The Death of Manual: Meta Hands the Reins to AI

Ding dong the manual sales campaign is dead! Yep, Zuck and his minions finally decided there was room for one sheriff only in Meta ads town, and its name is Advantage+.

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Meta is no stranger to springing changes on its users, but it’s safe to say the removal of manual sales campaigns is something many advertisers saw coming for quite some time.

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You may be wondering why the change? And what does it mean in terms of the way we approach paid media? All valid questions I too thought to myself when stumbling across the platform update. So let’s delve a little deeper into the rise of Advantage+ & demise of the manual sales campaign....

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GRADUAL ROLL OUT

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If you haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary in your accounts and are still able to choose between manual and Advantage+ campaigns, don’t worry we’re not gaslighting you, the change just hasn’t rolled out across your account yet. In our agency alone, the split sits around 70% rolled out vs 30% not, so it’s still going to be a hot minute before it’s universally implemented. 

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WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IN PRACTICE?

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Let’s see how the change actually pans out when inside the Meta ads account.

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For starters, when you click on the green ‘create’ button and select the sales campaign objective, it now bypasses the page that let's you select between Advantage+ and manual. Instead, you'll be taken straight into the campaign level of the build out process.

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Once you’re at the campaign level, you’ll notice the following section:

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As you can see, Advantage+ functions are automatically ticked as the default for budget, audience and placements. However, manual options aren’t gone entirely - think of them as stuck in purgatory between life and heaven.

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At each stage of the set up, you’ll still be able to have some level of choice if you’re someone who likes driving stick. For example if you select AoB rather than CoB, the green tick next to Budget will disappear.

As for audiences, you can of course still set controls in terms of location, age and language. But as for other detailed targeting options, the platform will take your suggestions into consideration but at the end of the day go after whoever it deems fit. This sounds lowkey evil but remember that it’s within the AI’s best interest to go after the right audience type in order to prevent disrupting the user experience with irrelevant ads.

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Finally, when it comes to creative placements, it’s basically business as usual. While it will automatically turn on all standard enhancement options, you’ll have the ability to toggle these off before publishing. Thank god because those automated banners are so not cute....

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WHY THE SHIFT AWAY?

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So is this big change just for funsies? Not quite. Based on chatter amongst industry experts, there seems to be a few key reasons accounting for the decision to give manual sales campaigns the boot. 

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For starters, as a platform Meta is shifting towards a more business owner-friendly model so more business baddies have the confidence to run ads for themselves. Afterall, the easier it is for business owners to use Meta, the more people will start advertising on the platform. Which - you guessed it -means more pocket money for Meta.

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On another note, Meta is truly of the belief that its AI can yield better results than humans *cue bruised egos*. 

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Finally, in a world where everyone’s sick of being bombarded with spam texts thanks to data breaches, data privacy concern is at an all time high. As such, Meta finds itself moving towards AI-driven advertising as a response to increase privacy concerns and regulatory scrutiny regarding how personal data is used for ad targeting. 

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

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So what does it all mean? Are we all going to be jobless 3 months from now? Unlikely. While our jobs will likely look dramatically different very soon, the death of the digital marketer is nothing but a fictional tale. We’re not doomed, we just need to adapt!

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How exactly? Well, instead of spending hours of your week building out manual campaigns, your day might be taken up strategising outside the box advertising content that’s going to stop the scroll instead. I hate to be the bearer of bad news fore the AI sceptics out there, but this change is happening whether you like it or not. With that being said, I’ll allow 1 day designated to sulking. But after that it’s time to get on with it because if you don’t swim, you’ll sink.