Maor The Wolf Benaim

The guys on here posting non-stop about how much Meta is screwing advertisers with their Algo/Changes/etc probably don't realize how "new to the party" it makes them look. They are 100% correct that Meta screws advertisers ceaselessly. But this has been the nature of the beast for over a decade. To take just one example... After the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was a good 1-2 years where getting virtually anything Direct Response or DTC focused approved was close to impossible. Especially in the health and wellness space. But even independent of that, throughout the late 2010s there was a whole pattern with Meta that went like this: Policy was tight until Jan 1st of the new year. Then it loosened up like crazy for Q1 so they could hit their revenue/growth/earnings targets. This made sense because basically big brands spent a ton in Q4 for Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Christmas, then pulled back in Q1. So Q1 was really like the direct response industry's quarter. But then, come about Mid-March... Policy tightened back up with a vengeance. Ad rejections skyrocketed. Brands lost their accounts. You'd go from hundreds (or thousands) of sales per day to 0. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a whole cottage industry of experts teaching people how to write copy and create funnel assets that were "Meta Compliant." If you look at my content from that time, I'm talking about it a lot as well and constantly answering questions from people about how to actually run anything in DTC health on Facebook. And I'm not just talking about compliant from a claims perspective. I'm talking about stuff like: -Never say the word "you" in your ads because it would be like calling out the user -Don't show unhappy images because that will create a negative user experience in Meta's eyes, so you'll get penalized or have ads rejected. -No before-afters. -Never say words like "inflammation!" -etc, etc, etc. Even with all of that, your best shot was to either: 1. Buy an agency account (or a bunch of them) and expect that your ad accounts would go down constantly and you'd have to start back up with a new one. Or... 2. Find a way to spend enough money at scale (before losing your account) so that you got a competent rep who could get your ads approved and/or reinstated when it went down. For #2 there, it was basically a world of the haves and have-nots. VShred crushed because of great marketing and media buying, but also because they were so big that they had awesome reps. If a smaller brand tried to run the same ads or funnel as VShred, they'd get rejected and probably lose their ad account or get restricted from advertising too. So, by comparison, Meta is actually incredibly loose with their policy today. It's super easy to run ads and scale a DTC brand. And it has been this way for the last 2+ years. Yes, the algo updates can suck, but they've been going on forever. The weird AI stuff they're doing is super annoying, but they've been f-ing with people's money forever too. DEFINITELY the same thing with pacing issues as well. At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that Meta is similar to Democracy in this way: It's the worst ad platform except literally all the others.