From The Founder:

Meta’s operating expenses grew 55% year over year. Its ad revenue grew 28%.

Sit with that gap for a second, because somebody has to fund it, and it isn’t Meta.

A company spending that much faster than it earns has one lever available: extract more conversion value out of every impression it sells. That pressure doesn’t land on Meta’s shareholders. It lands on the brands running $50K, $100K, $200K a month through the platform.

Which is why the “efficiency improvements” keep arriving. Advantage+, generative creative, automated placements. Those are not gifts. They’re a platform that needs more of your budget with less visibility into where it went.

Most agencies won’t say this out loud, and the reason is simple arithmetic: Meta is where the majority of their managed spend sits. You don’t tell clients to reduce dependency on the channel that pays your rent.

But the math is public, and it changes what Meta is for.

Meta is still the best bottom-of-funnel conversion machine available. What it has stopped being is a reasonable place to run your entire customer journey. When costs climb and the margin for error disappears, you measure twice and cut once, and you stop asking one platform to do prospecting, consideration, and conversion all at once.

The brands handling this well right now are not negotiating better. They’re moving upper-funnel work to Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube, where impressions are still cheap, and keeping Meta pointed at the part of the funnel where it genuinely wins.

That’s a budget architecture decision, and it’s yours. Your media buyer can’t make it, and your agency may be structurally disinclined to raise it.

The diagnostic is below. It takes about twenty minutes and you only need two invoices.

What did your Meta CPM do this year? Reply and tell me. I’ll send back where that sits against the accounts we run.

Ask Your Team

“Pull last year’s Meta invoice and this year’s, for the same campaign type. What happened to CPM, and what happened to total impressions?”

Green flag: both numbers, side by side, and a view on why.

Red flag: a ROAS answer. ROAS can hold steady while the underlying economics rot.

“Which funnel stages are we currently asking Meta to do?”

Green flag: a clear split, with upper-funnel work running somewhere cheaper.

Red flag: “Meta does everything.” That was the right answer in 2022.

What Good Looks Like

The first row is the one that matters, and it’s the one a ROAS report will hide from you completely.

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The Round Up:

Amazon rebranded its ad stack. At unBoxed, Amazon merged its ad console and DSP into one AI agent and made AI-driven campaign types the default. It’s Advantage+ and PMax again, third time around. Worth ten minutes to find out which of your campaigns defaulted into the new types and where advanced settings moved. Not worth a strategy meeting.

McDonald’s launched a media network with a $1B target. Everyone with foot traffic sells ads now. Not your Q4 problem.

Not ignorable: Amazon also claims roughly 20% of brand sales value arrives after the standard attribution window and is extending its lookback to 12 months for new-to-brand shoppers.

Notice what that does regardless of whether it’s true. If Amazon scores itself over 12 months while every other channel gets judged on 7 days, it wins your 2027 budget on window length rather than performance. Pick one window and hold every channel to it before the January reports get written.