Redefining Meta’s $75B AI brand in a new campaign experience

Context

Meta Advantage+ is a set of AI products that automate parts of an ad campaign, such as audience, budget, and placements. The brand has an annual revenue run rate of more than $75 billion.

Until 2025, advertisers had two separate ways to set up a campaign:

  • Manual campaigns gave advertisers full control of every setting. However, setups that were too narrow could lower performance.
  • Advantage+ campaigns used AI across the campaign for better performance, but gave advertisers less control.

The two paths had different interfaces and different mental models. The brand also had two tiers. Advantage+ named end-to-end campaigns and a few individual products, and Advantage named other individual products.

In 2025, Meta merged the two paths into one campaign setup flow with AI on by default. At the same time, a separate team launched Opportunity Score, which scores how well an ad account or campaign is set up on a scale from 0 to 100.

Problems

For advertisers

  • Advertisers had no shared meaning for Advantage+. In research, some saw it as Meta's recommended default and some saw it as a stronger version of a product. Others saw it as Meta's AI, and some did not know they were using it.
  • Advertisers confused the two brand tiers. In research, 10 of 17 advertisers misused products because they mixed up Advantage and Advantage+.
  • The merge broke the existing mental model of the brand. Advertisers used to choose Advantage+. In the merged flow, every campaign starts with Advantage+ on, and advertisers turn it off by adding controls.

For the business

  • The brand could promise performance that a campaign did not deliver. If every campaign carried the Advantage+ name, including campaigns with limits that lower performance, the brand would lose its core promise.
  • Two teams were building products that gave advertisers competing advice, at the risk of shipping the org chart. Advantage+ and Opportunity Score both told advertisers how to improve the same campaign.

Key decisions

1. Define what Advantage+ means in the merged product

  • I framed three strategies and scored each against eight questions in three themes. The questions included whether advertisers would understand the strategy, whether it protected the brand and Meta's narrative in the market, and whether it would still work as more campaign types merged:
    #StrategyWhat it meansKey risk
    1Advantage+ is a suite of productsBrand every product, as beforeA campaign full of controls still carries a brand that promises performance
    2Advantage+ is the optimal campaign stateThe brand shows whether the campaign is set up optimallyAdvertisers must learn a new meaning
    3Retire the brandAI is built in, so drop the nameSignals Meta lost confidence and throws away the brand
  • My product design partner and I recommended Strategy 2 with two design approaches to test. Leaders across the merge aligned as well.
  • I turned the recommendation into two hypotheses, and two rounds of research tested them:
    • Less aggressive: The brand as an on/off label is easier to understand than the brand as a product name.
    • More aggressive: Showing an overall status nudges advertisers toward more automated setups.

2. Make the Advantage+ status binary: on or off

  • The first version of Strategy 2 used a scale that showed how close a campaign was to full automation. I explored labels such as "strong, medium, weak" and wording such as "enabled" or "active." We then mapped every setting change to a state, because each change raised a real question. For example, does adding an age range in an audience still count as on?
  • We dropped the scale. We could not offer a fix for every partial state, so advertisers would see a partial status with no clear next step. Instead, we chose a strict rule: any limit turns Advantage+ off. As a trade-off, more campaigns would show "off," but the brand would appear only on setups that met its promise.
  • The same logic simplified the brand tiers. We first planned to keep "Advantage+" for full campaigns and "Advantage" for single settings. By launch, only "Advantage+" remained, and the single settings appeared as plain "Budget," "Audience," and "Placements."
  • I wrote the copy for the status. When Advantage+ is off, the content names the cause: "You have Advantage+ off for Audience." Then it offers the fix and says what the fix will do: "Switching setups will turn Advantage+ on for Audience."

3. Put Advantage+ inside Opportunity Score

  • Opportunity Score gives each ad account a score based on how many of Meta's recommendations the advertiser applies. During setup, a version called campaign score rates only the campaign being built. The Opportunity Score team built the score because recommendations had appeared in many places and repeated the same claims, and advertisers had learned to tune them out.
  • The two features were planned as separate tests, and later, potential launches. I raised the overlap several times, because both told advertisers how to improve the same campaign. Before launch, design leadership made the merge a launch blocker. Leadership also required Advantage+ to stay as a brand, so we could not drop it inside the score.
  • My product design partner and I co-led a sprint and a cross-team workshop with the Opportunity Score team. We worked to one rule: neither product could weaken the other's promise. A score that ignored Advantage+ would undercut the brand. An Advantage+ panel beside the score would give advertisers two answers to one question.
  • We put Advantage+ inside Opportunity Score as its main lever. Advantage+ recommendations appear first and carry more weight in the score. We gave up a right panel that showed only Advantage+, so that advertisers would see one answer instead of two.
  • We also chose where the status would live. The page header was where advertisers already picked preset settings, but it scrolled out of view. The right panel stayed visible beside every setting, so we chose the panel. In the product today, the Advantage+ status sits under the campaign score.
  • To support the experiment for the combined experience, I redesigned the onboarding flow. The new flow used fewer screens and explained how the two products work together. It received VP sign-off and shipped within one month.

Outcomes

  • The merged setup surpassed its launch goals, with no loss in revenue and no drop in automated setups. Adoption of the optimal Advantage+ state rose 1.1%.
  • In research, advertisers understood the new meaning. One said it was "very clearly defined" when they were or weren't in an Advantage+ campaign. Another said: "In just 2 clicks I had everything change to Advantage+ on, it's a very pleasant experience."

Reflection

  • Get data sooner: Research confirmed that advertisers understood the design. However, we had to wait for the launch test to learn whether the label changed how advertisers set up campaigns. Next time, I would push for an earlier quantitative test.
  • Governance: Build more robust documentation of principles and content patterns earlier in the process for the broader ads design team to adopt across the rest of Ads Manager.

Peer feedback

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