Meta is removing placement exclusions. Creative is the targeting now.

Jon Loomer posted it on August 20, 2026. A bunch of advertisers had started seeing an in-product notice saying excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems would no longer be available for their ad sets. Social Media Today ran it that same day.

These are the switches every media buyer flips without thinking:

• Pulling one placement out of an ad set, like Audience Network or right column.
• Killing a whole platform (Messenger, say) along with every slot in it.
• Mobile only or desktop only. iOS only or Android only.

A few caveats. Meta hasn't formally announced anything, this is a test. Only Sales and Leads objectives are in it. Sensitive verticals got left out, which probably means special ad categories plus some health and wellness advertisers. Haven't seen the notice in your account yet? I'd plan like you will.

Then on August 26 Meta dropped a Creative diversity column into Ads Manager. Every active ad set gets rated Low, Medium or High on how varied its ads are, and Meta's own label calls it "estimated and in development." It's under Columns → Customize columns → Creative diversity. From what people are reporting it's pretty rough so far. Some ad sets with a mix of formats still come back Low.

None of this should surprise anyone. Ever since Andromeda, the retrieval system Meta shipped in 2025, they've been saying the same thing over and over: go broad, use Advantage+ placements, run lots of ads that are meaningfully different and let the system figure out who sees what. August just made that the default and put a score on it.

Less than you used to. Still something.

Honestly that last row is the whole story. You can't pick where an ad runs anymore, so it's got to work in any slot Meta drops it in, and whatever's in the ad turns into the loudest signal Meta has about who should see it.

Meta looks at each ad and guesses who'll respond to it. Say you sell a supplement. Make one ad about a 52-year-old runner with sore knees and another about a new parent with no time to cook, put both in the same broad ad set, and Meta will hand them to completely different people. Your audience is basically whatever's in the creative.

Which is why near-duplicates are a waste. Meta groups ads that look and read alike and learns from them like they're one ad, so ten copies of your product shot on ten background colors is really one idea. The Creative diversity column is Meta telling you, per ad set, how many ideas it thinks you actually gave it.

I see this all the time reviewing batches for brands. When two ads have almost the same format and copy I just cut one, and what I ask the team for is 15 to 20 ads per batch that are highly varied. Fewer, more different ads beat a pile of lookalikes.

More files isn't the goal. More answers to who's this for and why would they buy? is. Ads can differ on five things:

1. The buyer. Whoever's in the frame, plus whatever problem brought them there.
2. The motivation. Why they'd buy. Sometimes it's relief, sometimes status or saving money, sometimes identity, curiosity or FOMO.
3. The hook. The opener, which might be a question, a number, a before-and-after, a claim or a confession.
4. The visual style. We rotate between product on white, lifestyle shots, founder to camera, customer reviews, comparison charts and editorial looks.
5. The format. Statics, carousels, short video.

Change the buyer or the motivation and you've usually got a new ad. Only touch hook, style or format and there's a good chance Meta lumps it in with the original.

Mostly this comes down to production habits. What we do:

1. Start from buyers, not layouts

Before anyone opens a design tool we write out three to five buyers, with why each would buy and what makes them hesitate. Each concept gets tied to one, and when two of them end up chasing the same buyer for the same reason we only keep the better one.

2. Cut every concept twice

Meta can put any ad anywhere now. Feed, Stories, Reels, Marketplace, whatever. So each concept gets a 9x16 vertical plus a 4:5 or 1:1. Only bother with 1.91:1 if you've got proof those surfaces matter for you. Upload the cuts as a single ad using placement asset customization and Meta will serve the right shape.

3. Watch the 9x16 safe zones

In Reels and Stories the profile row eats the top of the frame and the caption plus CTA button eat the bottom. Headline, product and offer all need to sit in the middle. I catch this in review more than I'd like to admit, where something looks great in Feed and then half the headline is hiding under the Reels UI. That's two-thirds of an ad.

4. Make the first second carry the message

Nobody's really paying attention on Audience Network or in-stream, which are exactly the spots you used to exclude. Your product and your promise need to land in a glance with the sound off and the caption unread. For Black Friday we're doing BOF statics that are basically big text, the offer, and very little else, and that style works here too.

5. Check the Creative diversity column, then check results

A Low is a nudge to go look at whether your concepts really differ. It's not a verdict, and Meta itself calls the number estimated. Cost per purchase and new customer revenue still decide what stays on.

6. Replace ideas, not pixels

When an ad fatigues everyone wants to change the color and relaunch it. With grouping that doesn't get you much. Kill the concept and go after a new buyer or motivation instead.

We built Copia around this exact idea, that the ad decides who it reaches. Copia reads your site and products first. Then it goes through the ads your competitors are running live on Meta right now, builds buyer personas off that research, and generates Meta-ready ad creative for each persona. So concepts come out split by buyer, motivation and objection instead of by layout.

Self-serve is $99 a month to start. If you’d rather not run the tool yourself, Managed ($2,000/mo) gets you 200 statics and 2 videos delivered a month, finished and ready to ship.

Want to see what diverse creative looks like in your category before you change anything? The free Competitor Ad Teardown pulls every Meta ad a brand is running today and breaks down the hooks and angles. You’ll pretty quickly see which buyers your competitors are going after, and which ones nobody’s bothered with yet.