Meta’s Andromeda Update: The Great Advertising Lock-In

Meta has changed the rules. And if you advertise there, you’re already playing.

Meta’s latest evolution, Andromeda, isn’t just another update to Ads Manager, it’s a full-scale re-architecture of how advertising on Facebook and Instagram works.

Andromeda is Meta’s next-generation ad engine. A complete rebuild of how ads are retrieved, ranked and delivered.

Over the last few years, we have seen the shift towards Meta being eager to target a much broader mass audience, whilst relying on Meta to get results by giving it carte blanche to show an infinite variety of AI generated ads.

The Andromeda evolution has completely flipped the switch from audience targeting to creative.

Instead of advertisers telling Meta who to show ads to, the system is fully focused on creative delivery instead.

It is designed to decide dynamically which ads to serve to which users, based on hundreds of creative, behavioural and contextual signals.

It’s easy to see why this is happening. Targeting, as we’ve known it, is being stripped back by privacy changes, consent frameworks and data signal loss. Advertisers are losing access to granular audience insights that once gave them precision. Meta’s solution? Target everyone and give all of the decision making to its own algorithms.

It creates a much deeper dependency on Meta. The more data and decision-making you surrender to Meta, the harder it becomes to advertise without it.

The new addiction: dependency by design

Meta has spent years perfecting the art of advertiser dependency.

Andromeda takes that to the next level. By downgrading manual targeting further and layering in complex automation. It is getting harder for brands to optimise Meta’s system, they can only feed it.

The platform’s AI thrives on creative volume and data diversity. The more assets you upload, the smarter it gets. The better your signals (conversions, engagement, lead quality), the more accurate its predictions.

Broad automation ensures more data for the algorithm, more impressions in the auction and more spend cycling through the platform.

But the loop always closes back to Meta. Your data, your learnings, your results all reinforce the machine that you don’t fully control.

And because brands think can’t replicate this system elsewhere, they’re effectively locked in.

Targeting still matters, but control is slipping

Targeting remains fundamental. It’s how you ensure your ads enter the right auction, at the right time, against the right intent.

But Andromeda changes the shape of that control.

Privacy restrictions and data fragmentation have made it harder for advertisers to define audiences with precision. Meta’s AI now fills those gaps, expanding reach automatically, inferring intent through behaviour and matching creatives to people it thinks will respond.

Marketers still choose the direction but the steering is shared with the system.

As an agency, we have seen this cycle of transparency to blackbox many times over the years. An agency's role is to find the levers to understand how we influence algorithms and this is just the latest iteration of this challenge.

Creative is now the competitive edge

If you can’t target like before, you have to win through what you show.

Andromeda rewards advertisers who can deliver a steady flow of distinct, high-quality creative concepts. Different angles, formats, and emotional triggers. It uses these signals to decide who sees what and when.

These are the levers.

But this brings new risks.

Meta’s systems optimise for engagement and conversion, not for nuance, tone or long-term brand equity. Left unchecked, the algorithm can nudge your creative output toward whatever performs fastest, even if it slowly drifts away from your intended brand voice.

Owning creative direction in an AI world

The answer isn’t to resist automation; it’s to govern it.

As automation takes over Meta targeting, marketers need to take ownership of creative direction and consistency. The future advantage lies in how you structure, manage and monitor your creative assets, not in how tightly you define an audience.

That means building internal systems to:

• Control what gets uploaded and tested
• Maintain clear tone, look and message boundaries
• Track which themes are driving performance (and which are diluting it)
• Keep performance feedback loops tied to brand values and not just cost metrics

The detail of how you do that matters less here than the mindset shift it represents: creative governance are the new levers for media buying on Meta.

Why brand integrity matters more than ever

Meta’s AI doesn’t understand subtlety. It doesn’t care if an ad feels off-brand or tone-deaf, only that it converts. Without checks in place, it will happily reward clickbait, over-promising or sensational creative that damages long-term trust.

Brands that maintain control over how they look, sound and behave will weather this shift. Those that don’t will slowly start to sound the same, as they will be optimised for algorithms, not audiences.

The irony is that as Meta’s systems become more intelligent, the responsibility to protect brand identity becomes more human.

The new marketer’s mindset

Andromeda marks a turning point for everyone in advertising, as it is likely TikTok and Google will follow.

Media buyers need to think like creative directors. Creative teams need to understand data infrastructure.

The smartest marketers won’t just optimise for performance, they will design for predictable creativity, feeding Meta enough variation to learn, but within a brand framework that protects consistency and trust.

This is not the end of targeting or creativity. It’s the beginning of a new relationship between the two.