The winning creative playbook for 2026: 3 Meta Ads experts help you tame Andromeda
Feb 28, 2026
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5
min read
Andromeda has drastically altered the Meta Ads landscape. And now that the dust is settling, the winners aren't the biggest spenders or the most prolific ad factories.
They'll be the ones who figured out that Andromeda doesn't just want more ads: it wants better reasons to show them. Yes, volume still matters, but only once every creative is pulling its own weight.
Meta's own literature does a good job explaining how Andromeda works, but it's short on practical advice on how to work with it. So we spoke to three leading Meta Ads experts who were ready for Andromeda when it showed up:
Sarah Levinger, Founder, Tether Insights
Phil Kiel, Director of Paid Social, Taikun Digital (Supporting brands like Jones Road and Plunge)
Akvile DeFazio, a veteran performance marketer with over a decade of experience in paid social (Supporting brands like Rothys, Headspace, and Johnson & Johnson)
We pulled the six most pressing lessons from those interviews and showed you how to apply them to your own accounts, including:
Andromeda was like natural selection for brands advertising on Meta
Evergreen ads are dead, and so is resting on your creative laurels
Focusing on deliverables instead of buyer psychology is a good way to set cash on fire
Psst! Still haven't fully figured out what Andromeda's all about?
Dive into this release from Meta themselves on how this new retrieval system works, the advanced chips that enable it, and how decisions are made within the algorithm. It doesn't reveal much about how to handle Andromeda, so you'll also want to keep reading to find out what actual DTC operators recommend.
1. Creative intelligence is no longer optional
The best time to build your campaigns on actual psychological insight and audience intel was the day you started advertising. The next best time is now, because Andromeda has rendered the volumetric approach moot.
Marketers who think like Sarah Levinger have been ahead of that curve for years. Her decision to specialize in psychology-based creative puts her closer to traditional mainline agency planners than the colder, attribution-driven approach common in digital marketing.
"Meta is clearly moving toward a world where the algorithm does the optimization and humans do the sense-making. Andromeda rewards truth and truth only, and it punishes anyone pretending to know marketing. Brands with real insight win; brands running performance hacks get left behind."
We asked her what one thing advertisers and agencies can do to pivot fast and hard into this way of planning ad campaigns. She gave us three.
"Get rid of thin inputs like generic hooks, recycled UGC, and vague positioning. Andromeda will happily optimize you into the same bucket as everyone else, and keep your CAC rising."
"Provide high-resolution inputs: clear emotional angles, distinct identity signals, and honest creative that actually reflects why people buy. It will amplify that faster than any manual setup ever could."
"Andromeda can be a net positive, but only for brands that stop trying to outsmart the machine and start feeding it real insights."
How Atria helps
Sarah is describing the exact shift Atria was built for. Instead of your team manually reviewing every new creative to categorize its funnel stage, hook style, and emotional angle, Raya — Atria's AI creative strategist — does this automatically — surfacing the psychological patterns behind what's winning and translating raw performance data into the kind of high-resolution inputs Sarah is talking about. You get the insight quality of a senior strategist running in the background, so your team can spend their energy on sense-making instead of spreadsheets.
2. Stakeholders are still an account's best friend… or worst enemy
Wholesale changes to your creative approach come with added baggage: getting your team and leadership to adapt to a new reality. It can be challenging, but internal buy-in can be the difference between a more successful strategy and near-term churn.
The conversation only grows more complicated and layered the longer you put it off. So address it quickly and proactively, but bring sound rationale to the table like Phil Kiel did.
"Our conversations with stakeholders have completely changed. 'We need 50 new creatives for Q4' is now 'What are the 5-7 core objections we need to address?' We're literally showing them their ad library and asking if Meta's AI had to group these by concept, how many unique piles would there be. Usually, it's way fewer than they think."
Instead of thinking about campaigns, Phil's team is asking stakeholders to adapt to the growing value of creative intelligence by pushing them to explore concepts. And it's working.
"One brand launched every concept into its own campaign — skeptics, price objection, taste concerns. We consolidated that into one purchase campaign across 2-3 ad sets, and let Meta figure out who sees what. Their spend distribution improved overnight because the AI needed that creative diversity in one place to optimize properly."
If you follow Phil on social media, there's a good chance you already know the secret sauce that makes his approach work.
"Get stakeholders to accept that ugly wins, because polished brand content is getting smashed by native-looking stuff: email screenshots, IG story-style text on phone backgrounds, customer testimonial statics that look like they were made in Apple Notes. They hate hearing this but the data doesn't lie, the stuff that looks less produced is performing better because it feels more native to the feed."
