The next evolution, the Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM), aims to fully automate ad creation. Marketers will simply provide an image and a budget, and the AI will generate the entire ad library. This shifts the marketer's primary value from ad creation to optimizing the post-click customer journey and offer.
GenAI transforms advertising's core pillars. It enables hyper-personalized creatives at scale, democratizes ad production for smaller businesses, and fundamentally enhances the two most critical functions of any ad platform: predicting user behavior and measuring campaign outcomes.
The largest advertisers on platforms like Meta launch over 10,000 new creatives a year, equating to more than 40 per workday. This massive scale of experimentation is manually impossible for most companies, creating a clear market need for AI platforms that automate and scale video production.
As AI takes over campaign execution, the marketer's job shifts from micro-management to macro-strategy. They define the business rules—such as discount ranges, offer types, and creative assets—and the AI then makes millions of optimized micro-decisions for individual customers within those human-set boundaries.
AI is creating a fork in marketing strategy. It disrupts traditional demand acquisition channels like search, making it harder and more expensive to get measurable traffic. Simultaneously, it provides powerful new tools to monetize existing demand more effectively. This forces a strategic shift from a volume-based to a value-extraction model.
Ridge automates ad creation using a custom GPT and N8N, producing 500 static ads daily. Even if 90% are unusable, the remaining 50 ads provide a constant stream of testable creative, increasing the chances of finding winning variants for personalized campaigns at scale.
Previously, marketers told Meta who to target. With the new AI algorithm, marketers provide diverse creative, and the AI uses that creative to find the right audience. Targeting control has shifted from human to machine, fundamentally changing how ads are built and optimized.
Instead of testing individual ad variations, advertisers can use the "Dynamic Creative" (for leads) or "Flexible Creative" (for sales) toggles. This allows combining multiple top-performing images, videos, headlines, and text into a single ad unit, which Meta’s algorithm then mixes and matches to find the optimal combination for different users.
With Meta's Andromeda algorithm automating audience targeting, the primary reason for poor ad performance is no longer incorrect targeting settings. Wasted money is now almost exclusively a result of insufficient or non-diverse creative, making creative strategy the most critical component of a successful campaign.
A new Marketing API feature allows Meta's AI to allocate up to 5% of ad spend to placements explicitly excluded by an advertiser. This signifies a major shift towards autonomous campaigns, reflecting Meta's confidence that its system can identify performance opportunities even in channels that human advertisers have ruled out.
By 2026, Meta will discontinue its automated ads product and remove 7-day and 28-day view attribution windows from its API. This change forces advertisers away from older automation and reporting models, pushing them to fully adopt Meta's more sophisticated (and less transparent) Advantage+ AI campaigns and adapt measurement strategies accordingly.