We pride ourselves on staying ahead of the curve when it comes to digital advertising. In fact, as Meta Partners, we’re constantly testing and trialling all of Meta’s new releases. Meta’s recent introduction of the “Flexible” ad format is no exception, and we’re excited to delve into what it means for you, the advertiser.

For those familiar with Meta’s (formerly Facebook) “Dynamic Creative” option, Flexible Ads might seem like familiar territory. Reason being, AI has been invading the digital advertising space for years. But, in the past couple of years, this feels like it has been accelerating significantly – following the zeitgeist being driven by LLMs (Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini FKA “Bard”.) Performance Max has been a bit of a game-changer when it comes to Google ads and Bing ads. Whereas, Meta ads’ own version being “Advantage+” had a little less automated approach than Googles. However, there are key distinctions that could offer a significant boost to campaign performance when it comes to this new “Flexible” option which seems much more inline with Google and Bing’s Performance Max campaign types. Let’s unpack what Flexible Ads are and how they can revolutionise your Meta advertising strategy.

What are Flexible Ads?

In essence, Flexible Ads allow you to provide Meta with a pool of creative assets – images, videos, headlines, descriptions, and primary text – and their algorithm does the rest. It automatically generates the most compelling ad combinations tailored to individual users based on factors like demographics, interests, and browsing behaviour. This ensures your message resonates with the right audience in the format that’s most likely to grab their attention.

What do we like about this? We’ve seen many advertisers struggle with Meta’s “ad fatigue”. For those of us who work in advertising full-time, it’s not as big of a deal as we have the time to be constantly rotating creatives and keeping things fresh. However, we can’t ignore that many advertisers are actually the business owners themselves and just don’t have time to fight that battle. This format, allowing you to upload a huge range of variations, could help you by allowing Meta’s algorithms to take control and rotate a bank of content for you. 

However, if you know this author, you’ll know I’m a bit of a sceptic when it comes to the performance of AI in marketing – before it has proven itself. Now, yes, I am sold on Performance Max, but only after months of testing and updates from Google as well as custom scripts allowing me to pull additional insights. My main issue with this is the “veil” that these AI-driven campaigns pull over the data behind them as well as the lack of control we have over the performance. If you only run this campaign-type with this one ad and it doesn’t perform, you’re kind of backed into a corner with nowhere to go to improve things. So, I’m hoping to see some accessibility of data when it comes to these so we can see of our uploaded assets which combinations drove positive performance.

Here’s some benefits we think Meta’s Flexible Ads will bring to the table: 

• Increased efficiency: Manually testing countless ad variations can be slow and pretty cumbersome. Flexible ads might just take the guesswork out of the equation as Performance Max has, freeing up your time and resources for other strategic tasks.
• Format flexibility: Unlike Dynamic Creative, which primarily focused on carousels, Flexible Ads offer the potential for your ad to be shown in single image/video or carousel format, whichever Meta predicts will perform best. This adaptability ensures your message reaches its target audience in the format that best suits their preferences. Again, this sounds pretty similar to Performance Max which diversifies your spend across Display, Search, Shopping and more automatically. 
• Improved performance: Meta’s machine learning algorithms are constantly learning and optimising. By leveraging this power, Flexible Ads can dynamically adjust your ad’s presentation for maximum impact, potentially leading to better click-through rates, conversions, and overall campaign success. Whether or not this actually leads to better performance, well, the proof will be in the pudding. This is an assumption based on advertising platforms’ strengthening of algorithms and quicker speed to performance than prior manual setups in some cases. 

To answer the question around the blog – is it worth testing in your own account? Absolutely! You should always be testing new features through Meta for uplift in your performance metrics! Stay open-minded when it comes to campaign types and embrace all the latest in digital advertising and find out what works for you!✨