While Meta plans to fully automate its ads business with AI by 2026 and has positioned an automated model as the key to higher performance, not all marketers are impressed.

At EMARKETER’s Future of Digital Summit last month, Liquid Death’s chief media officer Benoit Vatere voiced his frustrations with paid social, arguing that the lack of transparency that comes with automation outweighs any efficiency gains.

Some 75% (74.7%) of marketers reported diminishing paid social returns in a recent Taboola study. This slowdown could stem from a combination of factors, including rising ad costs, slower growth, and a plateau in time spent on social platforms, said our analyst Minda Smiley.

“Two things can be true. Marketers may be seeing diminishing returns, but that isn’t stopping them from spending on social platforms,” said Smiley, adding that marketers have become reliant on the ability of these platforms to drive results.

Managing Meta’s black box

As ad costs rise, Smiley said it's partly due to Meta’s Advantage+ program, which is “essentially driving up prices with the promise of better results.".

Meta no longer allows advertisers to opt into specific campaign priorities or audiences, a change that leaves brands with fewer levers to control strategy.

“They’re iterating on creative, but they’re not really telling the brand what’s working. They’re just kind of magically doing things in the background,” said Lance Wolder, head of strategy and marketing at Padsquad. “The brands that I talk to have a real sincere concern about what’s actually running.”

Despite transparency concerns, Meta just saw its first share gain of US ad spending since 2018. While marketers might be frustrated, it's not enough to stop spending and miss out on reaching their consumers where they are.

“The reality is that social media is one of the primary ways for marketers to find and target massive audiences, so they’ll keep spending there despite frustrations with the major platforms,” said Smiley.

Promising performance at any cost

The promise of ad performance in exchange for a loss of control doesn’t work for all brands, said Owen Miller, director of connections and media strategy at Ogilvy. A brand that is willing to pay more to reach new audiences, instead of the same repeat customers, is losing that choice.

“It used to be ‘Check this box if you want us to expand your audience and we think it’s going to improve performance,’ and now they’re sort of doing that whether you check the box or not,” said Miller. “If you really understand your audience and have sort of an informed approach that's developed outside of Meta, it's hard to execute things exactly as you want to.”

If Meta is just chasing easy wins to show the marketer, that could work against a brand's long-term strategy, said Miller.

“When they target some of those warmer audiences, that looks good in the short term, but if you’re trying to grow and acquire new customers…that’s hurting your long-term strategy,” said Miller.

Filling the data gaps

To offset Meta’s opacity, some brands are testing paid social-style assets outside social platforms.

• PadSquad’s SquadStories, a web format modeled after Instagram stories, has seen 136% higher engagement than standard units, said Wolder.

“You shouldn’t abandon social, but how do you take those assets and use them more broadly?” he said. “You can come back with a holistic strategy because you’ve gained more of an understanding outside of what Meta has told you is going to work.”

More brands are taking a more holistic approach to social assets. A majority (58%) repurpose creator content for their website, and many use it for email campaigns (43%) and events (37%), according to a July CreatorIQ and Sapio Research report.

“My suggestion to brands is to do more of that experimentation and use those assets in other places, where it almost feels expected to the consumer, to stand out,” Wolder said.

Automating creativity

Since “the algorithm rewards copy cats,” said Wolder, Meta’s creative automation lacks distinction and true brand identity.

“That’s the big crisis for the brands,” said Wolder. “If all the automation is happening in the background and you don’t know what that is, but all the best practices are telling you to develop creative that looks like everyone else’s creative, how do you distinguish yourself?”

If marketers are losing their ability to manipulate audiences within paid social with their first-party data, they can regain some of that control during the creative phase, said Miller.

“We have all this first-party data, and we need to change how we’re applying it,” he said. “How we’re really reaching those people is analyzing the copy, and analyzing the imagery. There’s still a lot of value in that, and you don’t need to go on autopilot and hope Meta figures it out.”