It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.
“This is something universal that everyone is experiencing.” With the problems continuing to pile on, Williams said his marketing firm completely halted its use of Advantage Plus in early April. Instead, they’ve gone back to the old-fashioned method of buying Facebook and Instagram ads manually. Notably, going back to the pre-AI, pre-automated way of doing things hasn’t really taken a toll on the firm’s human labor force.