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Creative is the targeting
Targeting moves to creative
Meta used to ask advertisers to describe their audience inside every campaign. The Andromeda update changed the targeting algorithm: Meta now analyzes the creative and finds the people it fits. The media buyers who made a living tinkering with campaign settings and audience strategies lost their lever, and their whole job turned into creative strategy.
Hundreds of new ads
That puts the number of different ads at the center. Victor, an AI employee product, and Wispr Flow, a voice dictation app, each work with hundreds of creators who film different demos and use cases for different audiences. On a $100,000 Meta budget, at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month are needed to avoid hitting a plateau and getting out-competed.
Where Google differs
Google runs the other way. Its ads still carry manual controls, so Wispr Flow could set different cost targets for India and for the United States. On Meta those settings are gone, and scaling means iterating on creative, which is a completely different job from steering a structured campaign.
How does Meta match an ad to a person?
Large ad systems work in stages. A retrieval stage first narrows an enormous pool of ads to a short list for each person, and a ranking stage then scores that list in detail. Meta's engineering team described Andromeda in late 2024 as an upgrade to the retrieval stage. Retrieval compares numeric representations of ads and people, so what an ad shows and says shapes who it gets matched with.
Why do repeated ads lose their pull?
Advertisers call it wear-out. Herbert Krugman's 1972 paper on how many exposures an ad needs argued that a viewer's response changes over a handful of showings. Later research found attention fading as the same ad appears again and again. Platforms report frequency, the average number of times each person saw an ad, to track it.
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