This week on The Marketing Factor, I talked with Andrew Foxwell, co-founder of Foxwell Digital and the person behind Foxwell Founders, a private community I've been a member of since day one. Andrew has been running paid social in some capacity for 16 years. He's seen every era of Meta: the wild west targeting days, the iOS fallout, the performance creative obsession, and now whatever this current chapter is. In December of 2024, he stepped back from hands-on account management entirely. He now audits 20–30 accounts a month through the membership and stays as close to the platform as anyone I know.
The conversation went deep on where Meta actually is in 2026 and how to think about creative strategy if you're a brand trying to grow..
You can catch the episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.
This is the most important thing to understand about Meta right now. The micro-targeting era, where you found people interested in water bottles and served them a water bottle ad, is largely over. What replaced it is creative-led targeting, where Meta's CBO figures out who the ad is for based on what the ad says and who responds to it. The practical implication: if you want to reach new segments of your customer base, you can't get there through audience settings. You get there by making ads that speak to different people. Andrew's example, Hollow, the alpaca wool socks brand, illustrates it well. They're producing separate creative for hunters, nurses, mountain bikers, and construction workers. All going into the same CBO. Meta routes it. The creative is doing the audience work.
The "ugly ads always win" take has been oversimplified. Barry Hott made the point to push back on over-produced creative that nobody relates to, and it was a useful correction. But Andrew's view is you want a suite of ads. A founder talking on their iPhone about why they built the thing. Polished brand creative for high-AOV contexts. Ads that address specific objections and feature different customer personas. And roughly 10–15% of your mix testing AI-generated creative, tools that scrape ad comments, Reddit threads, and product reviews to surface real angles, then generate ads around them automatically. None of these formats replaces the others. You need the range because different creative unlocks different people.
If you're launching a new account with $10–15K, Andrew's take is counterintuitive: you're probably better off spending it over two weeks than over a month. Faster spend means faster signal. Start with five distinct ad concepts, one founder-led, four tackling different value props or customer objections, put everything in a single CBO with one ad set, and run 7-day click / 1-day view attribution. Watch the sessions, watch what's getting engagement, then iterate on the concepts that are showing traction. Before you spend anything, make sure Meta's automatic enhancements are set intentionally. They're always turning something new on, and some of those defaults will work against you.
Andrew isn't worried about AI eliminating agencies. He's more focused on the job description shift that's already happened. The ad buyer used to pull levers — audience targeting, bid strategies, campaign architecture. That role is becoming a creative strategist with direct response instincts: understanding customer objections, building content frameworks, iterating on hooks, identifying new personas. Motion's creative strategy course had 36,000 registrants with a month left to go. That's not a coincidence. The complexity of the platform and the speed at which it's changing is actually the value proposition for a good agency right now. Expertise built from looking at dozens of accounts simultaneously is hard to replicate in-house.