Before we get into this, something important up front.
Meta's advertising platform, meaning Facebook and Instagram ads, remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to put your business in front of the exact customer you want to reach. Three billion active users. Targeting depth that no other platform matches. The ability to reach someone who has never heard of you and turn them into a customer for a fraction of what traditional advertising costs.
We are not telling you to stop. We are telling you what is working against you inside a channel that absolutely works, so you understand what we are managing on your behalf and why it matters.
Meta is changing your ads after we build them
There is a platform feature called Advantage+ Creative. Meta has increasingly turned Advantage+ Creative enhancements on by default in many campaign setups, and some enhancements may be enabled unless manually reviewed and turned off.
Here is what it can do after we submit your ad:
Crop your images to fit placements we did not design for. Adjust your brightness and contrast because its algorithm decided it knew better. Generate entirely new backgrounds using AI. Create variations of your ad that neither you nor we have ever seen or approved. Run all of these variations against each other using your budget.
We do not always get a notification. You do not get a notification. It can just happen. And what your customer sees on their phone may look nothing like the ad we built, and you approved.
This is not a reason to leave the platform. It is a reason to have someone managing it who knows this is happening and knows how to address it.
Why this creates a perception problem
When your ad looks wrong, you should question it. That is the right instinct. But if you call us and say the image looks bad or the creative does not look right, and we look in Ads Manager and see that what we submitted was correct, there is a gap between what we built and what Meta served that can be hard to explain at the moment.
We never want you to wonder whether we know what we are doing. We manage millions in ad spend across hundreds of accounts. But Meta has created a situation where the platform itself can silently degrade work that left our hands in perfect condition.
This piece exists so that if you ever see something that looks off, you have the full picture of what is actually happening and who is accountable for what.
The image size problem specifically
Meta runs ads across multiple placements simultaneously. Every placement requires a different image size.
Feed requires 1:1 or 4:5. Stories and Reels require 9:16. Right Column requires 1.91:1.
We build every size. We assign every size manually to its correct placement. That is standard in our process and has been for years.
When Meta's Advantage+ system overrides those assignments and forces a Feed image into a Stories placement or vice versa, the result is a cropped or distorted version of your creative running in front of your customers. That version was not what we submitted. It is what Meta's algorithm decided to serve instead.
This is also why businesses managing their own ads, without knowing this, will lose money quietly and never understand why. The ads look fine inside Ads Manager and broken everywhere else.
What we do to fight it
We review and turn off Advantage+ Creative enhancements at the ad level on every campaign we manage. We build creative in all required formats before anything launches. We audit active campaigns regularly because Meta can introduce new automated settings over time, and duplicated or updated campaigns may require these settings to be checked again. We verify live placements on actual devices because the Ads Manager preview is not always what is actually serving.
Despite all of that, Meta is an increasingly aggressive platform that sometimes moves faster than any audit cycle can catch. When that happens and something slips through, we want to hear about it immediately. That is not a failure of the process. That is the reality of managing campaigns on a platform that is actively working against advertiser control. The answer is not to leave the platform. The answer is to stay ahead of it, which is exactly what we are here to do.
What we need from you
If you see an ad that looks wrong, screenshot it and send it to your account manager right away. Tell us the placement, the date, and what looked off. We will do our best to adjust against any of Meta’s changes.
Do not assume it was us. Do not assume it was Meta either. Just send us what you saw and let us investigate. That is how we protect your brand together.
The bottom line
Meta works. It works very well when it is managed correctly. The businesses winning on this platform right now are not the ones who figured out some secret. They are the ones who have someone making sure the platform is not quietly working against them while they sleep.
That is what we do for you every day. And now you know exactly what we are up against.
Questions about your specific campaigns? Reach out to your IMEG account manager directly. Not yet a client? Reach out! We are glad to take an honest look at what your campaigns are actually doing. No obligation.
