Hey, it’s Alex.

This week we’re going to dig into performance marketing.

With the brands we work with at Studio Almond, I am seeing a bigger shift to businesses wanting to take their performance marketing in-house, and while this is a great idea for some, it’s important to know what you’re talking about even if working with an agency, to make sure you are getting the best possible results.

Let’s dive in.

🤖 MEET ANDROMEDA

The Fundamentals have changed - and most brands are $paying into an old way that is now dismissed by Meta.

Over the past decade, paid social has been through several eras of reinvention.

But 2025 marks a decisive break: Meta’s Andromeda update didn’t just tweak targeting - it rewired the entire logic of how performance advertising works.

For founders, growth leads, and e-commerce operators, this isn’t a minor algorithm shift.

It’s the beginning of a new creative economy inside Meta - one that rewards speed, experimentation, and insight over manual control.

The end of rule-based advertising

In the early days, running ads on Meta felt almost mechanical.

You chose audiences, wrote copy, adjusted bids, tested placements, and waited for the data to tell you what worked. Success came from precision: targeting was deterministic.

If you did X, the system would predictably do Y.

Andromeda has replaced that world with something else entirely.

Where deterministic systems follow rules, probabilistic systems learn patterns.

Think of it this way: the old Meta was a recipe - add 320 grams of flour, bake for 18 minutes, done.

The new Meta is a chef.

It tastes as it goes, adjusts the salt, experiments with heat, and makes thousands of small, intelligent guesses until the dish is perfect.

Instead of following fixed pathways, Andromeda digests thousands of data points in real time, weighs probabilities, and decides what’s most likely to succeed in this exact moment, for this exact user.

It can now process 5,000 ad variants per week - not 50.

That single change has collapsed the traditional creative process.

You can’t feed it with a few polished hero ads anymore. You have to feed it with a constant stream of diverse, insight-driven creative.

The brands that do this well - those who can pair volume with strategy - are the ones pulling ahead.

If you are not doing any of this, or not in a position to do so, then you’re going to be seriously underperforming.

From targeting to teaching

When Meta automates targeting, optimisation, and delivery, the only variable left under your control is the creative itself.

You no longer tell the platform who to show your ad to; you show it what to learn from.

Every piece of content becomes a training signal - an opportunity to teach the algorithm which stories, visuals, and emotional triggers convert.

This shift reframes the marketer’s job entirely.

The most valuable skill today isn’t audience segmentation; it’s creative iteration.

Winning on Meta in 2025 means mastering strategic creative volume - producing large amounts of conceptually distinct content that appeals to multiple audience mindsets, not just aesthetic variations of the same ad.

The goal isn’t to flood the platform with noise. It’s to build an intentional system of difference - hundreds of creative hypotheses, each designed to reveal what resonates with different kinds of people.

The faster you feed Andromeda new insights, the faster it learns - and the cheaper your conversions become.

This is why creative is no longer the output of strategy.

It is the engine of strategy.

The Soulmate Theory

To make sense of Andromeda’s behaviour, imagine this simple principle:

For every user on Meta, there exists a perfect creative match - the one combination of copy, imagery, tone, and offer that feels like it was made just for them.

Let’s call this Soulmate Theory (thanks to Soar with us for this one).

Under deterministic targeting, advertisers asked: “Which audience is right for this ad?”

Under Andromeda, the question flips: “Which ad is right for this person?”

The system’s goal is to make every impression feel handcrafted, as if the brand somehow knew exactly what the user needed to see.

That’s why variety matters more than volume.

If every ad in your account looks and feels the same, you’re starving the algorithm. It has nothing new to learn, no new combinations to test, no fresh creative DNA to match with a user’s probability of conversion.

The creative-testing mindset

For performance marketers, this new environment demands an operational shift: creative testing becomes a discipline, not a phase.

Gone are the days of producing one “winning” video and scaling it until fatigue sets in.

Now, success depends on designing systems that can continuously generate and evaluate new ideas.

That means:

• Building frameworks to test hooks, headlines, and emotional triggers systematically.

• Treating every ad like an experiment, not a campaign.

• Measuring not only what performs - but why it performs.

• Organising creative production to prioritise speed, diversity, and learning loops.

The most sophisticated DTC teams are already building what we might call creative R&D pipelines - small internal studios or partner teams dedicated to producing, testing, and iterating ads every week.

Instead of chasing perfection, they chase momentum.

Because the more creative experiments you run, the higher your odds of finding new winners - and feeding the algorithm what it craves: variety with purpose.

Why this matters for DTC e-commerce brands

For direct-to-consumer brands, this change hits at the core of growth economics.

The brands that once scaled through efficient targeting are now finding their CPMs rising and their conversions slowing - not because Meta is “broken,” but because their creative systems haven’t evolved to feed it properly.

Andromeda doesn’t just reward creativity; it demands it.

It favours advertisers who can generate differentiated content at scale, test across awareness stages, and interpret data fast enough to inform the next creative wave.

If your brand can do that - if you can produce high-quality variation at speed - you’ve effectively built a creative advantage that compounds over time.

In a probabilistic system, learning accelerates exponentially.

Every test improves the algorithm’s understanding of your brand’s buyer psychology. Every iteration makes your targeting smarter, even if you never touch a lookalike audience again.

