Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I trust you’re all enjoying Fall’s prime - the changing leaves, the brisk mornings, the football-filled weekends and the never-ending onslaught of conferences…all taking place in the shadow of Q4 goals + BFCM. Somehow, Thanksgiving is already on the extended forecast (the really, really extended one, but still), with the winter holidays and 2026 not far behind.

During the first run of Fall conferences, I had the opportunity to meet with several folks from Meta, who were kind enough to share some insights on both the future of the Meta ads platform, as well as specific insights on what they’re seeing perform since the full-scale roll-out of GEM, Lattice & Andromeda over the past ~6 months.

If you’re not familiar (or frantically Googling, “What is Meta Lattice”), let me save you the trouble:

• GEM = This is Meta Ads’ “brain” – it ingests trillions of data points (everything from ad creatives, messages and offers to offline events, behavioral sequences, personal characteristics and more), maps the relationships between each one, then leverages the model created by this process to predict which ads are most likely to produce a desired action from each person, all in near-real-time.
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• Lattice = The easiest metaphor for Lattice is the Library of Congress. Where most towns operate a library (or several), each with some combination of the classics, some regional favorites, and some picks from the librarian, the Library of Congress contains copies of every single printed publication in the history of the US. Before Lattice, Meta’s ad library operated very similarly to those regional libraries - each one held ads based on geo, objective, surface (IG, FB), industry. Lattice has combined them all into one, super-massive library that can be readily searched and analyzed by Meta’s ad systems. The end result? Meta has a richer understanding of how different ads work across objectives, and can more accurately predict which creative(s) are more likely to convert.
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• Andromeda = Andromeda is (as Meta describes it) a “personal ads concierge” that leverages staggeringly sophisticated machine learning to refine the pool of ads available to be shown to you to only the ones most likely to resonate with you, based on your tastes, preferences, behavioral history, connections, relationships, etc. Think of it like your personal, fully-customized ad filter: Andromeda uses its accumulated knowledge about you to filter out billions of ads (literally), leaving only a few thousand that are most likely to be relevant to you. Only the ads that make it through Andromeda’s filter are eligible to be served to you by Meta’s ad systems.

Each of these three systems is interconnected, working together (along with sequence learning, which is a system that allows every Meta ads model to consider the order in which events happen before and after an ad exposure in order to enhance delivery + relevance) to improve Meta’s ad delivery systems. At first glance, each of these three systems probably seems quite good for advertisers – after all, getting more relevant ads delivered sounds like a huge win. Meta having a “better understanding” of what ads are most likely to lead to certain outcomes probably seems like exactly what we want – but the devil is in the details.

And that’s what brings me back to the conversations with several senior members of Meta’s Ads team. The big takeaway is that, through these three systems, Meta is fundamentally rethinking what it considers a “unique” or “distinct” ad. The days of driving creative diversity via uploading step-change, iterative variants of a winning ad are over. That’s a big deal (aside - it’s also something I warned was coming way back in 2023)

But the bigger deal? Meta is finally beginning to leverage the ad set audience as the primary lever for creative diversity. The impact of this change can not be overstated. It is a tectonic shift in the Meta ads landscape.

And it’s happening right now. If you’ve been in Ads Manager over the last few days/weeks (rollouts take time), you’ve likely seen several changes to the “recommendations” section: (1) Creative Similarity (the exact text: “Using creative that doesn’t appear visually similar in your ads can help those ads resonate better with audiences…”) and (2) Ad Fatigue (“creative fatigue occurs when an audience has seen the same creative too many times. People may be less likely to engage with your ad, which can increase your cost per result…”). These are direct, downstream effects of the above big changes to Meta’s ad systems….and we’re still early in the rollout + fallout.

For today’s issue, I want to share what I’ve heard directly from several Meta Product Leads, alongside data from accounts that corroborates what I’ve been told and how we’re thinking about modifying our creative strategies moving forward in response.

Let’s dig in.

