Mete

An Open Letter to Meta As I write this in mid-December 2024, we are in the midst of yet another performance outage on your platform—this one occurring right as many DTC brands are scaling up in anticipation of their shipping cutoffs. This is a crucial time for everyone to maximize earnings during the peak buying season, yet performance has tanked following the outage, despite your assurances that "everything was delivering." I think it's important we start at the beginning. 2024 opened with a sense of promise. January was off to a strong start—people were consuming, brands were eager to scale, and all was well. But in February, we were hit with not one, not two, but three major bugs on your ad platform. Performance dropped off a cliff in the days and weeks that followed. Again, in your eyes, "everything was delivering." But delivering and performing are two very different things. Digital marketers, brand owners, and operators know all too well that it takes time for Meta to recalibrate when these issues arise. The timing was especially damaging because these outages occurred just a week before Valentine's Day—a prime gifting season for many DTC brands looking to kick off the year strong. 2024 has been the first year in many that we’ve seen this platform struggle so consistently. This is not about the media buying strategies of brands, but about the platform itself. Throughout the year, we've seen repeated and cumbersome changes to the user interface (UI), with Meta consuming more and more memory, even on the most powerful Macs. The push toward “Advantage+” (AI) was one of the most abrupt shifts we’ve ever encountered. We understand that 2024 was the "year of AI," but the lack of communication about these changes left many of us scrambling to adapt. The pace and scale of these UI changes in 2024 were unlike anything we’ve seen in previous years. Some of us have been using Meta’s platform since its inception, and this year marked the largest, most disruptive changes we’ve experienced. We often found ourselves managing multiple versions of Ads Manager running across multiple accounts—even within the same Business Manager. Communication about these updates was lacking, with many of us receiving critical information days or even weeks after the changes had already taken place. This creates real problems when you’re spending millions on the platform. Between the UI changes, ongoing bugs, and the lack of centralized communication, advertisers and business owners alike feel that Meta has become more disjointed than ever before. We understand that bugs and technical issues are part of the territory. We all make mistakes. However, 2024 has seen an alarming frequency of delivery problems—many of them recurring monthly. In the past, serious ad delivery issues were rare, occurring once every 3-4 months. Now, it feels like we’re experiencing these disruptions almost every month. Do the UI updates play into this? We would assume so, but clarity from Meta would go a long way. To keep this brief, here’s our request: In 2025, please be better partners to us—the DTC community, the group that’s had your back time and time again. We don’t need extravagant gestures. We simply need a stable platform that works and that we can grow with. What we’d like from you is the following: 1. Be more open to listening to feedback from the DTC community. 2. Be more transparent about upcoming UI changes and how to prepare. 3. While the Meta Status RSS feed provides some clarity in the moment, we need you to take the next step: - What is being done to request refunds for affected advertisers? - What is being done to prevent these issues from happening again? We were your biggest champions during the iOS 14 changes, so much so that you included us in your marketing campaigns. Now, as we head into 2025, we need you to continue that support. Listen to us, please.