing a campaign that perfectly captures your brand world, only to have an algorithm slap a random background and some generic music on it because it thinks it’ll perform better.
And if you’re in a restricted industry like alcohol, pharma, or financial services? This becomes a compliance nightmare. Alcohol brands have incredibly strict advertising guidelines where every word, image, and implication gets scrutinized. Now we’re supposed to trust an algorithm to automatically modify that content without violating advertising standards or legal requirements? Mind you, this is the same algorithm that pushed gore, violence, and death to people’s feeds in an “oopsie” a few months ago. Hm, no thanks!
What’s even more frustrating is the operational burden this creates. I’m hearing from agency buyers that they’re having to increase billable hours just to spend extra time making sure these features are turned off. Meta uses some pretty sneaky UI tricks to keep them enabled by default like buried toggles and confusing opt-out flows. There is no singular button to disable it in Ads Manager nor disable it from your ad account or business manager.
So now agencies are billing clients more time to fight against features that were supposed to make things easier. That’s backwards.
I get that automation can drive performance. But there’s a line between optimization and completely surrendering brand control to an algorithm that doesn’t understand your brand story, doesn’t know your visual guidelines, and definitely doesn’t care about the consistency you’ve worked so hard to build.
When did we decide that slightly better CTRs were worth giving up our brand identity? How did we end up in a place where media buyers are “approving” creative edits?
This is a fundamental role reversal where traditionally the creative process flows from brand → creative team → media team for placement. Now it’s becoming brand → creative team → algorithm → media team scrambling to notice what got changed.
Somewhere deep in the cubicles of Meta’s offices is a product manager who knows better but has to implement Gen AI features because of a mandate that conflicts with their customers needs.
