[HN Gopher] Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performin...
___________________________________________________________________
Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-
generated ones
Author : zdw
Score : 106 points
Date : 2025-12-29 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| measurablefunc wrote:
| This is nothing, wait until Zuckerberg delivers those 15 virtual
| "friends" he promised & they start shilling for whoever is the
| highest bidder.
| tehjoker wrote:
| this might be a submarine advertisement. someone is pitching
| their startup near the bottom of the article
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Submarine? It says Advertising at the top.
| smallerize wrote:
| That's just the category of news this is. It doesn't mean
| it's an ad.
| smallerize wrote:
| I don't think so. It goes against their sponsored content
| policies https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts
| Specifically, it should be labelled, and editorial staff are
| not involved in making it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between
| human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of
| something
|
| for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but
| everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
| atomic128 wrote:
| Poison Fountain https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
| agumonkey wrote:
| interesting, i didn't know about this effort
| design2203 wrote:
| Because there is an obsession re. Financial wealth as opposed
| to the creation of real wealth.
|
| The two are not the same. The connection between the two has
| seemingly been lost.
| neom wrote:
| Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes as they
| say. Hyper consumerism, status symbols, a fundamentally
| pack/tribal species? what could possibly go wrong?
| immibis wrote:
| The way around this, by the way, is to create some kind of
| alternative exchange system that only admits real-for-real
| exchange and makes hoarding money impossible.
| ben_w wrote:
| To the main topic: I am so not surprised.
|
| I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to
| publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness.
|
| As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read
| it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting
| this problem?
| latexr wrote:
| > As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I
| read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else
| getting this problem?
|
| Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared
| on HN on occasion) both do that to me.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally
| hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms
| continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them
| through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average
| person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be
| done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most
| people don't actually hate ads.
| dylan604 wrote:
| haha, you seem to think laws a democratically created. we
| _should_ all by now know that most laws are written by others
| that donate the most to the congress critters that just
| attach their names to them.
| silisili wrote:
| I'm always baffled by this. The only exposure I have to video
| ads at all anymore are the 3 or so football games I might
| watch per year OTA. Each time, I'm always absolutely blown
| away by both the amount of and content of the ads and how
| maddening they are.
|
| I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used
| to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm
| syndrome.
| esseph wrote:
| Everybody hates daylight savings time but we still have it.
|
| 54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile
| and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad
| load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital
| advertising "annoying and unpleasant".
|
| (I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are...
| interesting to say the least.)
| imiric wrote:
| The tech ouroboros manifest.
| xthe wrote:
| That's a bit risky. When AI starts swapping proven ads, you often
| end up with more volume but lower quality lots of junk leads. If
| something is already working, replacing it automatically can hurt
| real results, not just the metrics.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| But just think of how much money Meta could make by slopping
| fetish-bait over your brand and charging you for every click!
| copx wrote:
| Don't give them ideas.
| haskellandrust wrote:
| Proven ads? The dirty not-so-secret is that proven ads don't
| exist. That's why these companies employ PHDs to think of new
| and interesting ways to modify your behavior and influence your
| future. This is just another step in that evolution
| hawtads wrote:
| It's not just Facebook, the entire ads industry is heading in
| this direction. There's a seismic change going on right now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So instead of devs needing to retool their skills, the Don
| Drapers of the world will be ousted instead? I'm thinking I'm
| okay with this
| ffuxlpff wrote:
| We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better
| than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can
| compete with them.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Elsagate is back, and this time she's after boomer gold.
| atrus wrote:
| Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI
| and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups,
| and higher retention) the more traditional and even _player
| created_ ads.
|
| The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because
| it kinda sucks that's what works.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Could we(AI ads) be hitting this? "Supernormal Stimulus"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
| hollerith wrote:
| Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli
| 200 years ago.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I think you can add to that things like fast foods,
| snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts,
| sugars etc to keep people eating.
| hollerith wrote:
| And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and
| video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward
| available through these things with only a small effort
| and a small risk and a short waiting time are much
| greater than anything available in the environment of
| evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort,
| risk and waiting time.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| this plot twist happened years ago.
