Meta's Andromeda engine narrows millions of eligible ads to a few thousand candidates before ranking picks the winner - so creative diversity decides whether you're in contention at all. Our working guidance is 10 to 15 genuinely distinct assets per Advantage+ campaign - concepts and angles, not colour swaps. Consolidated structures generally beat granular audiences. And AI-generated assets need a disclosure.
For years, the paid social lever everyone reached for was the audience - stack interests, layer lookalikes, slice by behaviour. Meta's Andromeda engine has quietly moved that lever. Worth being precise about what it does: Andromeda is the retrieval stage, narrowing tens of millions of eligible ads down to a few thousand candidates. A separate ranking stage then decides what actually serves. So Andromeda doesn't choose your winning ad - it decides whether your ad gets into the room at all. In practice that still pushes weight onto creative, because thin or repetitive creative gives retrieval less to work with.
Building a creative system that actually feeds the machine - and knowing what to test next - is the core of how we run paid social.
What Andromeda changed
The practical implication is to give the system a genuinely varied pool to retrieve from, and a broad enough audience to find people in. Meta's AI then works out which messages, formats and angles resonate with different sets of people. On consolidation, Meta's own A/B testing puts Advantage+ Shopping at 12% lower cost per purchase, and it reports a 22% ROAS uplift for advertisers using Advantage+ creative AI targeting. Those are vendor figures, so treat them as directional - but they are at least Meta's own, published and testable.
The numbers that matter now
The centre of gravity has moved from audience settings to creative supply.
Sources: Meta Engineering, “Andromeda” (Dec 2024); Meta Newsroom, Advantage+ A/B testing (Aug 2022); Meta Business Help Centre on the learning phase. Asset guidance is our own.What 'distinct' actually means
This is where most accounts go wrong. Fifteen creatives that are the same idea in different colours is one creative. Andromeda wants genuinely different concepts - different hooks, formats, value propositions, and messengers. A founder talking to camera, a UGC unboxing, a bold static claim, a problem-agitation reel and a product-demo carousel are five distinct things. Five background-colour variants are one.
- Vary the angle - price, speed, status, problem, proof.
- Vary the format - static, reel, carousel, UGC, motion.
- Vary the messenger - founder, customer, creator, brand voice.
- Then let Andromeda decide - and read the winners weekly.
If you use AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, ElevenLabs or similar to generate creative assets, those ads now need to carry a disclosure. It's easy to overlook when you're producing at volume - build it into your QA so it isn't a compliance problem later.
If your paid social is still built around audiences rather than a creative system, that gap is usually the single biggest opportunity we find. It's a typical focus of a strategic review.
Frequently asked questions
How many creatives do I need per Advantage+ campaign?
Our working guidance is 10 to 15 genuinely distinct assets per campaign - different concepts, angles and formats, not colour or copy variants of one idea. That's our own starting point rather than a Meta specification; Meta's published limits are far higher (up to 50 assets for some Advantage+ campaign types). The principle holds either way: retrieval needs real diversity to work with.
Does audience targeting still matter on Meta?
Less than it used to. With Andromeda and Advantage+, broad targeting plus strong, diverse creative usually outperforms tightly sliced audiences. The creative is doing the targeting work now.
Do I need to disclose AI-generated ads on Meta?
Broadly yes. Meta operates an AI-disclosure regime for ads: there's a disclosure control in Ads Manager, and Meta also applies labels automatically where it detects its own AI tools or C2PA metadata from third-party tools. Minor edits like cropping or colour correction don't trigger it. If you're generating assets with tools like Midjourney, DALL-E or ElevenLabs, build the check into your creative QA.
What counts as a distinct creative?
A distinct creative is a different concept - a different hook, format, value proposition or messenger - not the same idea recoloured or lightly reworded. Think a founder video versus a UGC unboxing versus a static claim.