Meta, Meta, METAAAAAA (cue Andrew Garfield in The Social Networking slamming Zuck's laptop). Why do we lose trust in you? When you pull off things like this product browsing toggle being turned on existing ads automatically. Forcing product browsing on RIGHT as the biggest season of the year starts is downright diabolical. I appreciate you sending an email, but this should also be a message in ads manager this is turned on. For the uneducated product browsing is an AI feature that turns ANY creatives essentially into dynamic product ads AKA for most of us the ugly carousels that somehow magically always have high ROAS. What happens is Meta will take a select group of your audience and turn the creative you've been working on into these DPAs. It especially hits hard after first touch. So instead of thinking your creative is doing the heavy lifting, it is in fact a dynamic ad. Why am I anti opt-in? Because in my experience this toggle actually impacted a client pretty hard. We discovered that almost all our traffic on an ad we thought was working was in fact just a collection ad on IG Reels, not the creative. Of course Meta didn't tell us the difference. We noticed that engaged audiences suddenly skyrocketed on said ad. After clarifying with our Meta rep we discovered this. This has now happened multiple times on multiple brands. The worst part is we've noticed if for example you run licensing, the copy will stay the licensor but unless you 100% have the product set for that licensor already set, the system will just do what it wants. So the copy won't match the DPA. In the BFCM when we're all scrambling to get things dialed in and right the last thing we should have to worry about is this new thing. Meta - our ask is you delay this opt-in / opt-out system until January. Don't do this now. Leave it as is. If we want to run it, cool. But also, when you do it, PLEASE create a column or a notice that product browsing is on and contributing X to the ad. Essentially give us the data so we know how to action item this. Monitoring Meta for constant changes is far and away our biggest headache, not necessarily performance.

Meta ads in 2015: 1. Take a photo of product with iPhone. Open Power Editor, launch ad in under 2 mins. 2. Refresh PE and see 1:1 conversions in under an hour, scale within 3-4 hrs. 3. Spend the rest of the day coming up with fun ideas for new offers, new landing page ideas, new product ideas, new copy ideas. Meta ads in 2026: 1. Hire creative strategist -> Who hire creative agencies / editors -> who build batches of creative. 2. Open ads manager, go through 25-30 prompts of things you have really no clue about, but Meta is insistent it'll lower your CPA by 7.9% based on a study from 2 advertisers in 2022. Click publish after 1 hr of building out 10 new concepts. 3. You're then hit with an error publish with messages like: "you have no shops select," or "you don't have page permissions," or "this creative has expired, please try a new one" you finally are able to hit publish. 4. Finally, you can go on with your day. But wait, client sees that they are getting discounts on the ads you just launched coming in. You open up ads manager and go to ad level to go through multiple areas to figure out why. 5. Ah, Meta has randomly turned the promotions automatically on. No worries, you pause it. On with your day. 6. Someone who knows someone at the company for whose ads you just launched flags to friend that the ads are appearing with a dubstep version of a Beethoven song and seem out of touch for the brand. You're then texted to go pause the music. 7. Open ads manager, navigate to ad level, pause music. You're then hit with a prompt from Meta: "WHY ARE YOU TURNING THIS OFF?!" You hastily respond, "BECAUSE IT SUCKS!" 8. Visibly irritated now over Meta you finally settle in to do the other part of your job, analysis! 9. But wait, there appears to be an outage! Everyone texting, "Is Shopify down?," "Is it Cloudflare?," "Is it AWS?," "No! It's Meta!" Ok, well now you're in fight of flight. Should we wait? Should we pause? Let's wait, yeah let's wait. This is just a minor blip. 10. Meanwhile you're not left refreshing things every 5 min instead of doing analysis and research. Finally, it is night time and you can relax (not)! On this particular day you managed to launch 10 ad sets and do nothing else. Feeling defeated because what once took 2-5 min to do now feels daunting. It feels like you now spend the majority of your day in defense mode. Not because the work has changed or the people, but the process for doing it all has. And that's why you're feeling burnt out media buying friends and creative friends.