Related Media - Why I'm avoiding this Meta Ads feature

One of the newer features in Meta Ads is called Related Media. It's an AI ad enhancement associated with Advantage+ campaigns. It's the concept that Meta will pull and use high performing creative images or videos from other campaigns in your ad account that match the product and objective and apply them to current ads you have set up.

related-media-why-i-m-avoiding-this-meta-ads-featureFor example, let's say you have a Image in Ad 1 from last month. This month you have a new Image in Ad 2 (with different ad messaging). Related media will have the option to pull in the image from Ad 1 and serve it with Ad 2. It'll only use the prior image or video (not the previous ad copy) and pair it with existing ad copy.

I don't like it for several reasons:

• While it prioritizes pulling from other active campaigns/ad sets it can also pull from paused campaigns.

  
  

• A competent practitioner working in Meta likely has a good reason creative is organized into different ad sets and campaigns. For Meta to simply pull creative from one and mix and match into another will likely throw a wrench into carefully laid plans.

  
  

• Internal context is missing. It's not going to know what's going on at your company or what your current business goals are - maybe you have to use a certain image due to a partnership. Also, budgeting in Meta Ads is set at either the campaign or ad set level. If it's going to pull creative out from one and use into another, that's likely going to mess with how you have your budget carefully allocated.

  
  

• If you work in any trend, product focused or seasonality related industry you'll know that when it's time to promote something specific - it's just plain time to promote it. How many brands can you think of that are just okay with potentially last season's creative being served in place or alongside the current season's creative? Meta does allows you to review and choose specific pieces of creative you allow for this feature but by default it's going to pull in what it wants.

  
  

• This muddies up evaluating ad performance data. If ads can pull in different creative then it becomes harder to distinguish which ads are actually performing well. Meta does allow you to do some segmentation between the creative when using this feature but still, I'd prefer having the ad stand on its own.

  
  

• Broader vs Specific Audiences. I have no doubt Meta can distinguish a college student looking for a spring break travel package to Cancun vs a high income middle aged couple planning a trip to Europe. However, in some industries it can get hyper specific between the audiences. For example, a product is designed for X purpose. The last thing I want is the creative meant for X serving alongside copy saying Y. I'd rather just not mess with stuff like that.

  
  

I also question the findings...Meta cites a 12% increase in conversion rate when enabling this feature. However, you read the fine print, this conclusion is based of a 4 day study. That's a remarkably specific and short timeframe. You talk to any Meta rep and they'll tell you when you're running any test, it needs to go longer than 4 days. So why were they okay running this one for 4 days only? What happened on day 5 and beyond?

I can't help but wonder...did you run a 4 day test or did you run a longer test and cherry pick out this 4 day span?

This is part of Meta's larger push for AI automation, which I'm only for to a certain extent. The fact that Meta is auto-enabling features like this, I definitely do not support. Basically, if you don't know to look for it, you might not even know it's running.

Here's where to go to look for that. It can be found when editing or creating a new ad, and is typically located near where the primary text fields are. Once you find it, it's easy to edit which images it pulls in or simply trash them all out.

Happy Trails, Hans!