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1️⃣ Advantage+ Leads Campaigns Open to Everyone
Meta's Advantage+ Leads campaign type, which automates budget, audience, and placement decisions for lead generation, is now available in ad accounts worldwide.
Meta Ads -Advantage+ Lead
Source: Confirmed in own account
My take: This is a feature I've been expecting since the Advantage+ era started. Let's see what results it brings.
2️⃣ Meta Adds Exclusion-Only Custom Audiences
Meta introduced exclusion-only custom audiences, a new audience type built solely to remove people from ad targeting instead of including them. Unlike regular custom audiences, they work as one-way blocklists that can't be converted into a normal audience later, and Meta says the feature helps keep ads away from people who've opted out, employees, or other restricted groups.
Source: Jon Loomer
My take: This is a genuinely useful, boring feature, and that's the best kind. I've built workaround audiences just to exclude people before, so making it official and impossible to misuse as an include list is a real quality-of-life fix.
3️⃣ A Closer Look at Messenger Stories Ads
Meta published a help center guide on how the Messenger Stories ad placement works.
Source: Meta Business Help Center
My take: In my experience, Stories is one of the worst-converting placements out there, second only to Audience Network.
4️⃣ Meta Pushes Creative Differentiation Over Repetition
Meta published a small business guide warning that overly similar ads can trigger "Creative Content Limitation" or "Creative Fatigue" status and quietly cut delivery. It recommends varying messaging, visuals, and formats (tutorials, urgency, before/after) instead of near-identical variations.
Source: Meta for Business
My take: This just confirms what media buyers have been saying since Andromeda: real diversification means new creative concepts, not swapping headlines or colors on the same ad. I wrote about this back in DAS #092, Creative Is the Targeting - Meta Finally Admits It.
5️⃣ Meta Ad Revenue Hits $59.4 Billion in Q2
Meta's Q2 2026 ad revenue reached $59.4 billion, up 27% year over year, with Advantage+ campaigns now running at a $75 billion annual revenue pace. Investors reacted cautiously anyway, worried about Meta's raised AI infrastructure spend ($130 to $145 billion for the year) against a softer Q3 forecast.
Source: Social Media Today
My take: Reading this as a European advertiser feels strange. Meta's ad engine keeps printing record numbers, but the AI spend behind it hasn't shown up as an upside in EU accounts yet, so I'd like to see that investment turn into real performance here, not just bigger numbers on a US earnings call.
That's it for this week.
See you in two weeks with the latest Meta news.
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