Facebook Ads Has Changed & Most Brands Aren’t Ready

Facebook ads are entering a completely new era. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small brand or a long-time giant, what’s happening right now is leveling the playing field in a way we haven’t seen in years. Based on what I’m seeing across our agency managing nearly 100 brands, the next 12 months are going to look nothing like the last four years.

Below are the seven major shifts already unfolding inside Facebook ads

1. The Return of Complexity (Goodbye Ultra-Simple Advantage+ Era)

Four years ago, Facebook shoved the entire ecosystem into extreme simplicity. Advantage+ was pushed so hard that you almost felt stupid for running anything else. Budgets were consolidated, audiences collapsed, and the algorithm did most of the work.

Late 2025, everything flipped.

Advantage+ Smart Campaigns were officially merged back into the manual campaign structure. We’ve gone from forced simplicity to optional simplicity, and Facebook has re-opened the door for sophisticated advertisers to introduce nuance again.

Inside The Moonlighters, our structure reflects this shift:

• A prospecting campaign with 90–95% of your spend, built around “packs” (net new groups of creatives launched together).
  
• Interest groups layered only for winners, not for testing.
  
• Retargeting and retention broken into specific cohorts (site visitors, add-to-carts, 180-day purchasers, etc.).
  
• And finally, a scale campaign that holds only the best ads and runs on pure broad.
  

This layered structure lets us lean into the algorithm with a hyper-competitive environment, but it also allows us to know exactly how much we are spending against new customers vs. existing customers which has become a delicate balance in Facebook.

2. From One Winning Creative Format to Many

For years, a brand could blow up off one dominant format: UGC testimonial, founder talking head, clean product demo, etc.

The highest-performing accounts today are the ones running every format at once:

• Static images
  
• Long-form video
  
• Short-form reels
  
• Carousel
  
• Text-heavy images
  
• Raw organic-feeling content
  

Customers consume content differently on the same platform. One person lives on Reels. Another never opens Reels and scrolls only Feed. If you’re only producing one format, you’re capping your total available reach and your total scaling potential.

3. From Chasing New Concepts to Iterating Winners 

The biggest advertisers in the world aren’t winning because they come up with brilliant new concepts every week. They’re winning because they create an insane volume of iterations on the concepts that already work.

Look at Dr. Squatch.

They launched 400+ ads in just 14 days not because they’re reinventing every video, but because they test dozens of versions of a winning concept. When their Sydney Sweeney partnership popped, they didn’t wait 30 or 60 days. They immediately created waves of iterations, new hooks, new cuts, new edits, new overlays, new angles.

Iterations allow you to sustain your existing best ad concepts longer.

It is incredibly hard to create and find successful concepts so once they are found, it is critical to extend them as long as possible. Most brands wait far too long to iterate.

4. From Ads-Only to Ads + Organic Content Flywheel

This is one of the biggest unlocks for the next two years.

For the first time ever, because the IG algorithm is now “For You”-driven, your organic content is a free testing engine. You can post endlessly without spending a dollar, see what pops, and then:

1. Take the exact organic post and run it as an ad, unchanged.
   
2. Create an ad-specific iteration of that organic post (add price, hook, overlays, demo steps, etc.)
   

If it resonated organically, the core signal is strong. This completely flips the creative pipeline, I will admit this concept is best explained by my former CEO, Gary Vaynerchuck in his book Day Trading Attention.

5. From Slow Scaling to Fast Scaling

Facebook told advertisers for years: “Never raise budgets more than 10–15% per day. Don’t break the learning phase.”

That narrative is collapsing. The learning phase is mostly a mechanism to stop advertisers from pausing too early, not an actual barrier to scaling. The real check you should be using is new audience, incremental ROAS or CPA inside your Audience Segments breakdown.

If your new audience ROAS is healthy and incremental attribution or 1-day click signals are strong you can scale much faster than you’ve been told. Sometimes even 2x or 3x in a single day without tanking performance.

6. From All-Broad to Broad + Interest Expansion

Pure broad isn’t truly “broad.” It’s constrained by your pixel’s data density. Many advertisers have noticed that no matter how much they increase their spend they never grow beyond a certain total reach. 

Who you reach is determined by your creative, pixel and ad account information. You need to unlock new audiences in order to reach more new unique users.

That’s why layering adjacent interests, not obvious ones, works so well. You’re not trying to target your own category. You’re trying to help Facebook discover new pockets of people who look like your best converters.

This is why in our prospecting structure:

• New creatives test in broad packs
  
• Winning creatives graduate into interest groups
  
• Each interest group is intentionally dissimilar to your core category
  

The interest groups don’t replace broad, they widen it, increasing total reach.

7. The Quiet Rise of Live Shopping

This is the whisper I keep hearing behind the scenes.

Live shopping is already massive in APAC markets, it is growing on TikTok and will eventually be a staple for all platforms. It’s authentic. It’s real. It cuts through the AI fatigue that’s accelerating every quarter. And platforms are preparing for a major push.

I expect live shopping placements inside Ads Manager to quietly rise, then explode.

When it hits mainstream adoption, it will reshape creative strategy overnight.

Final Thoughts

Facebook has made and rolled out more changes than ever before in the last year. Algorithm changes, flexible ad units, value rules, and so much more has launched creating more complexity than ever before. Complex media buying is absolutely here to stay. And in a market where every dollar counts, it’s important to be on top of every adjustment and every trend. 

My best advice is to find a system that you believe in and stick to it as much as possible. Think both macro and micro, all factors are at play in 2026.