Meta’s Advantage+: Who Really Wins?
Meta has positioned its Advantage+ suite as the future of advertising on its platform. And you know what, maybe it is. As we’ve often covered, AI is shaping up to completely change the digital marketing game, and Advantage+ is no exception. It’s marketed as smart, efficient, and easy to use. To some, it sounds like a gamechanger. But when you take a closer look at how Advantage+ functions across campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads, a very different picture emerges.
Advertisers are being pushed toward a system where Meta controls more of the process and agencies are expected to simply go along for the ride. The promise of simplicity hides a complex reality: Advantage+ often adds more friction than it removes, especially for those managing budgets and protecting brand integrity.
Campaign-Level Automation: The Illusion of Efficiency
At the campaign level, Advantage+ campaigns consolidate decision-making into a single streamlined workflow. Advertisers are encouraged to skip manual setups, allowing Meta to handle budget distribution, placements, and creative prioritization.
This sounds efficient, but the tradeoff is a significant loss of visibility. When Meta controls these key variables, understanding what’s actually driving performance becomes difficult. Performance breakdowns are vague, limiting the ability to learn from the data. Audience segments blur together, which makes strategic targeting nearly impossible.
For advertisers with large budgets and mature data pipelines, that might not matter. But for most brands, especially those looking to test, refine, and scale deliberately, it creates more problems than it solves.
Ad Set-Level Controls: Reduced to Suggestions
At the ad set level, Advantage+ pushes us even further into automation. Targeting parameters that used to provide strategic control are now treated as suggestions. Age ranges, placements, exclusions, and custom audiences may be overridden or deprioritized in favor of broader machine learning objectives.
The interface offers some customization, but navigating it requires time and vigilance. Settings are buried under layers of vague toggles and defaults that lean toward expansion. Unless you actively opt out of each one, you risk over-delivery to irrelevant segments, wasted spend, and diminished campaign focus.
What’s especially challenging is how difficult it can be to diagnose why certain delivery patterns are occurring. With limited transparency, marketers spend more time reverse-engineering outcomes than proactively optimizing for them.
Creative Optimization or Loss of Brand Control?
Advantage+ Creative introduces another layer of complexity. Meta automatically adjusts ad elements like headlines, descriptions, image formats, and calls to action in an effort to drive better results. It also generates new variants using generative AI.
In theory, this allows the platform to serve the most engaging version of your ad. In practice, it raises serious questions about brand consistency and approval workflows. Generated variants may include design or copy elements that were never reviewed or approved. When this content goes live, brands are exposed to potential messaging inconsistencies, misaligned visuals, or even off-brand language.
Agencies are left in a difficult position. Do they trust Meta’s AI to protect the brand’s integrity, or do they try to limit the scope of creative automation? The latter is possible, but it requires a deep understanding of every toggle, opt-out, and creative setting—something the current UI makes unnecessarily complex.
Evolving Features and Unintended Changes
One of the most frustrating aspects of Advantage+ is the way it continues to evolve without warning. Meta has introduced new features mid-campaign, altered existing behaviors, and even re-enabled settings during duplication without explicit consent.
These updates often come silently. If campaign managers are not monitoring changes like a hawk, it is easy to overlook a shift that affects performance, targeting, or creative delivery. This creates an environment of constant rechecking and reconfiguration, which increases workload and undermines predictability.
The result is a setup process that looks simple on the surface but often requires more time and attention than traditional manual builds. For agencies managing dozens of campaigns across multiple clients, this adds up quickly.
Who Actually Benefits?
Advantage+ works best for large advertisers with access to rich historical data. When Meta’s system has enough signals, it can optimize effectively. These brands benefit from scale, volume, and repeatable creative frameworks that feed the algorithm.
But for everyone else—including most small and mid-sized advertisers—performance is far less reliable. The lack of control, transparency, and stability makes it difficult to build long-term media strategies. Meta presents Advantage+ as a one-size-fits-all solution, but the reality is far more selective.
What Advertisers Should Do Now
If you’re using Meta ads today, you can’t ignore Advantage+. It is already integrated into the platform, and opting out entirely is no longer practical. Additionally, to a certain extent, success on platforms like Meta come with a level of “play by our rules” which makes it impractical to completely write it off like it doesn’t exist. AI isn’t going away, and the platform will only become more and more inundated with Advantage+ features, so we have to learn to adapt.
Instead, the goal should be strategic navigation.
Advertisers need to:
Audit every campaign setup before launch
Manually opt out of creative and audience automations where brand control matters
Monitor for mid-flight changes and re-enable preferred settings when duplicating ads
Benchmark Advantage+ performance against manual setups to determine where it actually adds value
Don’t Let Advantage+ Become a Disadvantage
These aren’t just best practices. They’re required in order to maintain visibility, control, and accountability in an increasingly opaque system.
Advantage+ isn’t neutral. It serves Meta’s goal of driving platform-wide optimization. That may work for some advertisers, but for many, it reduces transparency, adds complexity, and puts brand integrity at risk. Agencies and clients need to understand exactly what they’re giving up when they hand the reins to automation—and decide when it’s worth pushing back.
If you're not managing these systems with care, you’re not really in control. Meta is.