If you're still spending your days checking interest boxes, excluding age groups, and micromanaging your audiences in Meta's Business Manager, sit down: we have bad news: you're wasting your time and your clients' money.
Advertising targeting as we've known it for the past 10 years is officially dead.
Today, Artificial Intelligence is in charge. But be careful: this doesn't mean the end of advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Quite the opposite. In episode 5 of The Feed, Chris meets Martin, Performance Manager at Socialsky, to decode this 180-degree turn. Forget the technical "hacks": the new golden rule is called Creative Strategy.
To understand what's currently happening on Meta (with the advent of Advantage+ campaigns), Martin uses a perfect analogy: that of a car.
A few years ago, managing Ads was like driving a car with manual transmission on a mountain road. You had to shift gears yourself (adjust bids), brake in curves (cut underperforming audiences), and keep your eyes fixed on the CPC meter (Cost Per Click).
Today, Meta gives you the keys to a Tesla in "Autopilot" mode. You enter your destination (your conversion objective, your target ROAS), and the machine drives itself. Trying to take the wheel back by forcing the algorithm to manually target "women aged 25 to 34 who like yoga" risks crashing the car. The machine has infinitely more data than you to find the ideal customer.
If we no longer manually target, how does the algorithm know who to show the ad to? The answer fits in one sentence that redefines our entire industry: Creative is the new targeting.
It's no longer your settings that find the audience, it's your visual and your message. Concretely, Meta's artificial intelligence doesn't just read the text of your ad. It "scans" every pixel of your video, analyzes colors, deciphers on-screen text, listens to the voiceover, and understands the context.
This automation doesn't mean there's no more strategy. On the contrary, it requires a much smarter account structure, based on the TOFU-MOFU-BOFU method (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel).
Instead of having 50 small campaigns that cannibalize each other, the 2026 approach consists of consolidating data:
The secret of a good Performance Manager today? Patience. Once the machine is launched, every modification restarts the learning phase (Learning Phase). Touching your campaigns every day is the best way to never be profitable.
Facing this super-powered AI, a legitimate question arises: will the Media Buyer profession disappear?
The answer is no, but it has already mutated. AI won't replace the marketer. However, the marketer who knows how to use AI will replace the one who ignores it. Yesterday's Media Buyer was a technician of numbers. Today's Media Buyer is a Creation Architect. His role is no longer to find where the audience is, but to analyze why a video works and to brief creatives to iterate on the best concepts (change the first 3 seconds, test a new customer benefit, adapt the call-to-action).
Stop fighting algorithms. Feed them with the best creatives possible, and let them work for your business.
It's the principle that social media advertising targeting (Meta, TikTok) is no longer managed manually through interests, but directly through creative content. The image, text and video "select" the interested audience naturally through AI semantic and visual analysis.
It's the acronym for the classic conversion funnel. TOFU (Top of Funnel) targets cold audiences for discovery. MOFU (Middle of Funnel) targets people in the consideration phase (educational retargeting). BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) drives final action (purchase) with the hottest prospects.
Less and less. Current algorithms (like Advantage+ campaigns on Meta) generally perform much better with broad audiences ("Broad"). Manually restricting your audience often prevents AI from finding less obvious but more profitable buyers.
AI is replacing the operational and technical part of media buying (bidding, micro-targeting). However, it's increasing the need for strategists capable of analysing creative data, understanding consumer psychology and designing effective advertising videos.