How Atria helps
Showing up to an internal review simply asking for wholesale mindshifts rarely goes well. Raya gives you the receipts. Atria's AI creative strategist surfaces exactly which ads are winning and why, so you can walk into any room and say, "Here are your top eight ads and here's what's been newly rotated into the account — make more like this." No more gut feelings or tab-juggling. Just clear performance data that makes the case to shift away from output as a goal and toward creative intelligence.
Angelito Tanglao, VP of Paid Media at VaynerCommerce, says that Atria has helped him "consolidate my tab volume and tell clients, 'Here are your top eight ads and here's what's been newly rotated into the account, so make more like this.' That has been game-changing for me."
3. Evergreen ads are increasingly prone to decay
The days of ads that can run all year (or at least for a season) are gone. Andromeda demands not just creative diversity, but a regular influx of fresh creative approaches that feel distinct from what's already in the account.
Akvile DeFazio says it's past time to leave that approach behind.
"Many brands used to rely quite heavily on smaller sets of polished evergreen ads. But as the platform continues to evolve, we're educating teams to shift older mindsets and work even more closely with creative teams to develop stronger, more scalable creative frameworks."
What do those frameworks look like in practice?
"Clear personas, compelling hooks, angles, tone, and formats that can be tested and iterated quickly based on performance data."
"Since creative diversity is more essential than ever, a mix of messaging angles and visual formats is crucial. We use a variety of images, videos, UGC, carousels, and testimonials to resonate with people across the funnel."
Or as she puts it, "creatives are now doing the targeting for us" which means that advertising on Meta is becoming increasingly about system management. Withholding input is quickly becoming the cardinal sin of the platform.
"It's important that we reframe creatives not just as a deliverable and visual, but as a living input that delivers many signals to Meta that then helps us accomplish our goals. The more we give Meta's AI to learn from, the better it will serve our accounts."
How Atria helps
This is where Raya earns her keep. Atria's AI creative strategist continuously monitors your account for blind spots — flagging when you're over-indexed on one format, under-represented in a persona, or running too many variations of the same concept. It's the difference between reacting to decay after it's already cost you and staying ahead of it with a clear map of what's missing.
4. Creative strategy has to go deeper than "more ads"
The smartest creatives in the room are inverting the pyramid when it comes to Meta Ads workflows, choosing to spend more time at the foundational and planning stages instead of rushing through to production.
Sarah is shifting away from "more creative" as an output goal and toward better inputs as the main lever.
"I'm spending more time upstream on insight quality with emotional mapping, identity framing, and constraint-based testing. I don't want velocity to come from frantic overproduction of ads, but from clearer creative bets. In my own workflow, I'm building systems that turn raw customer insights into modular angles quickly, instead of brainstorming from scratch for each sprint."
Phil's approach is similar and carries a warning against thinner, more surface-level strategies.
"If your brief is 'create 5 ads promoting our supplement', you are cooked. Andromeda will see them as identical. We've completely flipped our approach to creative production, and it's been a pretty significant shift in how we operate day-to-day."
Internally, the biggest change is moving away from the mindset of needing to create 20 ads a week to 3-4 distinct concepts.
Each of those concepts gets multiple format treatments: static, video, UGC style, product-focused, etc.
The core angle is genuinely different across treatments; not 'buy now' versus 'shop today', but distinct concepts.
In the process, brief writing has become his bottleneck… but in a good way.
"I spend way more time on brief development than I ever did because that determines conceptual diversity — not our designer churning out variations after the fact. We're writing briefs around ideas with distinction."
Awareness levels: problem aware vs. product aware
Objections: taste, price, skepticism
Formats that feel native to the platform: IG stories, Apple Notes mockups, email screenshots
"Our creative-only service is structured around this now: 8 concepts per month generating ~40 assets. This matters because it's multiple executions of fewer ideas rather than just churning out volume."
How Atria helps
This is exactly what Raya was built to help you break out of. Atria's AI creative strategist acts as your creative sparring partner — analyzing what's already working in your account, identifying the psychological and structural patterns behind top performers, and helping you generate genuinely distinct concepts instead of surface-level variations. Our creative inspiration feed is over 25 million ads strong and puts you in the company of greatness, leading to better and fresher ideas with wider conceptual variety.
