I've Never Been More Uncertain About Meta Ads

I’ve never been more uncertain about the future of Meta ads.

Look, let’s not pretend like where we are today is completely unexpected.

Anyone paying attention saw it coming.

Mark Zuckerberg even gave us his plans years ago.

And while none of this is shocking, that doesn’t make the current place we’re in right now any less uncomfortable.

While I could confidently make predictions three years ago, and many of those predictions aligned pretty close with reality, I feel much less confident today.

So let’s back up.

The way Meta advertising has advanced over the years has generally had some predictable themes.

During the first several years, it was all about building a full suite of features to reach your ideal audience.

Facebook at that point was constantly rolling out new targeting options to reach the people you wanted to reach.

Because, as we all believed back then because it was true at that time, targeting was everything.

And that mostly took us to the iOS 14 changes in 2021.

From that point forward, it’s been all about automation and improvements to optimization.

Advantage and Advantage+ everything, wide open targeting, less control.

But once ChatGPT took the world by storm, Meta doubled down.

There would be a time when you’d be able to tell Meta your budget and what you wanted to accomplish, and Meta would take care of the rest for you.

While that has always sounded too simplistic, we’re definitely on the verge of this.

LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are advancing at a scary rate.

Literally scary as there are now concerns about how unchecked AI may impact the future of humanity.

But the scariness aside, you can connect the Meta ads MCP to Claude and have it do a lot of stuff for you automatically.

Countless other tools exist that allow you to iterate ad copy and creative at scale.

While you could create Meta’s vision right now, it’s not a centralized solution under Meta’s navigation.

That’s the part that is still coming.

The problem today that was less of a problem three years ago is that there’s so much noise about everything going on right now it’s just so hard to keep up.

What is the future of the Meta advertiser?

It’s hard to sort out hype from what’s possible, and it’s nearly impossible to test every tool and see how I can best use it.

All the while, there’s this piece of me that’s incredibly uncomfortable because of what these tools could mean for our future.

For my future.

I’ve generally been extremely risk averse when it comes to the use of AI, but at some point you have to make some difficult decisions.

I keep seeing stories of what’s possible, and I feel a need to experiment myself.

And sometimes that means taking a few risks.

But the more I try and the more things I build, the more I have to ask where you and I fit into all of this.

Look, I’m not naive.

I know that AI in its current form is far from perfect and needs plenty of checks and crosschecks.

But the advancements that have happened during the past year, even just a month or two, are freaking ridiculous.

I simply cannot believe the things I can do today that were not possible even a year ago.

A bored afternoon usually means, “Let’s see what crazy idea I can bring to reality today,” and build that thing.

Some people are building AI-generated videos at scale with AI-generated people posing with products.

And systems are set up to automatically optimize and iterate and create and keep building until you can get the results you want.

Struggling businesses are replacing employees with AI agents and finding the success they haven’t seen in years.

And man, I know, I’m not comfortable with so much of this stuff.

I don’t want AI replacing art.

I understand the anger from photographers and artists and designers alike about AI-generated images.

But I also understand how hard it has always been to get and create ad and website images, and that’s easier than it’s ever been.

It’s not as good as what can be done by an expert, but it’s so much better than what we were doing as non-experts.

I’ve created some terribly ugly websites, landing pages, and ad images in my past.

And I don’t want AI to replace good writing.

I actually enjoy the writing part, and I hate that so many people sound the same now.

People are using AI to replace human connection with AI-generated posts and comments and entire personas.

And man, that just feels so freaking gross, I wish we could outlaw that nonsense.

So back to the point of this episode, I just don’t know what this all means.

Everything feels so uncertain.

Every time I use AI to do another ridiculous thing I never thought would be possible, I realize what that means for my own business.

People will be able to replicate me.

Look, I’ve already created JonBot for my private community, and I’ve started testing a new MCP using my content as its foundation.

Someone told me they created their own Jon Loomer bot that they can talk to to get advice and help manage their advertising.

Like the photographer or artist, I can be replaced.

I can tell you that the advice you’re getting isn’t nearly as good, but it doesn’t change how easy it will be to acquire.

And I can’t help but think about how all of this could contribute to the Dead Internet theory where the internet eats itself.

It’s just AI creating more AI content based on other AI content, and getting worse and worse and worse until it’s all meaningless.

You have to think something similar could be coming to Meta ads.

Advertisers could have the ability to create an endless volume of ad images and videos and text options and test and iterate.

And many advertisers will be using many of the same tools which are trained on much of the same content, and they’ll likely look and sound like each other.

Or as they optimize to find what works best, they all start working toward a similar end point.

Does the ad world eat itself?

Does it become so flooded that nothing stands out?

And if social media is flooded with AI content and AI-generated people, will there be any real people to reach with those ads?

Will we be creating ads to sell things to non-people?

I don’t know!

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s a scary time.

The exact same things that make it exciting because of what’s possible is scary as hell BECAUSE OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE.

I don’t know what this means for the future of Meta advertising, but that feels like such a small piece of the unknown here.

I don’t know what this means for the future of the internet or the job market or social media or freaking HUMANITY.

So yeah…

Here’s the bottom of the glass.

For years, I was pretty confident about where we were headed.

Even though I was never comfortable making predictions, my predictions were pretty damn good because it wasn’t that difficult to follow the trends.

But right now, it definitely feels like there’s a trend line into a space that we can’t currently comprehend.

And because of that, I don’t know what it means for my future as an online business owner or writer or podcaster or advertiser.

I don’t know what it means for you, I’m sorry.

What I do know is that we’re going to have to figure this all out together.

And I’ll keep being one of those people to test things and talk it through, hopefully with a level head.

Although I’ve gotta admit. I’m losing my balance.