Meta Is Completely Changing How Ads Work! (Your Targeting Doesn’t Matter)

The game is changing faster than ever, and Meta is leading the pack with their massive AI updates that will leave a lot of affiliates struggling to make enough money to pay rent, while making others millionaires. 

I just had an interesting conversation with some account managers and some industry insiders at Meta. What they told me made me reconsider all of my campaigns and think of what I need to change to keep in making the big money in 2026.

If you want to scale, you need to stop acting like it’s 2018. I have no plan on staying behind, and neither should you. Here is what you need to know in 2026 to keep ahead of the game on Meta!

1. Seasonal Events

We all know that Black Friday and Christmas always pull up the big numbers, but its not only those two events. There is something happening all the time and you should use it. 

• • Valentine’s Day

By the info I got, spending jumps every year by roughly 7%. This means that you can scale certain products and services that can be marketed for couples or as gifts. Even if you cant, nothing can stop you of just making a “valentines day sale” for your random product. People sometimes don’t even think about if things make sense, they just expect to see sales at a certain period. 

• • Easter

5% increase in sales in 2025 compared to 2024, and its rising again. Food items, family items, and gifts are still king here, but you can always think of your own sale. Think of “Steam” and how they have their spring sale which gets them billions of dollars each year. They sell games, games have nothing to do with easter, but its like an event that marketers use to push products. 

• • Ramadan

This is something that is becoming more relevant in European and American markets. While Ramadan is a 4 week event, Meta recommends you run your campaigns for 6+ weeks to see the real results. Dont do short bursts but play the long game. 

2. Andromeda

This is the big thing that will determine how well you do in the coming years. This is a stack of AI systems that they call Andromeda. Its made out of multiple parts. Andromeda, GEM, Sequence Leadnirng, and Lattice. Here is how they work:

• • Andromeda (The Senses) ~8% ad quality increase

It scans millions of ads and narrows them down to a few thousand that “look” right for a user.

• • GEM (The Conscious Mind) ~5% conversion lift (especially on Reels)

This handles the recommendations. It’s why Reels conversions are jumping (up 5% already).

• • Sequence Learning (The Memory) ~3% conversion lift

It remembers what a user did before and after seeing an ad. It knows some people don’t buy on the first click. It optimizes for the “long-tail” behavior.

• • Lattice (The Nervous System) ~6% conversion lift

It connects everything together.

This system sees everything. You cant out-target it. You need to help it understand your ads and audience and connect them in the best way it can. If you fail to do this, it will push your ads further down in the priority list and you will get no results even if you spend a lot of money. 

3. Creative is the New Targeting

Before you would have a few ads and optimize the hell out of them until they get the best performance. This was due to how the algorithm worked, but they changed it. Instead of having one creative that rules them all, now you need to change your strategy and have a creative for each of your audience members.

The more variations and angles you have the better as Andromeda will try its best to push more creatives to people, and if you dont have enough, just tank your performance. 

The example they used is this. Lets say you are selling a pasta recipe book. 

Before, it was fine to just run an ad that showed the recipes, maybe a 20% off sign, some happy person cooking, and that would be it. Now its not like that anymore. 

To get the best performance you would need to approach the same ads from unique angles (and preferably with video). So your one ad, would then turn into multiple like this:

• • A person cooking various recipes and comparing results
  • A mom explaining how she is cooking for her family certain pasta dishes from the book and how they love it. 
  • A sale ad that shows big savings
  • A price chart showing how much you can save by cooking incredible dishes at home instead of takeout
  • A high quality cooking video
  • A video of an amateur cook making something incredible and being surprised
  • An ad showing a guy flexing his new skills to his guests
  • Etc etc

As you can see, these are all unique angles and they will work on various audiences. You dont have to target those audiences, the algo will find them. This might be ok if you have just a few products so you can make a bunch of variations of ads for them, but as you start scaling, you will hit a limit on how many variations you can make, and thats where AI can help you, but ill cover that in another article in the future!

One of the things that is supposed to help you out with this is Meta’s own AI systems. They now have things like flex media and soon they will introduce some basic AI avatars and features like AI try-ons for clothes. These are supposed to help you out, but I am still confident that a more manual approach will be better as I dont trust their AI tools. 

A big focus for them are reels. It seems like everything is slowly focusing on video as the CTRs are bigger, the results costs less, and people just like them more. So if you havent started making videos, its time!

Meta couldn’t be clearer here.

• • 9:16 only
  • Sound on
  • Safe zones matter
  • Lower CPA than image ads
  • Higher engagement
  • Can land in trending categories if relevant

4. Future Roadmap

They call this project North Star, though they might rename it. Its basically their goal for their AI system and advertisers to together create personalized and contextual ads that are customized to each user. 

This means more angles and variations, more videos, and more internal generative AI models that help make this possible. For now, most of these features are still not live or even close to being live, but its coming during this and the next year. It should fundamentally change how Meta works, and if you don’t adapt quick, you will feel the performance tank. 

5. Automation

Another thing Meta is trying to force one way or another are Advantage+ campaigns. We all know that its getting harder and harder to make a manual campaign, and they plan on making this not even an option soon. 

They want to push Advantage+ to everyone and you can already feel it happening. For now, A+ performs the same or a bit worse than manual before, but once we all switch to A+, I’m sure performance is going to tank. 

The goal of Meta is not for you to make money, but for them to make money. So performance is going to be tuned so that you just get enough to not quit, but never enough to be relaxed. You will always have to keep improving and pushing limits to get the results you want, and I am not a huge fan of it. 

One way they are pushing it already is through their opportunity score. So far its more like a marker that shows where you could improve based on Meta’s data. But soon they will start to punish campaigns that don’t have perfect scores and make them perform worse. This means you wont be able to even run the placements and demographics you want, but you will just have to let Meta decide everything and keep praying it works. 

Keep an eye on this in your account. Meta is literally grading you on how well you use their automation. Higher scores = better delivery.

6. Partnership Ads

Another thing they are trying to push, but which is actually good for brands is partnership ads. This is basically where you partner up with influencers to promote your services or products. Their internal data show that these ads have:

• • 19% lower CPA
  • 71% higher brand lift
  • 13% higher CTR

Sadly, these don’t fit evey niche, and they cant be used all the time for all products and services, but for those who can, this can be a great way to push some sales. 

Conclusion

Meta is about to make some huge changes. Depending on how well they execute them and how greedy Zucc gets, it might enhance their ad system, or kill it for most advertisers like you and me. They are slowly moving to a blackbox system where you put the money and creatives inside, and they do the rest. 

You can’t influence the targeting much, you cant pick the demographics, you just pray that they find the right people and that your investment pays off. As an OG in the industry, I cant say I like it, but I will adapt to it. 

There is still a lot of money to be made with ads, and if you adapt to the system right away, you can likely ride the wave and make crazy cash while everyone else is struggling! Stop stressing over “Lookalike 1% vs 2%” and start stressing over whether your video hook is strong enough to stop the scroll.

Now get to work and start testing those angles!