WTF has Meta Been Doing This Week? 26 OCT 2026
More AI, more automation, more decisions made for you
Meta wants to make it easier to create ads, manage campaigns and find customers. Some of that is genuinely useful. But as more of the decision-making moves inside the platform, advertisers need to be clear about what they’re handing over, and more importantly how they’ll know if it’s working.
Here are two developments worth paying attention to.
1. AI can help with creative. It still needs a human eye.
Meta is expanding Ads Creative Studio, making static-to-video generation available in Advantage+ creative and rolling out Customer Lifecycle Strategy to all advertisers. It’s also testing an AI assistant that can help build campaigns, suggest targeting and budget changes (subject to advertiser approval). AI-powered audience discovery is expected later this year.
For teams under pressure to keep up with Meta’s demand for fresh creative, there’s real value here. More variations, faster production and less manual work can mean more opportunities to test what resonates with different audiences.
But, and this is a big but, producing more creative doesn’t automatically mean producing better creative. We’ve seen AI-generated image and video suggestions that simply haven’t been good enough to run without substantial human input. And there’s a bigger question when the same platform is recommending changes, delivering the ads and reporting the results. It’s starting to look a lot like Meta marking its own homework.
Meta’s attributed conversions don’t always reveal how much incremental value advertising has created. Those who are making decisions based solely on platform-reported CPA risk missing what matters further down the funnel: lead quality, sales, revenue and profitability.
AI should help us make better decisions and spend less time on manual work, rather than producing more for the sake of it.
2. Meta may be changing where your ads send people, unless you opt out.
Advertisers have reportedly received an in-product notice saying Meta will enable Product Browsing on eligible existing ads from 28 October, unless they opt out. When someone taps an ad, they may see product information and personalised recommendations inside the Meta platforms before reaching the advertiser’s website.
Meta cites an average 3% increase in conversions from its own experiment. But the notice doesn’t clearly define the conversion metric, explain the impact on revenue or establish whether those additional conversions were incremental. The reported rollout date also hasn’t been confirmed in a public Meta announcement.
There may be a benefit, particularly for retailers with strong product catalogues. Helping people discover relevant products before they reach a website could improve the shopping experience.
But it also changes the customer journey, and potentially the way we measure it.
If the first experience after the ad click happens inside Meta, clicks on ads may not line up with website sessions. It could also complicate creative testing, remarketing and analytics comparisons.
It also raises questions about how much control brands have over the experience. We spend a lot of time making sure our clients’ ads and landing pages work together. If Meta starts personalising what happens between the two, we need to understand whether it’s helping or getting in the way.
We shouldn’t dismiss the feature outright. But we shouldn’t assume it’s better simply because Meta says it converts more. An improvement in conversions is only useful if it’s creating additional value for the business.
Here’s what we’re checking in our clients’ accounts
- Creative quality: Are AI-generated assets good enough to represent the brand, or are we creating variations for the sake of volume?
- Campaign control: Are AI recommendations and proposed changes to budget or targeting being reviewed before they’re applied?
- Customer acquisition: Are existing customers being excluded where appropriate, and are we measuring new customers separately?
- Product Browsing: Has the account received the notice? Is the feature enabled or scheduled to change? Should we opt out before 28 October?
- Measurement: Do Meta-reported conversions line up with website analytics, CRM data and actual sales?
- Business outcomes: Are we optimising towards qualified leads, incremental customers and revenue, rather than just platform-reported CPA?
- Testing: Where there’s a potential benefit, can we test it in a controlled way before rolling it out more broadly?
As far as automation goes, if AI can take repetitive work off our plate and help us test more intelligently, that’s an Audience Group vibe.
But there’s a difference between using AI to make our jobs easier and letting Meta decide what success looks like. As these tools get smarter, our job is to make sure the strategy, measurement and decisions behind the campaigns are actually making our clients’ businesses better. Because a better result in Ads Manager doesn’t always mean a better result for the business.
