Meta will phase out manual targeting from some Advantage+ campaigns

The news: Meta is phasing out some manual controls from Advantage+ catalog ads in favor of fully automated, AI-powered targeting. Advertisers will lose some ability to directly control how their ads are targeted, but Meta is betting that automation can provide better results than hand-picked audience segments.

Zooming out: Meta has increasingly relied on automated ad buying tools in the last few years. While some of its products, like Advantage+ shopping campaigns, have had mixed results and increased ad prices, others are showing signs of improvement. Additionally, advertisers say they plan to boost their reliance on automated buying processes.

• In an August 2024 EMARKETER survey, 57% of US digital ad buyers said they plan to use AI to assist the buying process through automated tools like Advantage+ and Google Performance Max—the second-highest use after ad personalization.
• The ability for intelligent tools to process large amounts of user data and target consumers that hand-picked audience segments may have missed is driving a broader push toward automation. In 2025, we expect that automation will play a role in an even larger share of media buys.
• That doesn’t mean the ability to customize campaigns is going away; catalog ads will still allow buyers to retarget consumers or create custom audiences, granting advertisers a best-of-both-worlds approach that leaves automation to cover potential blind spots.

Our take: Advertisers have relied on automation for years, but product launches from Meta and Google have pushed along the transition and opened the two companies up to pools of ad spending from smaller brands less familiar with traditional buying processes.

• In a December 2024 Interactive Advertising Bureau survey, 62% of respondents said that generative AI use cases for advertising will be an increased area of focus in 2025, just behind cross-platform measurement (64%).
• It’s not just Google or Meta: Automated buying and targeting is appearing all over the open web. Criteo, The Trade Desk, Taboola, Disney, and even individual publishers like The New York Times are pushing AI-powered advertising tools to meet growing demand from marketers.