Embrace Your Lack of Control

Advertisers resist every Meta automation because they want control over targeting, budget distribution, and creative enhancements. But this resistance isn't just about performance. Jon explains why clinging to control will make you obsolete and what you need to embrace instead.
The vast majority of complaints that I see and hear from Meta advertisers are related to control. They’re mad that they can’t restrict their targeting to a specific audience, and they don’t trust algorithmic targeting. They don’t trust Meta’s distribution of budget to ads, so they’ll manually turn off bad performers or create separate ad sets for individual ads.
They hate every single Advantage+ Creative enhancement, and it sends them into a fury if an enhancement is automatically applied. Does any of this sound like you? Advertisers want to control everything, or as much as they can.
My point isn’t that Meta’s automation is perfect and can’t be improved. But I also think that advertisers are way too quick to reject Meta’s automation and enhancements. And I think I know why. You don’t want this stuff to work. It’s an attack on your way of life.
When you break it down this way, it’s understandable why some advertisers will never give any of Meta’s automations a chance. They’ll always look for a reason to blame Meta for their bad performance. It must be because of the expanded audiences, which meant reaching people I didn’t want to reach. It must be because of the flawed algorithm showing the wrong ads to people. It must be because of those enhancements that make all of my ads look worse. If only I could have full control, I’d get much better results.
But we know that control isn’t coming, and the reality is you shouldn’t want it. Here’s the thing that advertisers need to understand. Meta wants your ads to succeed just as much as you do. Any conspiracy theories suggesting that Meta wants you to waste money without getting results just don’t hold up.
Why would Meta want to force you to show ads to people who are less likely to convert? Why would Meta want to force a badly performing ad to be shown more than a good ad? Why would Meta want to ruin your ad performance by turning on ineffective enhancements? It’s in Meta’s business interests that you get good results so that you’ll spend more. Any forced waste for a short period of time on bad results isn’t a sustainable business model. You’ll stop spending.
I think part of the problem for some advertisers is that some of these problems are true in isolation. If your audience is expanded, will more irrelevant people see your ads? Well, yeah, probably. But expanding the pool has benefits too. It makes your campaigns more scalable and sustainable. It can lower the overall cost to reach people, and it can help you reach customers you otherwise wouldn’t have reached.
Can an enhancement that’s automatically applied to your ad look terrible? Yeah, sometimes. Part of this is on you to be sure that you make the right customizations to limit these problems. But Meta’s enhancements also help generate lots of versions of your ads. Some of those versions may look bad to you, and they actually may rarely get shown. But they also may have an audience that will act on them.
By having these enhancements, it takes some of the pressure off of you. Your image or video can be automatically cropped, resized, or adjusted for certain placements or certain people. Animations can be added to static images to make them more engaging and clickable.
Understand that Meta needs your ads to succeed just as much as you do. And you also need Meta’s automations to work effectively. You can’t avoid many of them now, and resisting automation and trying to retain control will often limit your potential results. So don’t resist them.
Here’s the bottom of the glass. I know that this isn’t easy. Controlling things was once the primary job of advertisers and media buyers. It’s how we made ourselves useful and valuable. But if you insist on controlling everything and resist every automation, you’re going to become obsolete.
You need to understand how all of these automations work and how to take advantage of them. You need to know why they aren’t working when you aren’t getting good results, and how you could leverage them better. Stop blaming Meta and its automations. Educate yourself on them. You’re going to need them if you want to remain relevant in this industry.