The immediate implications of this are direct from Meta’s team: Lattice + Andromeda functionally compress the number of ads available to be served (Lattice accesses billions of ads in a single library - meaning Meta can now “see” every single ad in one view; Andromeda “dedupes” all of the similar ads then filters/curates based on your tastes/preferences/history). The primary reason for this is that it saves compute while maintaining a viable set of available ads. The logic seems to be that if Meta combines all the “similar” ads first, then filters them, it (essentially) guarantees that it will have a sufficiently large set of potential ads to enter into the auction.

That means that Meta categorizes two ads as “identical” if they share the same visual aesthetic (statics/carousels) OR a similar first 3 seconds (video ads). Both Lattice + Andromeda are visual-first systems; ads with similar visuals are considered identical even if the copy or offer is wildly different.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Visual similarity now dominates narrative variation in Meta’s assessment of distinctness across all ad formats (statics, carousels, videos).

The implications for that change are staggering:

• Different copy/CTA on same visual = same ad
• The same creator (UGC, founder, VSL, whatever) in the same scene (i.e. office

background, in front of a mirror, etc.) = same ad

• The same hook followed by two different stories = similar or same ad (depending)

It’s abundantly clear that these changes are a direct response to how advertisers tried to “game” Meta’s old ad system: find a winning ad, create 30 variants of it, load ‘em all into ads manager, profit. Well, thanks to Andromeda, those 30 variants are now treated as 1 ad. This puts the onus back on advertisers to create truly diverse, differentiated creatives for the system to consider.

Creative Relevance Is the Lever

For what feels like ever, we’ve heard that creative is the targeting lever for Meta. The implication of that was: don’t worry about the audience, don’t worry about interest/lookalike targeting, just go broad with creative and Meta will figure it out. Obviously that was not (and is not) entirely true – but (as with most things), it was half true. What we’ve found is that creative relevance - the connection between creative and audience - is the thing that matters. Align your creative - offer - audience - experience (i.e. creative relevance) and you’ll see improvements in engagement (CTR) and action (CVR) rates.

This isn’t new. If anything, this is Meta algorithmically implementing a core tenet of behavioral economics: contextual relevance drives engagement more than precision targeting. Users respond when they see themselves - visually, emotionally and motivationally - inside the ad. This is validated by three behavioral economics principles: (1) the Self-Referencing Effect; (2) Framing Theory and (3) the Mere Exposure Effect.

However, this does not imply that ad set-level targeting is obsolete. In fact, persona-based ad sets, structured around a behaviorally-defined audience, make more sense than ever when paired with true creative diversity.

If each ad set targets a distinct persona and includes multiple, visually divergent ads tailored to that persona’s fears, hopes, dreams, challenges and/or motivations, the system has a clearer signal to work with - Andromeda can then match the right angle to each individual member of the targeted audience segment. Ironically, the alignment of behavioral/audience-based targeting and informed creative relevance improves ad relevance and drives deeper personalization.

On the flip side, broad targeting remains useful for maximizing reach with diverse creatives, but tight persona-level targeting gains power when matched with informed, intentional creative differentiation at the ad set level.

When New Things Happen, Sometimes The Old Ways Are Best

When big things change (and this certainly counts as a big thing changing in a big way), my default strategy is to go back to what never changes. It sounds crazy and counterintuitive, but often there’s an answer for today’s crazy challenges in yesterday’s old truths.

Case in point: as I was thinking about how to respond to these changes, I wound up calling (yes, on the phone) a good friend, Rabah, to catch up. Somehow, we ended up spending 30+ minutes talking about the classics - Ogilvy, Bernbach and Burnett - the old-school, mad men era guys. And ironically, I found the lessons from those long-gone advertisers to be more applicable now than they were back when they were first shared. In fact, how I’m approaching the Andromeda era is actually shaped by some of their lessons/principles:

“Creative is not creative unless it sells.”

One of my favorites. Ogilvy insisted that advertising must ultimately drive results. Endless experimentation that doesn’t scale or endure is not real creativity. In the current landscape, your creative needs to do two things: immediately attract attention and sustain relevance to the target audience over time. That does not mean the ad needs to appeal to everyone - in fact, the opposite is true: your creative should NOT appeal to people outside your target audience. It does mean that your ad must stand the test of time to earn sustained delivery – the quick, flash-in-the-pan meme ads aren’t likely to sustain your account. Focus on creating ads that are likely to work for a while, not a minute.

