Shut up and give me your money!

Not long ago…

Being a media buyer was a mix of magic, technology and luck. Many were preaching obscure and articulated methods to “cheat” and get better performances through infinite duplication of ad sets or other strange practices.
Both Meta and Google started from a very simple tech and 20 years ago was still possible to trick the system and get incredibly good results. There was no underlying intelligence, everything was quite predictable and mostly, the competition was not so fierce.

Now (I’m going to spare you the history of time) things are going into a direction of extreme simplification. We have all kind of automated campaigns available in all moajor platforms (PMax and ASC+ for example) and the providers are *asking to rely on those.
^{* rather sooner than later they will deprive us of any form of control over bidding and other things}

Spending our days chasing the perfect account structure doesn’t make more sense and even trying to direct the algorithm sounds like a silly practice.

Why?

Let’s talk about lookalike audiences.

For years, this was the default. You had a customer list, maybe a bunch of email signups or past buyers, and you’d toss it into Meta and say:
"Hey, go find me more people like this."

And Meta would do its thing. Match a chunk of those users, analyze their behavior, and then spin up a new audience that, on paper, should be statistically similar.

It worked.
I’ve done this a hundred times. Probably more.

Now I like to use as an example a smallbets.com member, Peter. He’s selling onions online and it’s a perfect example.

Let’s say he sends Meta his list of customers who love his sweet Georgia-grown onions. He’s basically asking Meta to go find new customers who are kinda like the old ones. People who might care about food quality, or organic farming, or maybe just have a soft spot for quirky eCom brands. The inferred psychographic data that comes from that list has some features that Meta will try to find in other customers.

But here’s the thing: Meta isn’t really into that anymore. They need first to understand what your ad is about, how good it is, how appealing the content is to their audience.

They’re literally scaring us away from granular audience targeting.
They’re pushing broad targeting. They’re pushing “Advantage+” and audience expansion and black-box machine learning where you throw your ad into the system and pray the algo gods deliver.

The fact that you’re paying doesn’t give you a front seat by default and you might be in some expensive market where your spend is lower than many others’.

What to do, then?

Shift!

Instead of obsessing over perfect audience segments, forget about them and start obsessing over the creative.

Because what if, instead of whispering “find me onion lovers”, I make super cool ads that scream why these onions are the best damn onions you’ll ever taste?

Meta will love:

• Beautiful shots of caramelized onions sizzling in cast iron

• Stories about the farmers who grow them

• Weird onion trivia that makes people stop scrolling

• Recipes, memes, real customer reactions

• Behind-the-scenes stuff that makes the brand feel alive

It’s a FREAKING SOCIAL NETWORK! People want recipes, entrepreneurial stories, memes, inspiration, fun.

Here’s a couple of Tweets that would make some great ads:

Paying for ads gets you an entrance ticket, but how much you pay and how close the seat is to the stage, that is determined by the quality of the content.

What has changed then?

I’m still asking Meta to find onion buyers — but now, I’m not relying on past behavior tracked by a pixel. I’m giving the algorithm fresh, rich, high-engagement content that matches what Meta actually wants:
People staying on-platform. People watching, liking, commenting, sharing.
People interacting.

But don’t take my word for it.

Mark Zuckerberg himself revealed Meta’s strategy in a recent interview:
https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-about-ai-and-the-evolution-of-social-media/

The article was also picked up by The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/meta/659506/mark-zuckerberg-ai-facebook-ads

Mark said they don’t even want us to bring creatives anymore. They want our money and they’ll figure out what to do with it. And if that sounds like an exaggeration, I assure you: this is exactly the direction every platform is heading.

Mark said about targeting:

Over the last 5 to 10 years, we’ve basically gotten to the point where we effectively discourage businesses from trying to limit the targeting. It used to be that a business would come to us and say like, “Okay, I really want to reach women aged 18 to 24 in this place”, and we’re like, “Okay. Look, you can suggest to us…If they really want to limit it, we have that as an option. But basically, we believe at this point that we are just better at finding the people who are going to resonate with your product than you are.”

And about creatives:

But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.

The platform has moved on, Mark’s words, not mine. So I’m moving with it.

Even celebrity marketers like Jon Loomer abandoned Lookalike audiences:

This doesn’t mean targeting is dead, but it’s definitely nearing its expiry date.
As for creatives, we’ll still have some control… for now.

We no longer buy audiences, we train and influence the algorithm.

It’s no longer about who you target, but what you show them.

So if you’re still running the same audiences from 2021 and wondering why performance is tanking…

This might be your sign to shift.

Thank you for your invaluable support of my newsletter—I hope you found some useful insights here.
Feel free to reply to this email with any questions about growth or paid ads. You can also book a session with me anytime at adsformakers.com.

Yours truly,
Francesco “The Ads Dude