absolutely. That Advantage+ creative nonsense is just another layer of complexity Meta throws in to make you think you're optimising, when really they're just feeding their own black box. ads Manager has always had this habit of overcomplicating stuff that should be straightforward-like, why does changing a single ad creative require me to wade through three nested menus and confirm twice?
Here's the real pain point for me as someone who works with programmatic builds and technical setups:
- Advantage+ creative forces you to hand over control of copy, images, and even the call-to-action. For a brand with strict guidelines, that's a nightmare.
- The "creative optimisation" toggle does weird things with asset combinations-sometimes showing a headline from one ad and an image from another. Good luck explaining that to a client when the wrong version serves.
- And the reporting? Good luck trying to isolate which creative element actually drove performance. It's all blurred into one "campaign-level" view.
The frustrating part is that the tool exists because Meta wants to automate itself into a corner-they'd rather you let their system guess what works than let you run proper controlled tests. For anyone in SEO or programmatic, it's the same old story: the platform's incentives don't align with yours. They want you to spend more, test less, and never leave their ecosystem.
So yeah, Advantage+ creative crap exists because it's easier for them to monetise lazy optimisation than to build a transparent tool that actually empowers advertisers.