Write Ads For Your Audience, Not For Everyone

Ogilvy’s most enduring lesson is brutal in its simplicity: pick a position, pick a person and speak in their language. The most effective advertising reads like a one-to-one letter, not a stadium announcement. It uses the target audience’s words, frames and fears to make a single promise unmistakably relevant to them. When you create ads for “everyone,” you sand off the edges that signal meaning to someone; relevance collapses into generality, and generality doesn’t sell. Choose the audience, honor their vocabulary and context and make the ad feel made-for-me to them - because if it isn’t for a specific person, it isn’t for anyone. If you can’t tell immediately who the ad was created for or who it is speaking to, it is too generic.

The customer is not a moron.

Ogilvy famously cautioned against advertising that underestimates or condescends to the audience. With audience-driven ads, respect cognitive complexity. Don’t default to shouting features or parading out awards/recognition. Instead, focus your ads on meeting the audience segment’s emotional and identity-level needs; assume the audience is intelligent, somewhat informed and capable of understanding how your product/service can improve their lives.

Focus on the Fundamentals of the Human Experience

One of Bernbach’s most enduring observations was that while everything else may change, people don’t – we’re still motivated by the same handful of things that we always have been. The durable advantage is creating ads based on a single, timeless human drive, then expressing it in the audience’s language, visuals and context.

Survival: turn fear into agency
​Identify a real, near-term risk, then show the path to safety (via your product/service).

• Hook: the avoidable mistake or looming loss.
• Visuals: problem-first, high-contrast; fast cut to resolution.
• Proof: demo the safeguard; reassure with clarity (guarantee, fail-safe).

Admiration: signal status
​Show (don’t tell) how the product/service confers belonging to an admired group.

• Hook: “for the ones who…” (set the bar, lead the field).
  ​Visuals: elevated design, distinct palette, aspirational archetypes.
• Proof: tasteful third-party signals; social proof as texture, not trophies.

Success: show transformation
​Walk the viewer from “now” to “next,” with measurable progress.

• Hook: time, money, or outcome delta (“Go from 3 hours to 15 minutes,” “+27% ROI”).
• Visuals: timelines, side-by-sides, dashboards, time-lapse.
• Proof: specific numbers and receipts; the user is the hero, product/service the enabler.

Love: create connection and belonging
​Make the audience feel seen, supported and not alone. This doesn’t have to be purely romantic love - but rather any form of connection and belonging.

• Hook: empathetic mirror (“If this sounds like you…”).
• Visuals: lived-in settings, real people, warm tone; micro-moments > polish.
• Proof: authentic testimonials, DMs, UGC clips; speak plainly.

Protection: defend the tribe and its values
​Draw a line around standards, origins and what you won’t compromise.

• Hook: conviction (“Made for [community], not for everyone”).
• Visuals: craft, provenance, badges; behind-the-scenes rigor.
• Proof: guarantees, certifications, founder voice; expect (healthy) polarization.

Test For Insights & Learning, Not P-Values

Ogilvy’s enduring lesson on testing remains urgent in the Andromeda era: experimentation must be systematic, intentional, and designed to uncover insight, not to chase statistical significance. The goal is not to prove that one variant “wins” at the 95% confidence level, but to understand why an ad resonates, with whom and under what contextual or emotional conditions. Modern creative testing should function as behavioral research: mapping motivators, decoding visual triggers and refining hypotheses about audience psychology. In other words, data should fuel creative intelligence, not just validate it.

From those principles, we’ve evolved our approach to creative strategy:

Creative Must Be Audience-Centric

The primary reason why I’m obsessed with audience understanding isn’t because I love SparkToro (though I do) or doing research (which I don’t) – it’s because understanding the audience at a deep, human level massively increases the odds of creating hit ads. It’s really that simple.

From a practical standpoint, that means that we spend an inordinate amount of time on audience understanding + insight, then design ads around psychographics, motivations + audience preferences (what sources do they trust? Where will they get this information? Do they care about third party credibility or prioritize personal relationships?) – not visuals or messages.

