Meta's AI Push Demands More Creative Work, Not Less
Meta wants advertising on its platforms to eventually require nothing more than a credit card and a business goal. The company has suggested that fully automated ad buying could arrive by the end of 2026. Marketers and creative professionals say that timeline is unrealistic, and the current tools are forcing them to produce vastly more creative assets than before.
The company has rolled out aggressive automation across its ad systems in recent months. Its Andromeda ad retrieval system, which began rolling out in late 2024, has fundamentally changed how ads reach users. Meta also acquired Manus, an AI agent now surfacing in Ads Manager, and continues expanding its Advantage+ suite, which handles creative, targeting, and budget optimization.
The Creative Volume Problem
Andromeda shifted Meta advertising away from targeting fixed segments toward showing diverse creative to broad audiences and letting AI determine what resonates with different users. The system incentivizes uploading more creative variations and concepts.
This has created a production bottleneck for agencies. Aaron Edwards, founder and CEO of The Charles Group, described a recent client project that ballooned from 300 creative assets to 1,000 once the team gamed out variations across different personas and concepts. The work demands speed and scale that manual creation cannot match.
Yet most brands remain hesitant to use AI-generated creative. Hayley Owen, SVP and group media director at Deutsch, said she has encouraged clients to test Advantage+ creative tools but has not encountered a single brand willing to adopt them. "Most of our clients want to retain control because they put so much time and effort into crafting what their brand is," Owen said.
Legal concerns drive much of the resistance. Edwards said clients worry about the risks of undisclosed image generation in ads. His team uses AI tools outside Meta to help iterate copywriting, but creative generation remains off-limits for most clients.
The Black Box Tradeoff
Meta has been moving advertisers toward its automation features whether they choose them or not. Owen described constantly discovering new AI features Meta has activated without explicit notification. "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," she said.
Meta said in March that advertisers who opt out of Advantage+ creative will have that preference saved going forward rather than reverting to automatic opt-in. The company also said advertisers are not penalized for rejecting AI features and that the delivery system optimizes based on stated objectives regardless of which tools are used.
Some advertisers report performance gains from automation, though results vary. Jeremy Schulkin, SVP of services at Hawke Media, said Advantage+ campaigns now represent 60% to 70% of the agency's Meta spending, but the tools consistently steer ads toward "low-quality placements" and low-engagement demographics.
Daniel Johnson, founding partner at We Scale Startups, said he has seen performance gains from Meta's non-creative automation but produces AI-generated creative through third-party systems instead. "We do experiment on a regular basis with the pre-existing functionality and just consistently see worse results," Johnson said.
Human Work Remains Essential
Meta reported a 14% improvement in ads quality on Facebook following changes to Andromeda in the third quarter of last year. The company continues updating the system.
Schulkin said human oversight will be necessary for brands for some time. The core issues persist: overspend in lower-quality placements, poor targeting across regions and demographics, and inadequate setup at the ad level. These problems require hands-on management that automation has not yet solved.
For creative professionals, the immediate reality is different from Meta's vision. Rather than simplifying ad creation, the platform's AI push has increased the volume of assets needed while limiting creative control and introducing new compliance questions. The future of fully automated advertising remains distant.
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