Does Andromeda change anything for BFCM?

Meta's Andromeda is changing how some advertisers approach their ad strategy. The algorithmic update supposedly rewards brands for creating more distinct ads instead of minor variations. Andromeda has  quietly decided most advertisers’ ads are, in fact, the same ad. 

It's reshuffled how Meta retrieves and groups ads, rewarding true creative diversity and collapsing duplicates. Five product shots with slightly different copy variations? Meta sees that as one ad now.

The timing couldn’t be trickier. Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) has always been high-stakes, and this year, it’s colliding with a system update that punishes repetition. 

So while performance creative teams scramble to make sense of it, one question keeps coming up: What’s unsettling about Andromeda isn’t that it’s new — it’s that it’s caught some advertisers off guard. Meta is showing marketers what their audiences already felt: that most creative “testing” was just recycling. 

What the Experts Really Think

To get a clearer picture, we asked a group of top creative strategists and growth marketing leads how Andromeda is shaping their BFCM plans (and if it is at all). This is what they told us…

The Contrarians

For the contrarians, Andromeda is more theory than reality. Jess Bachman, Creative Strategy Director at FireTeam, sees it as background noise in a sales period still ruled by offers.

“What are we doing about Andromeda for BFCM? Absolutely nothing,” he said. “Your top BFCM ads will be evergreen. This season is about harvesting the viewer pools you’ve already inflated. What wins BFCM is offers, not creative.”

He isn’t alone in his skepticism. In a recent post on LinkedIn Aazar Ali Shad, Founder of The Performers, called Andromeda “nothing more than a snake oil scheme.” 

Shad manages over $7 million a month in ad spend and says he hasn’t seen the update move the needle. Despite his testing process already accounting for differentiated formats, concepts, audiences, and headlines, only one ad wins at a time.

“Maybe it’ll start to matter in a few months,” he wrote. “But I don’t see it in action yet.”

For the contrarians, Andromeda isn’t as much an epochal shift as it is an overhyped buzzword. 

The Experimenters 

If the contrarians see Andromeda as hype, the experimenters see it as a creative permission slip.

Lee Joselowitz, Co-founder of The Quality Edit & Quality Media, said her team is using BFCM as a chance to push their focus beyond iteration. “In prior years, we’d double down on promo versions of our best performers and pause new testing,” she said. “This year, we’re carving out budget for net-new creative testing and bigger swings—especially in the visual hook.”

At Birddogs, VP of Paid Creative Joannah Wallace is applying that same idea to audience diversity rather than aesthetics. “We’re thinking less about discounts and more about personas,” she said. “The more our ads speak to different kinds of shoppers, the better Andromeda performs.”

That shift is where many of the best creative strategists are landing. It’s not about flooding Meta with more content. It’s about designing variety that actually teaches you something in the long run. 

Connor Rolain, Head of Growth at Hexclad, has already operationalized this approach. On a recent episode of The Marketing Operators podcast, he described how his team flipped their process entirely: “We used to make seventy-five ads a campaign. Now we make six that are genuinely different. The overlap’s smaller, but the impact is bigger.”

You can listen to the whole podcast below... 

For Rolain, Andromeda didn’t create chaos. It made discipline non-negotiable. “Most brands keep changing how ads look but not what they say,” he said. “You unlock new pockets of audience only when you actually change the story you’re telling.”

The Realists

Senior Media Buyer and DTC authority Marin Istvanic was one of the first to explain the update without the hysteria or hype. 

In a recent breakdown on X, he said Andromeda simply changes how Meta selects and presents ads. But that it still rewards volume and diversification, just as the algorithm did before. 

He pointed to Meta’s own data showing that creative already drove roughly half of performance outcomes — and warned that after four exposures to the same ad, the chance of conversion drops by about forty-five percent.

Istvanic reminds advertisers that the algorithm has always favoured difference — it’s just getting better at spotting sameness.

Meanwhile, performance consultant and Meta ads torchbearer Dara Denney thinks the industry’s anxiety is misplaced. The algorithm matters, she told us, but not nearly as much as macro-economic factors. 

“The [United States] government is shut down, and big tech companies are doing layoffs. When it comes to Andromeda, sure, make sure you have visual diversity and focus less on variations. But I’m capping my teams at two. Creative strategists should think about the true value they can provide when dollars are tight.”

It’s a useful reminder at a time when most creative strategists are chasing small optimizations that it’s easy to forget the broader reality: people are worried about money right now. When consumer confidence dips, performance marketing isn’t a creative problem or an algorithm problem. It’s an economic one.

And that’s where many advertisers miss the forest for the trees. They’ll debate how Andromeda groups their ads or whether Meta is collapsing duplicates, but they’ll overlook the fact that consumers are just behaving differently than they usually would be. They’re saving, delaying, or trading down. Ads that don’t reflect that shift — no matter how “diverse” they are — will still fall flat.

For Denney, Andromeda is a reminder to stay focused on fundamentals: clarity, relevance, and empathy for the shopper on the other side of the screen.

So — Does Andromeda Actually Change Anything?

In the end, not really.

The fundamentals of advertising during BFCM haven’t changed. Offers still win, pressure still spikes, and every creative strategist inevitably still spirals. 

Cherene Aubert, SVP of Digital and Ecommerce at ILIA Beauty put it bluntly, “Andromeda hasn’t changed what we’ve always believed to be true: engaging content that people love, that effectively demonstrates the product, and sells the product value props is what’s needed to win.”

Andromeda didn’t rewrite the playbook. It exposed which brands were testing with purpose and which were just refreshing the same ad twenty times.

What it did change was perspective.

It reminded performance marketers that creative diversity isn’t about volume, it’s about intent. It forced advertisers to admit what their data already knew — that repetition and iteration wasn’t really testing, it was avoidance.

For the contrarians, that truth validates their restraint. For the experimenters, it justifies their bigger swings. And for the realists, it’s proof that the market — not the machine — still sets the limits.

So does Andromeda change BFCM 2025? Only if you were building on shaky ground to begin with.

The rest of us just need to do what we’ve always done: make ads people actually want to watch, read the room, and — when in doubt — spiral about the right things.

Go forth and multiply your ads with intention

Still nervous about creative diversity?

Motion just launched an AI task that scans every ad in your Meta account and gives you a creative diversity score.

Here's how it works:

Open Motion and search for "Creative Diversity" in the AI tasks bar in the top right corner. This task analyzes every ad you're running on Meta and scans the creative elements - angles, hooks, formats, etc. After a few minutes, you'll get a report that tells you:

• Visual diversity - Are your ads distinct from each other at first glance?
• Messaging diversity - Are your angles unique to the different problems of your audience?
• Concept diversity - Are you investing in enough different concepts (visual + messaging + audience)?

See your ads the way Meta sees them. Available on all Motion plans with Meta connected as a data source!