What is Meta’s Andromeda Update?

Meta’s Andromeda is its proprietary machine learning (ML) system designed as the next-generation personalized ads retrieval engine. Rolled out globally as of October 2025, Andromeda uses cutting-edge AI for retrieval in ad recommendation, focusing on delivering a step-function improvement in value to both advertisers and users.

In Meta’s multi-stage ads recommendation system, retrieval is the critical first step, tasked with selecting a few thousand relevant ad candidates from tens of millions of potential choices. Andromeda leverages the power of sophisticated deep neural networks, benefiting from the co-design of ML, system, and hardware, including the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips.

The update radically changes the advertising paradigm:

• Old Meta: The system asked, “Who should see this ad?”.

• Andromeda Era: The system now asks, “Which ad should this person see?”.

This means the AI-powered ad delivery system decides which creative content should go to which individual person. Andromeda can process millions of creative data points in milliseconds, understanding emotion, tone, and visual style to predict the best-performing ad for each user. Meta estimates that deployments across Instagram and Facebook have already delivered an +8% ads quality improvement on selected segments.

The AI Shift: Killing Targeting, Elevating Human Skill

For years, advertisers focused on finding precise, winning audiences through stacked interests and narrow lookalikes. Andromeda has rendered that manual process obsolete.

The new system’s infrastructure literally thinks faster than humans can manage, scanning billions of data points to handle targeting. This means advertisers must become comfortable with relinquishing control over granular targeting. Broad targeting, combined with a simplified campaign structure, gives Andromeda the freedom it needs to learn, test, and scale rapidly.

Why Creativity is Your New Competitive Edge

If the algorithm handles audience selection, what is the advertiser’s job now? It’s to feed the algorithm.

Andromeda has flipped the advertising equation: Your creativity has become your targeting. Every caption, image, and hook sends data signals to Meta's AI, and the system studies which creatives resonate with which people, delivering them accordingly.

Success in this new era relies less on defining the audience and far more on how well your human-crafted content speaks to different motivations, needs, and moments. The real competitive advantage now lies in creative understanding.

The New Playbook: Mastering Human Ingenuity

Solely relying on generative AI tools to churn out mass-produced, lazy duplicates will not work. Andromeda rewards meaningful variation and distinctiveness. While AI tools can accelerate creative testing, they are not replacing creativity—they are accelerating the need for sharp human input.

To win in the Andromeda era, you must embrace the following shifts in skill and mindset:

1. Creative Diversity is Non-Negotiable: Instead of focusing on cosmetic tweaks, you must test distinct emotional angles and ideas. Your creative library should contain a broad range of options—perhaps 10 to 20 unique creatives per ad set—that speak to different themes such as Value, Transformation, Curiosity, and Authenticity (Founder Stories).

2. Focus on Storytelling and Education: Andromeda rewards emotional storytelling and longer watch time. The most effective creatives are authentic, story-driven, and educational—not sales-heavy. Examples include addressing common mistakes or demonstrating transformation.

3. Learn New Metrics and Strategy: Stop optimizing for vanity metrics like CTR (Click-Through Rate) or CPL (Cost Per Lead). New focus areas for learning include the Hook Rate (performance in the first 3 seconds) and overall Buyer ROI (ROAS/MER). Advertisers must audit their tracking, focusing on feeding the AI data from real buyers, not just form fills.

4. Embrace Simplicity and Trust Automation: The strategy is now to simplify the structure—using one campaign per objective, one ad set with broad targeting, and smart exclusions—to strengthen the signal the AI receives. Stop micromanaging and give the algorithm clean data and sharp creatives.

Andromeda isn’t killing Meta Ads; it’s killing lazy marketing. The update amplifies what already works, and it cannot compensate for weak fundamentals like poor offers or unclear propositions. Success comes from trusting the automation while ensuring your strategic clarity and creative production process are robust and continuous.