Atria's Radar is your force accelerator. Today, you're able to find what's winning in your account and breathe new life into lagging ads. Soon, you'll also be able to measure how many ads of any type you have with a given amount of spend dedicated to them — telling you exactly which bets to double down on and where to fold.
5. Velocity matters more than ever
Another impact of Andromeda is the greater emphasis on velocity, not only in terms of introducing new creative to the account but end-to-end workflows as well.
"We're using AI tools heavily now for velocity," says Phil. "Chat is handling a lot of our static production: product photography variations, floating products, macro shots, lifestyle backgrounds. Rapid mockups move to test concepts before we commit to full production. And format testing is where we ask if we can nail this angle in three different executions quickly."
Weekly creative drops with consistent volume are beating large batch drops for Phil and Taikun's clients, because "Andromeda rewards fresh creative regularly rather than 30 new ads in the account at once."
And while quality still matters, velocity beats perfection if your goal is to make a profit from Meta Ads.
"We're shipping faster because we're not waiting for 'perfect'. Test a concept at 80% and iterate on execution if it lands. If not, move on. Don't spend three weeks perfecting an ad that might not work. Brands want to treat creative like R&D: lots of small bets, double down on winners, and kill losers fast. It's a pretty different mindset from the old approach of perfecting everything before launch."
How Atria helps
Velocity without burnout — that's the promise. Raya, Atria's AI creative strategist, makes it faster to produce v1s that your designers can refine instead of starting from zero. Script generation helps you find and spot elements that work so you can attract and engage more buyers.
And when you find a winner, Atria's Auto-Gen capability analyzes your top performers and creates new variants automatically. Use the output to iterate new concepts and keep your Meta account on a steady supply of diverse ads — weekly drops, not monthly dumps.
6. Account management separates winners and losers
A lot has changed in the 19 years since Meta Ads first came out. SOPs and best practices have evolved, but fundamentals reign eternal. Brands that lost sight of those fundamentals (or neglected them outright) appear to be hardest hit by the demands of Andromeda.
Which is why Akvile thinks the update is not necessarily "a net positive for all accounts."
"In accounts where we've already established strong creative processes, we've already seen improvements in performance. The update works best in its ability to process more signals at scale and optimize faster than manual setups ever truly could. This is especially true for brands with more data, strong creatives, high creative volume, creative diversity, and very clear conversion goals."
As for the brands that aren't happy, Phil told us exactly where they went wrong.
"They're day trading — running 20 campaigns when their budget doesn't support it, maximizing control over the ad account, testing 50 variations of one individual asset without much difference among them. They're getting cooked at the minute and blaming Andromeda, when actually their approach is outdated."
He says that Meta is moving to a place that "prioritizes the experience for the audience rather than control for the media buyer."
"Brands that were running efficient best practices — consolidation, big swings between creative, diversity across every variable, formats, concepts, personas, messaging, indicators, brand versus non-brand, partnership ads, all of those things — are the ones for whom Andromeda has been a net positive. The others can benefit, they just have to do a lot of homework to catch up."
"Don't treat Andromeda as a replacement for strategy, creative thinking, or measurement. Maintain manual control of creative, messaging, and business context while also understanding where and when to let the system automate." — Akvile DeFazio
How Atria helps
Uploading new ads to Meta is time-consuming and frustrating. Having to toggle and review settings with each upload, duplicating ads and ad sets — it adds up. Atria's batch upload functionality gives your team the power to go live with new ads in a click. A soul-sucking process turned into just another button to press a few times a week, so your team can stay focused on the strategic work that actually moves the needle.
Stop keeping pace. Start winning.
The throughline from Phil, Sarah, and Akvile is clear: the brands winning in the Andromeda era aren't spending more. They're thinking deeper, moving faster, and feeding Meta's AI better inputs.
And fortunately, the only way out is up.
The new algorithm might seem cruel, but it leans more towards blunt honesty than fiscal elitism. You don't need deep pockets to think more deeply about which psychological triggers your ads are tapping into.
So if you don't feel like it's a net positive, don't close yourself off to the upside of changing your approach. Human and machine together will go much further than either can alone.
That's why we built Raya. From insight to execution, Atria's AI creative strategist helps top teams place more calculated bets, more often, backed by wider creative diversity and crystal-clear feedback loops.
Teams like Rubix trust Atria and see 40% faster creative analysis and turnarounds, fueling downstream financial outcomes like a 20% reduction in CPA. They're among the thousands of hungry agencies and growth teams sharpening their creative edge in the Andromeda era.
