Meta Advantage Plus and Other AI Watch-Outs

Meta’s Ads Manager has put a lot of focus into its suite of AI-powered features. They’re designed to streamline campaign management and allegedly improve performance. From automatic budget allocation to creative adjustments, the platform’s Advantage+ tools aim to simplify and improve advertising by leveraging generative AI and machine learning. While perhaps their future is brighter, right now they need to come with a large “buyer beware” warning. Based on our extensive testing across clients, Humans still need to play a very active role in the process to avoid an AI performance fallout while these tools find their way in the real world. 

Meta’s platform offers nearly 40 AI-driven features, applied at the account, campaign, audience, or creative level. While many of the automations sound great in theory, they come with a catch: if you don’t actively manage your settings, AI features can make decisions you might not want them to make and might, in fact, hurt the business or account’s performance. 

One of the more controversial aspects of Meta’s AI features is the automatic adjustment of creative assets. The platform can switch out images, videos, or text that aren’t performing well, which sounds efficient at first. But what happens if those creative changes don’t align with your brand’s voice or long-term strategy? What if the AI decides to swap out a carefully crafted image for something that works better in the short term, but is inconsistent with your messaging? Without human oversight, this kind of change can harm your brand’s identity, leaving you with ads that no longer reflect your core values. 

Meta’s Advantage+ Audience feature can automatically find and target new audiences based on user behavior. While this may help you reach new customers, it can also lead to your ads being shown to irrelevant or unqualified users, which wastes budget. If the audience parameters aren’t manually controlled, you might end up spending money on people who have no interest in your product or service. 

The Mostly Human team has closely monitored Meta’s Advantage+ features and found that while they offer automation benefits, they don’t always produce the best outcomes. For example, Meta’s AI-driven creative tool altered an ad image of a girl on the beach by placing her in a kitchen—completely misrepresenting the brand and context. We’ve also seen that clients with niche audiences who run Advantage+ shopping campaigns can experience up to a 40% lower ROAS, suggesting that open targeting isn’t always the most effective approach. In another a controlled test, a campaign that opted out of Advantage+ creative optimizations delivered a 10% higher ROAS compared to one that used them, further reinforcing that these automated features need to be applied selectively and strategically. 

While Meta’s AI features can save time and might improve performance in certain areas, they’re a long way off from replacing the value that people bring to the table. Here’s why: 

Strategic Alignment: Automation focuses on performance metrics like clicks or conversions, but doesn’t consider your broader brand goals. A human manager ensures that campaigns are aligned with your overall strategy.

Budget Control: AI might spend your budget too quickly or on the wrong audiences. A human can spot these issues in real-time and make adjustments to keep campaigns on track. 

Brand Consistency: Humans can ensure that creative assets reflect your brand’s voice, not Gen AI’s strange interpretations of it.  

Data Interpretation: While AI can generate insights, it takes a human to bring the broader context and act on them strategically. A human can adjust campaigns based on business shifts, something automation can’t handle. 

Meta’s AI tools can help make advertising more efficient, but they’re far from perfect. Without careful monitoring and strategic oversight, brands risk losing control over their campaigns, reaching irrelevant audiences, overspending, degrading performance, or damaging their brand identity.  

AI will become a powerful tool, no doubt. However, in the short-term it actually requires incremental time and oversight to avoid the many pitfalls outlined above. No shortcuts yet, unfortunately. At least not without significant risk!