Volume Is Dead On Meta. Here's What Replaced It

Hey, it's Simon.

Welcome to the first edition of Ads with Simon. Every week I'll show you what's working on Meta, from a seat nobody else has.

Let's get into it.

Volume on its own stopped working. As a strategy, it doesn't move the number anymore. And most brands are still operating like it does.
Here's what changed, and what the accounts crushing right now are doing instead.

The Meta auction rewarded whoever had the most output. More volume meant more surface area. More surface area meant more winners. The math was simple and it worked for almost everyone willing to ship.
Brands that figured this out early scaled fast. Agencies built their whole pitch around it. "We make 500 ads a month" was a competitive advantage. For a year, it was.

Then AI made volume free.

A 14-year-old in his bedroom can open Claude or ChatGPT and ship 100 ad variations in 30 seconds. Any junior designer with Nano Banana Pro can produce what used to take a 3-person team a full day. Volume isn't a moat when everyone has it. It's table stakes.

When everyone is using the same tools, they get the same output. AI is trained on everything that already exists, which means if you use it for the idea, you get the average of every idea that already exists. No new angles. No new framings. The category looks like one brand made all the ads.

The consequence is that fatigue collapsed. What used to take three weeks to burn out, now burns out in three days. When every ad in your account looks the same, audiences tune out faster. More volume, shorter lifespan per ad. You're spending more to get less, and your dashboard takes a month to tell you.

I had pushed against volume a lot. Brands kept asking me what their monthly ad count should be. Wrong question. The right question is how many different stories are you telling in a week.

The accounts spending $1M a month don't run one format harder. They run several at the same time, inside the same ad account, all the time. Here's the full mix I see across the brands actually scaling right now.

A wall of text on Instagram shouldn't work, but it does. Your brain doesn't filter it as an ad because it doesn't look like one: it looks like an email, a LinkedIn post, a long-form story. By the time you realize you're being sold to, you've already finished reading. The brands going hardest on this format are spending six figures on a single ad that, on paper, breaks every rule.

Crayon fonts. Post-it notes. Kids' drawings. Every designer and operator knows ugly stops the scroll. The take that's harder to find is what to do with it. Ryze is running one right now that looks like a kid drew it: "Dad's new favorite coffee" in crayon, dad flexing next to the product on a table, no offer, no urgency.

That ad doesn't need to convert on click. Its only job is to make you stop. The brands using ugly well aren't replacing their offer ads. They're stacking ugly TOF in front of polished BOF in the same account. One creates the stop. The other closes.

A gut supplement brand is running an ad with a photo of a woman in a hospital bed, hospital gown, monitors blinking behind her.

The copy opens: "I had a partial bowel obstruction last April." And then, a wall of text telling her story. The eye reads it as a Facebook post from someone you don't know but probably should. By the time the product comes in, you've already invested in the read. The best place to reach someone who hates ads is somewhere they're convinced there are none.

Once again a Ryze ad. For this one, we have a bikini model walking on a beach with the coffee bag where her head should be. A cappuccino mug with a face next to her. A French press with a face behind her. A bag of coffee with a face on the right. All of them turned toward her. Sunset, palm trees, pink overlay text.

There are two versions of AI in advertising right now. One is AI as the brain, with someone as the hands: mass-produced, looks like every other AI ad in the feed, and Meta isn't rewarding it anymore. The other is AI as the hands, with a human making the call to do something nobody else would. Putting a coffee bag on a model's head is a human decision. The execution is AI. The brands using it that way are shipping volume of weird, distinct ideas instead of volume of one safe idea. That's the version of AI that's scaling.

A girl getting ready talking for 7 minutes about whatever. A guy in his car going to Starbucks talking about his mental health. The brand product is in frame because it's around them, not because it's the topic. I've seen yapper videos cross $1M in spend in a single account. Founder talking to camera is the highest-converting ad in DTC right now. If your founder isn't in the account, that's where the next 10x lives.

This is a great example of a yapping video ad from Grüns

Two people sitting across from each other talking about a subject the brand actually cares about. Length is the bet: these are 3 to 5 minute clips, not 15-second hooks. The product gets referenced because the brand sponsors the conversation, not because the conversation is about the product. Brought directly from the YouTube/Spotify format to Meta. Works because the viewer already opted into that format somewhere else.

Here's a podcast-style ad from Hollow Socks

Cartoon characters inside a stomach explaining how a probiotic works. Animated figures pouring vitamins into an organ. Specifically strong in health and supplements, because the format makes complex biology digestible while someone scrolls. Anything that has to teach a mechanism to sell: gut, sleep, focus, hormones, benefits from this format.

This is a great example of an animated video ad from Ryze

There's a clean version of this story where AI made advertising easier and you just need to embrace it. That story is wrong.

Running different formats means different production systems. No economies of scale per concept. Statics is one workflow, videos is another. Every concept is a different machine. You can't industrialize variety the way you can industrialize volume.

The brands winning aren't winning on production as a starting point. They're winning on judgment, and the volume comes after. Somebody has to decide what's worth making, what angle each format hits, what emotional state the customer is in when they see it. AI doesn't make those calls. AI produces the average of what already exists.

The bar gets higher every year. Everyone else is in a race to ship the same AI ad as their competitor.

Volume isn't a strategy anymore. It's a consequence of doing the work right.

That's it for edition #1.

Reply to this email and tell me what you're seeing in your own account: what's scaling, what's dying, what nobody can explain. I read everything, and the best questions become future editions.

Talk soon,
Simon

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