From data science to brand empathy

There’s a poetic irony in all this.

As Meta’s technology becomes more probabilistic, the system itself behaves more humanly - it predicts, senses, and adapts.

And so must we.

Winning creative isn’t about louder headlines or cheaper offers; it’s about empathy at scale - understanding the micro-moments that drive people to act, and giving Andromeda enough creative diversity to express that understanding.

The future of paid social will look less like media buying and more like continuous creative dialogue between brand and algorithm.

Your creative library becomes your dataset.
Your design sensibility becomes your targeting.
Your storytelling becomes your signal.

The inevitable conclusion

The old playbook said: target better, bid smarter, tweak faster.
The new one says: create smarter, test faster, learn forever.

Meta’s Andromeda engine has eliminated most of the old levers of control - but in doing so, it’s elevated creative to its rightful place at the centre of strategy.

If you can build disciplined creative systems - where content is produced, tested, and refined with the same rigour as product development—you’ll dominate this new landscape.

Because on this version of Meta, you don’t out-target your competitors.
You out-create them.

And the brands that understand that aren’t asking if they’ll win.

They’re only asking when.

Takeaway for growth teams

• Speed matters. The faster you produce new creative inputs, the faster the algorithm learns.

• Volume matters. Variety across tone, message, and visual identity feeds Andromeda’s probabilistic hunger.

• Strategy matters most. Random creative volume is noise. Structured, insight-driven variation is leverage.

• Creative is now data. Each ad is not an output - it’s a datapoint that teaches the algorithm how to sell for you.

2025 belongs to the brands that build creative testing into their DNA.

Because in Meta’s new era, creativity isn’t a department.

It’s the operating system.

For lifestyle brands, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Done right, being indexed in ChatGPT isn’t just traffic - it’s highly qualified, purchase-ready customers delivered at the exact moment of intent.

✅ CHECKLIST

Meta Creative Systems Readiness Checklist

1. Shift Your Mindset

• Meta now learns from creative, not targeting.
  Treat every ad as data, not decoration.

• Move from audience optimisation → creative optimisation.

• Creative velocity = competitive advantage.

2. Build a System, Not Campaigns

• Set up a creative pipeline: insight → brief → production → test → learn → iterate.

• Run weekly or biweekly creative sprints.

• Track results in one central “Creative Learnings” doc.

3. Produce for Volume + Variety

• Aim for 5–50 new creative variants per week (depending on budget).

• Prioritise distinct angles, not cosmetic tweaks.

• Structure assets modularly: Hook / Body / CTA blocks that can be swapped and remixed.

4. Design for the Soulmate Theory

• Create ads that speak to different mindsets, not just demographics.

• Build ad families:

  • Emotional

  • Rational

  • Social proof

  • Curiosity-led

  • Problem-solution

• Every user should feel: “This was made for me.”

5. Feed the Algorithm Properly

• Keep a living creative library, tagged by format, tone, and awareness stage.

• Mix formats: UGC, founder-led, lifestyle, motion, product demo.

• Launch fresh creative every 7–10 days.

• Cover the full funnel:

  • Problem unaware → educational

  • Problem aware → solution comparison

  • Product aware → proof/testimonial

  • Most aware → urgency/trust

6. Learn Relentlessly

• Maintain a Creative Learnings Tracker (hook, angle, results, takeaway).

• Review weekly: what type of message, tone, or visual consistently wins?

• Turn every test into a new hypothesis for next week’s batch.

7. Resource & Enable

• Allocate 20–30% of ad spend to creative testing.

• Empower your creative team with performance feedback.

• Outsource or partner if you can’t sustain internal creative velocity.

8. Protect Brand Cohesion

• Define non-negotiables: tone, typography, lighting, brand feel.

• Encourage experimentation within a consistent brand system.

• Think: freedom inside a framework.

9. Execute This Week

1. Audit: How many truly different creatives are live?

2. Identify gaps (emotion / education / proof).

3. Set a 30-day creative sprint goal (e.g., 15 new ads, 3 angles).

4. Build your first Creative Tracker v1.

5. Review learnings weekly → iterate.

In short

Meta’s new Andromeda engine rewards:

• Speed (weekly iteration)

• Volume (creative diversity)

• Strategy (structured testing)

You don’t out-target anymore - you out-create.
Your creative system is your growth engine.

💪 DONE FOR YOU

Need help? Your 30-day plan awaits

Let’s be honest - the average performance marketing company is not going to be doing the above for you, and you might be looking at this thinking OMG - how on earth am I going to be able to handle this.

So where does that leave you?

Hitting a small fraction of your potential if you don’t adopt.

The key here is a system you can own and scale to create an array of on-brand design content.

Need help doing this - then let us know - we have created a 30-day plan to setup and build your creative system which you can own and then deliver your ads.

In this 30-day plan, we design your ad sets, templates, and system so you can generate hooks, copy, ctas, and visuals, all in-house.

We are only offering a handful of these this side of the year. So get in touch quick if you’re interested.

📣 HAVE YOUR SAY

How did we do?

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

Alex Murton
Shopify for Lifestyle Brands
Co-Founder @ Studio Almond & Almond Labs.