Ad-vantage > Ad Nausea

The 46% surge in ad impressions across Facebook and Insta is not creating Ad Nausea, but rather, Ad-vantage.

Barely a year old, Advantage+ shopping campaigns have proven to be a massive win for Meta, brands, and (debatably) users. The lightning-fast adoption is altering the foundation of ad segmentation and placement. And, the impact promises to alter the future of commerce journeys, too.

Here’s the short of it:

• Ad impressions surged 46% on Meta

• Users have accepted the increased supply of ads (time spent is up!)

• Meta essentially defrayed the cost by slicing CPM -19%

• Advertisers got results, increased spend +19%

Adoption of A+SC has been strong, accounting for nearly $1 in $4 of retail spend on Meta. This represents a reallocation of double-digit billions in ad spend. Meanwhile, their manual campaign counterparts are less popular - spend on non A+SC dropped -8.4%. Put another way, A+SC delivered 144% of the spend growth across Meta in Q3 2023.

The movement of funds from manual to automated A+SC ads is the big shift in AI-driven engagement that we’ve been expecting. Essentially, advertisers are trusting Meta’s algos to deliver results with nearly no strings attached.

‘Take my creative - you decide who gets it, and where to place it. While you’re at it, go ahead and optimize it too.’

Meta has effectively shed their ‘least trustworthy of big tech’ image.

Worth noting, too: I haven’t seen any evidence that any per-ad effectiveness has improved. A+SC are likely getting better results because of the volume of placements (and enabled by related discount afforded to advertisers). 

Over time, as the models train, the per-ad effectiveness likely improves - earning Meta more behavioral data on users and overcoming a primary forcing factor for the A+SC origin story - iOS14 privacy changes.

As advertising feels the automated revolution, commerce awaits the wave to lather its experience in as much intelligence. Commerce leaders and merchants have fought the automated content generation of their owned channels for years. It's not hard to find a merchant that proudly claims victory over algorithm-driven product recommendations. While merchants provide a unique voice for the brand, the battle for ‘who paints the glass’ of the site pages is soon to have a victor.