If you’re planning to ramp up Facebook and Instagram ad spend for the holiday rush, Meta has one word for you: automation—or more specifically, AI.
In a Q2 earnings call last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg credited AI for a noticeable lift in ad performance: roughly 5% more conversions on Instagram and 3% on Facebook after expanding its AI-powered recommendation model to new surfaces and using “more signals and a longer context.”
With the holiday season looming, Meta has published new tips to help advertisers make the most of its evolving AI tools. Spoiler: the advice mostly boils down to giving the system more freedom to decide where and how your ads appear.
1. Go All-In on Placements
Meta recommends opting into all placements—Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and Audience Network—via Advantage+ placements. The idea is to let the delivery system automatically allocate budget to whichever placements are most likely to convert.
Restricting campaigns to where you think your audience is could backfire, Meta says. Letting the algorithm explore the full ecosystem might uncover performance pockets you’d otherwise miss.
2. Diversify Your Creative Assets
Advantage+ creative now integrates with Meta’s growing suite of generative AI tools, enabling multiple ad variations at scale. Meta advises tailoring assets for each placement using placement asset customization.
The benefit? A reel viewer might get a vertical video, while someone in the Instagram feed sees a carousel—both optimized for their context. More variations give Meta’s AI more chances to match the right creative with the right audience.
3. Use Placement Controls Only When Necessary
Advertisers with strict brand-safety needs can use account-level placement controls to block specific platforms or ad slots. But there’s a trade-off: fewer options mean less flexibility for the algorithm, potentially lowering performance.
The Bigger Picture: AI as Your Media Buyer
The subtext here is that Meta is inching toward a fully automated ad system—one that handles creation, targeting, and bidding with minimal human intervention. The endgame? You supply a URL, and the AI does the rest.
We’re not there yet, but the message is clear: the more you let Meta’s AI run the show, the more it believes you’ll see results—especially during the cutthroat Q4 ad frenzy.
