Meta Wants to Make Your Ads for You. Brands Are Pushing Back

In June 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta aims to fully automate ad creation by the end of 2026. A year later, the vision is moving, and so are advertisers, but not in the same direction.

Meta’s plan

According to the report, a brand would upload a product image and set a budget. Meta’s system would then generate the whole campaign: imagery, video and text, along with targeting, budget allocation and real-time personalisation. The stakes are central to the company: advertising made up more than 97% of its revenue in 2024.

Mark Zuckerberg described the goal this way: “In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve… and then we just do the rest for them.”

Where reality stands

In April 2026, Marketing Brew spoke with media buyers and agencies. Their verdict: the timeline is optimistic, and the automated creative tools give uneven results. One agency says Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns now account for 60% to 70% of its spending on the platform, while flagging low-quality placements and imprecise demographic targeting. Meta, for its part, reports a 14% improvement in ad quality on Facebook from its Andromeda retrieval system.

Above all, brands are resisting full automation. “Most of our clients want to retain control because they put so much time and effort into crafting what their brand is,” an agency executive told the publication. Legal concerns over undisclosed AI imagery add to the caution.

The real change: volume

The most telling detail in the reporting is not automation. It is volume. Meta’s system works best when it has many different creatives to show to broad audiences. One agency describes how working a campaign across four customer personas, with five new concepts each, turned into a job that required 1,000 creative assets.

From one campaign to 1,000 assets

4 customer personas × 5 concepts, then formats and variants

That is where video production changes in nature. The job is no longer one ad. It is a system: one main video and its variants by audience, by format and by message.

What it means for a smaller business

Platform-generated ads will be generic. A product image and a budget give everyone the same thing. Your edge is creative that looks like your brand and nobody else’s.

Think in libraries, not single ads. A well-planned production yields one main video, then variants in 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9, and versions for each audience. It is one of the capabilities we deliver. And here is which ratio goes where.

Keep control of what defines the brand. Let the algorithm pick which variant to show to whom. Do not let it decide what your brand says.

Automation is going to take over distribution. Creative direction stays an advantage.