That’s a radical departure from how most agencies manage creative (which is disproportionately focused on output + iteration) - but one that is now being rewarded by both audiences AND platforms. If you don’t truly, madly, deeply, viscerally understand your audience - to the point where you can empathize with them, predict their responses, speak directly to their pains, challenges, hopes and dreams - you’re not going to be able to generate the caliber of diversity Meta is seeking.

If you’re curious about how we conduct audience research, I wrote about that here.

Immediate Visual Diversification Of “Hit” Ads

When a “hit” ad emerges, the natural tendency for most advertisers is to immediately begin making small, incremental changes to it – a slight adjustment to the hook, a different CTA, a new value prop, alternative proof points, whatever. That’s never been something I’ve gravitated toward, because (overwhelmingly) my thesis is that climbing a little higher on that particular mountain isn’t likely to be a positive expected value bet – I’m more likely to spend a bunch of time/money/energy to get a bunch of derivatives that perform pretty much the same as the original.

In fact, a few issues ago, I shared how we often will take the script from a “hit” ad, upload it (alongside our target audience details) to an AI system (Gemini or GPT), and have it create 5-10 diverse, new scripts based on the script + insights it can mine from the audience profile we provided. We’ll then give those scripts to different creators.

• Swap locations (indoor to outdoor, studio to field)
• Change spatial composition (wide, tight, split screen, motion)
• Replace set, camera style, framing
• Swap creators + formats
• Modify the drive (same audience, different approach)

In each case, we’re treating the original “hit” ad as the creative center of gravity, then branching out to different worlds via diversification. That’s a radically different approach vs. simple iteration on a winner (i.e., treating the winner as a template to be copied).

Spend 80% Of Your Effort on the Hook

One of the primary takeaways from the Meta team on Andromeda is that the system disproportionately determines “sameness” based on the hook - the first ~3 seconds of the ad. This creates a massive opportunity for advertisers to unlock new segments of your audience simply by adjusting the hook. The rest of the ad can change slightly, but (as I wrote here), spend 80% of your time focused on the hook.

Proactively attempt different hook styles - immediate action, result-and-rewind, secrets, stories, non-traditional narrative arcs, hopeless-until-solution, before-and-after, bold statements, whatever - to the fullest extent possible.

As a bonus, the beautiful thing about a hook-first approach is that the hook will dictate much of what follows, restricting your set of possibilities in the middle/end of the ad from a narrative, logical and tonal perspective.

The analogy I’ve used before (and which still holds) is that of a chess game: the hook is your opening. It shapes what happens in the mid game, which (in turn) dictates the end game. While a fantastic opening does not guarantee victory in chess (and, conversely, a brilliant hook does not guarantee the ad will be a hit), it certainly does improve the odds.

Smart Iteration + Repackaging

About 50 issues ago, I shared our creative matrix – how we think about Structural Iteration in ads (you can view the full article here):

And this framework is more valuable today than it was when I shared it years ago, simply because it leans in to the three things that will thrive in the age of Andromeda: (1) audience centricity (the inputs + idea generation); (2) the concept of tokenizing ads into component parts (i.e. the red part of the diagram above) and (3) recombining those components to create maximum diversity while minimizing creative costs.

If I was going to add anything to this, it would be to add format as an axis for diversity (something I wrote about here) – more brands should be trying more different types/styles of ads. Too many brands are too stuck in their ways, with each new creative following a relatively established, semi-predictable script. The brands with true diversity scrap that convention + create ads that are wildly different, to the point where the audience is surprised they’re all from the same brand.

Create Worlds Where Your Ads Can Take Place

Another big shift we’ve begun to adopt is the “worlds” framework. This is born out of the observation that differentiated creative must simultaneously create distinctiveness and separability for Meta while maintaining salience for the audience (basically, people like familiarity - just not too much).

For small teams, achieving that balance can be somewhat easy – the same creatives tend to work on the same projects, so they can reference/create that feeling of consistency. As you scale, doing that becomes much more difficult. The answer to that is worlds. A world is a repeatable, rules-based environment that governs how a creative concept looks, sounds, feels and operates. It’s the combination of setting, lighting, palette, cast (including creators/talent), voice, camera, symbols/artifacts and proof style. Each world has its own set of rules that dictate where and when it lives (setting, time of day), how it feels to the audience (palette, lighting, cut cadence), who speaks and how they speak (cast, dialect, cadence, language), what carries meaning (props, iconography) and how truth is shown (demo, receipt, stopwatch, testimonial).