|
| anyway, the main theory of better ad performance from generated
| ads isn't about, being weird or whatever. it's that few ads on
| social media are matching with intent to buy, i.e., they are
| the opposite of google search ads. so there's a much higher
| diversity of creatives. like, "saturation", like you see the ad
| so much, you are psychologically going to choose whatever
| product it is hawking when it finally comes time for you to buy
| a thing in the category it belongs to. generative ads are
| merely delivering ad creative development work that SMBs (40%
| of Meta's revenue) are too unsophisticated to use.
| redsymbol wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who spends a lot of money every month buying
| Meta ads, I had that thought looking at some of the article's
| examples.
|
| But in its current form, I think that may happen mostly for
| very direct-response ads, while creating branding problems that
| would be expensive for many companies in the long run.
|
| Also, some of the AI-generated creatives and copy that Meta has
| suggested to me actually misleads or flat-out lies about what
| is being advertised. Which makes me wonder if the American FTC
| will go after some companies for running misleading ads at some
| point, if they are not careful about what suggestions they
| accept (the ad manager UI currently makes it extremely easy to
| accidentally approve something you shouldn't).
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I think that's nice! Now my ad-blocker and their ad-generator can
| have a loving relationship without me being involved. The circle
| is complete!
|
| Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the
| last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an
| ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are
| popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they
| were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're
| not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop
| and think how much you care about a site.
| chuckadams wrote:
| > Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where
| Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when
| they'd explicitly turned them off -- meaning they inadvertently
| spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to
| run.
|
| Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
| Terr_ wrote:
| One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman
| formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the
| other as well.
| rchaud wrote:
| Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way.
| Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app,
| only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is
| why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will
| tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and
| that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the
| experience worse these days.
| jkuria wrote:
| This is really annoying. They force the "Optimize Text Per
| Person" and it is really hard to turn off. If you accept even one
| "enhancement" they turn OTPP and there isn't a disable button.
| And then it spews garbage in some of the ads--copy that is full
| of non-sequiturs and first and second lines that are complete
| nonesense. They should be held to account.
| conradfr wrote:
| An AI agent watching AI ads and buying groceries for you.
| naet wrote:
| I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts
| that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad
| sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were
| looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling
| monthly subscriptions.
|
| I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff
| like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic...
| if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you
| in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able
| to make some money off the content you produce with online ads.
| Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that
| are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making
| legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad
| spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that
| seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't
| _like_ ads, but sometimes I 'd rather see something for free with
| an ad instead of paying for it.
|
| --
|
| On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I
| have seen a _ton_ of ads for a local tech event... but the event
| already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it 's
| completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on
| their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing
| money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the
| wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are
| completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I
| do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing
| more than they are.
| __loam wrote:
| Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's
| breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging
| along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have
| the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally
| rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're
| causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on
| something that's totally unproven.
| gedy wrote:
| I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was
| Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast
| downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast
| listener counts for ad purposes.
| chistev wrote:
| Why are podcasts being affected?
| nyrikki wrote:
| Much of the podcast problems were due to Honey leaking any
| promo code to the world, including employee discounts and
| customer specific discounts.
|
| When Intuit is scraping every browser tab, there is no way to
| link a podcast campaign with engagement, so the way they were
| paid for driving traffic is lost.
|
| Basically Honey copied the Ashley Madison model,
| unconstrained addition with a pay for delete. Ashley Madison
| had no email verification fyi, any bot or angry neighbor
| could sign you up for an account, then they wanted payment to
| delete.
|
| Honey would extract any promo code they could find, then try
| to make you pay to remove it.
| rchaud wrote:
| As a podcast listener, I can think of a few reasons:
|
| - 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC)
| products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a
| lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming
| products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If
| their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate,
| podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've
| collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't
| great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.
|
| - A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify
| and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot
| of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total
| pool of advertising money available.
