Are Meta and Google’s fancy AI ad buying tools worth it?
Plus: Meta shares ad tips based on top performing creatives
There’s a reason automation sounds appealing, and why AI is entering our everyday lives more and more: fewer decisions, faster setup, and less specialist support required. It all sounds nice and easy.
But when it comes to AI-powered ad tools - like Meta’s Advantage+ or Google’s Performance Max (PMAX) - the promise of "set and forget" isn’t backed by results. Some might add “yet”, at this point - but nevertheless, I would say “buyer beware”.
For local businesses with broad and a specific regional appeal - think restaurants, florists, estate agents, those who might have a strong need for marketing but who might not have the budget to hire potentially expensive agencies or staff to do it for them - these tools can genuinely be useful.
You plug in a budget and some creative (and in the case of PMAX, this can even be scraped from your website), and the platform finds people nearby who are likely to care. Quick, scalable, efficient.
But in B2B, or any customer journey with a more complex purchase cycle, niche targeting, or strategic brand building, it’s often a different story. These tools are only as good as the signals you feed them - and most don’t have the granularity to find, say, “decision-makers at mid-size insurance firms who care about sustainability”.
Outside of this, in my own experience (anecdotally, but repeatedly), I’ve seen Advantage+ campaigns over-pace and burn through budgets while delivering mostly irrelevant traffic. I’ve even seen first-hand cases of Advantage+ budgets overspending beyond campaign limits - I have to say this is rare, but hardly fills you with confidence.
The targeting is often far too broad, and the transparency around who saw what, and why, is often vague at best. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
That’s not to say these features are absolutely useless. They’re engineered for simplicity and ease-of-use - they’re designed with the businesses we mentioned earlier in mind. The downfall is that time-crunched ad buyers then have these features foisted upon them at every turn, and it’s easy to over rely on them.
For solo marketers or SMBs spending £300 a month, they may make more sense than engaging an agency. But for most mid-market or B2B brands, automation still needs careful watching - or, it just needs more time to reach a point where we can trust it.
So until then, it’s less set and forget - more set and… carry on as we are.
What’s going on elsewhere?
Outside of Elon vs Trump, it’s been a relatively quiet week in digi-land. In a timely add-on to my thoughts above, Meta has shared tips based on top-performing creatives. Directly from this Social Media Today article, those foundational elements, Meta says are:
Create video ads in 9:16 (with audio)
Emotional storytelling (incorporate emotional hooks within the first few seconds)
Include a human presence
Add text overlays to maximize messaging impact
Elsewhere, you might have seen this in the platform, but ChatGPT has unveiled a tranche of new features, including access to Google Drive.
X has added a new overview of what checkmarks in the app now represent, with EU investigators examining whether its approach to verification violates the Digital Services Act.
And finally, WhatsApp is testing a feature which enables users to create their own AI chatbot assistants within the app.
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If you’re feeling particularly generous and enjoyed this edition, I won’t stop you from buying me a coffee. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week 🫶