Examples of this might be: “The Kitchen Table At Night” or “Morning Mirror” or “Workshop Desk” or “The Corner Office in the Afternoon” – each one immediately creates a specific feeling, while giving you endless opportunities to express the same core concept in materially different ways.

The inspiration for this was sitcoms – we’ve all watched Big Bang Theory and immediately knew what kinds of things might happen in Leonard & Sheldon’s apartment, or the Cheesecake Factory or the Comic Book Store (in fact, if you watched BBT, you can probably picture each of those scenes in your mind right now). The reality is that what happened in each of those places in each episode was quite different - but the “world” where the action took place created a sense of both narrative and visual coherence and familiarity.

That’s exactly what we’re doing here - but instead of a show, it’s your advertising. From Meta’s perspective, two ads that share the same copy/messaging but live in different worlds are distinct – Andromeda + Lattice won’t collapse them into the same concept. That provides you with the ability to scale while maintaining audience familiarity.

Adopt A Perpetual Creative Graph

Linear campaign planning assumes finite stories, fixed audiences and a platform that rewards cadence (i.e. shipping more ads over a certain period of time). But, Meta now rewards something very different: differentiation, specificity and diversity. Fundamentally, that means the operating model we use to plan + execute must evolve.

Instead of the old, outdated “campaign planning” approach, think of your creative system as a perpetual graph - a living network of ideas and evidence - rather than a sequence of launches or iterations.

The building blocks become nodes: the audience, the concept (big idea), the human drive it taps, the hook, the world, the proof type and your distinctive brand cues. The edges, then, are the relationships between those nodes. “Hook A × Survival Drive × World 2 × UGC × Bundle Offer 6 produced a “hit” ad for the Stressed/Overworked Toddler Mom Audience in Q4” isn’t some random thing; it’s actionable audience insight. Over time, the edges become IP: a proprietary map of what works for whom, when and why.

The result of this is that you stop “launching campaigns” and start “querying the graph” – given a specific audience and objective (sell product X or generate leads for service Y), you ask: What is the next best expression Meta will immediately recognize as new, relevant and distinct? The answer returns a small set of combinations - hook × drive × world × format × Product/Service/Offer - that are both available (i.e. we have or can get the assets) and untested (we have not created an ad like that yet). Those become the next creatives for the ad account.

This also fundamentally changes how we evaluate what to create and launch in the ad account – the tests now are simple:

• What is the probability that Meta will recognize this as meaningfully different from the existing creatives in this ad set?
• Does this combination align with our understanding of this audience? If not, is there something we could have missed in our research that suggests it is worth a try?
• Even if the performance of this concept is merely average, does testing the combination generate learnings we can leverage later?

This completely flips how you approach creative production – because instead of focusing on raw output or creative iteration, we’re now solving for two things: (1) expected value and (2) learning. The end result is a compounding advantage. As you map the edges in the graph, the areas of opportunity become more obvious. True creative differentiation becomes easier. Results become more predictable.

The Bottom Line:

The entire goal of Andromeda (and Lattice, and GEM) is to force advertisers to get back to being advertisers – to create truly unique, differentiated ads that actually resonate with different sub-segments of their target audience. Fundamentally, that means the days of small, incremental tests are over. The accounts that will thrive are the ones that can blend bold, big-picture variation with structured experimentation.

If and when you see some of your ads stop performing (or your iterations never serving), know that it is not because Meta is broken. That is the system working exactly as intended. It is more discerning + more selective.

In the new landscape, creativity is not more important than before - it’s importance is just more obvious. The key to winning is not to do some new-fangled thing or try to “hack” the system; it’s to go back to the old-school, tried-and-true principles. Meta just wants advertisers to go back to being advertisers – and they’re aligning incentives + systems accordingly.

Sometimes, the path of least resistance AND the right thing to do are the same thing. This is one of those times.

Until next week,

Sam

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