|
| - Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the
| downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has
| lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to
| podcast owners is less.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Seems like your description of what is happening would HELP
| podcast ad revenue, though? If web sites are no longer a good
| source of eyeballs (since people are just getting their info
| from AI summaries and aren't visiting web site), wouldn't that
| shift MORE ad spend to podcasts, where you will be more likely
| to reach an audience?
| gs17 wrote:
| > On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I
| have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event
| already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad
| it's completely pointless.
|
| I get a lot of these for elections which already took place...
| in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes
| on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine
| they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and
| deciding to keep spending.
| redsymbol wrote:
| I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the
| term for someone who purchases and configures advertising
| campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads
| the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I
| spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that
| Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on.
|
| I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the
| target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can
| do to avoid that now.
|
| Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings
| that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time,
| but right now three specific examples come to mind:
|
| 1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media
|
| I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an
| llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful
| in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to
| disable them.
|
| The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative
| (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are
| silently re-enabled.
|
| This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex
| web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a
| detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had
| activated ads with these accidentally active.
|
| The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the
| ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.
|
| It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly
| more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their
| ad campaigns.
|
| These three specific examples have been happening for many
| months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right
| now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which
| has been wasted by many companies around the world.
|
| That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this
| point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not
| to happen.
|
| Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal
| incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their
| compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site
| links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the
| design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those
| metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am
| seeing.
| algo_trader wrote:
| can you spare 5 minutes for a quick email/chat about
| bidding/campaigns?
|
| its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/
|
| (I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on
| twitter
| redsymbol wrote:
| Sure, happy to chat. @redsymbol on twitter, or my email is in
| my HN about page
| neom wrote:
| I recently had to charge back $20k of ads because meta said no,
| in spite of the fact that a support person went on a webex with
| me, did a screenshare and saw that their ads dashboard is so
| totally broken that these mystical ads that ran are nowhere to
| be found, I mean maybe buried in the pages that would literally
| fail to load half the content, then producing internal app
| modals spewing incomprehensible errors, buttons that lead to
| nothing, and don't get me started on if someone happens to
| start an ad-hoc campaign in IG directly. LinkedIn are the only
| platform with a half decent ads manager, X is well built but I
| trust the results from it near zero.
| redsymbol wrote:
| It's an interesting situation. I think that despite the
| issues, Meta is the best (and fastest-learning) platform for
| mass-market purchase conversions. Linkedin has powerful
| targeting options, but the fact that it's tied to GMT drives
| me nuts. For LI, typically I use manual bids so I can easily
| dial down delivery at off times (e.g. if the ad objective is
| booking a sales call).
|
| All in all, these ad platforms are tremendously complex
| software systems, and as someone who has been a fulltime
| software engineer I have a lot of sympathy. But with so much
| money is on the line, the standards are high.
| immibis wrote:
| Why class action? Sounds like you think you could sue
| individually. I'm not convinced, but you are.
| agentifysh wrote:
| are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime
| this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta
| is the best but is this backed up by real data?
|
| it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to
| what makes Meta so special.
| eastbound wrote:
| Maybe Meta has older people with more spending power. That's
| the lesson of Spinal Tap: Sometimes you don't know what your
| success is caused by, and every rationalization makes you
| optimize the wrong knob (hence the "amp it up to 11" meme).
| alex1138 wrote:
| I apologize for the somewhat low-effort comment but across the
| board Meta is the single most malicious tech company I can think
| of
|
| I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for
| ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example
| you can actually contact people via gmail
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
|
| It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters,
| joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to
| make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you
| who they are believe them
| lukev wrote:
| Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything)
| is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics
| for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored.
|
| There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just
| "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate
| towards just selling porn.
|
| This feels kind of like that.
| sfink wrote:
| iron crab porn
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak
|
| https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into...
|
| http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/
| yencabulator wrote:
| [delayed]
| garganzol wrote:
| Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads
| suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce
| funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to
| say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional /
| borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn
| that junk generation off.
|
| It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because
| loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than
| uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for
| an advertiser.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-29 23:00 UTC)