How Meta's latest AI update has made creative more important than ever

“Let Andromeda Take the Wheel” – Context

I won’t bury the lead, Meta’s new Andromeda update has drastically changed how ads will be delivered, and having a wide variety of creative in your campaigns is more important than ever. Does this mean that AI is replacing yet another important aspect of people’s jobs? Sadly, yes. Does it also mean that creative is more important than ever when it comes to success on digital platforms? Weirdly, yes!

So, what is the Andromeda update?

This new update is essentially the mass rollout of Meta’s Andromeda AI (machine learning) system across all Meta accounts. It aims to leverage AI learning to “predict which ads a person will find most interesting”.

Essentially, Andromeda is going to be handling how your ads are reaching people, not your performance specialist. Unfortunately, that also means if you aren’t adapting to this new process, your ROAS is going to drop.

“Go Wide, Not Tall” – Impacts & strategy

Instead of separating a select few ads out into curated targeting packages, you’ll now want to have a wide variety of ad approaches all in one pool, and then let Andromeda use that pool to test ad approaches, learn from the performance and decide where to best allocate spending. It’s like a supermarket displaying all its products equally, and letting the customers decide which brands they prefer.

How does it do this? Andromeda looks at each ad creative and picks things like colour, settings and faces to determine target demographics and interests. It looks at hook language to predict intent and pain points, and will even analyse cuts and transitions in video to gauge watch time and engagement.
(based on information from Saku F on LinkedIn)

This means each new ad you give Andromeda is another piece of testing information it can use to further refine its own knowledge and understanding of your campaign.

TLDR: the more diversity and volume of ads you have, the better Andromeda will be at serving the right ad to the right person at the right time.

“Silver Linings” – What this means for creative

So, with all that context out of the way, what does that mean for your friendly local designer?

Well it’s a mixed bag. Ads are going to rely on creative more than ever, which means your designers’ job just got more important as well, but let’s go a bit deeper.

When planning a campaign, there will be a greater emphasis on a wider variety of approaches and a higher volume of ads created. This means designers who can pump out lots of different designs quickly will likely be rewarded with better ad performance, but this could also mean a lower bar for quality in creative. It’s up to you if that’s a good or bad thing (shout out to my fellow perfectionists out there – kia kaha).

"Improvise, Adapt, Overcome" –  Takeaways for the whole team

For the designers, have a think about how your process might be affected by this change. Are you going to have to spend more time in the ideation & concepting phase to get a larger volume of ads ready? 

For the managers, how is this going to affect hours allocated to design and review stages of a campaign? Will the time saved on the performance side of things make up for it?

For the performance specialists, how can you switch up your workflow to be less deterministic and more reactive? What juicy insights can you look to pull out that might help steer the creative direction of the campaign?

I honestly don’t have a solid prediction for how this new update will change the dynamic of digital marketing, but it seems like everyone is in agreement that it’s a pretty big deal, and it always pays to be planning ahead.