Results or control? The new dilemma facing Meta’s advertisers

Meta’s Advantage+ platform is reported to be delivering advertisers results that match those achieved before Apple’s game-changing introduction of app tracking transparency, but the success comes at a price potentially too high for some.

Context 

Meta has revamped its advertising technology, pouring huge sums into an AI-driven platform to overcome the restrictions it faced as a result of Apple requiring apps to seek permission from users to be tracked and served personalised ads.

While the Advantage platform allows marketers to automate specific aspects of a campaign, Advantage+ enables full automation, including multiple creative combinations that can be tested against different audiences with subsequent optimisation of the best-performing ones.

Results are good 

• An associate director of marketing agency iProspect tells the Financial Times that clients are seeing a 7:1 return on their investment using Advantage+.
• A media buying agency executive estimates that results are between 20% and 30% higher using Advantage+ versus not using it. 

But not everyone is convinced

• Some companies that have used Advantage+ acknowledge that it drives engagement but argue it doesn’t necessarily drive traffic or sales. 
• Others point to a lack of control: “You are effectively looking at a black box solution where there is an algorithm saying it can do better [marketing] work than you can,” says one. 

What’s next

Meta has just created a new top-level product group focused on generative AI “to turbocharge our work in this area,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post. That will feed into ad formats in due course and, one can assume, Advantage+. The results vs control dilemma advertisers are facing isn’t about to go away.

Sourced from Financial Times, Meta