Facebook announced on October 11th, 2018 that it was adding messaging advertising to the advertising mix. Facebook is pushing new measures to allow marketers to reach large groups of users in a targeted manner via the messaging ads, and thereby increase their ad spend, the current solution. But not everyone is sold on the move.

As Maeve Foley, the CEO of Mindshare West tells Nieman Lab, Facebook is making the same mistake that Snap and Twitter did before it. They are copying concepts from those platforms and assuming there’s a usage model that works.

“Forget about these techniques being a unique way to create marketing efficiency. This is part of the same chain of bad practices that have been tried and found ineffective – make sure your ad is seen, copy what the other platforms have done and be forgiving if it does not work out. Make sure your creative is authentic and encourage the audience to share the campaign, don’t depend on an artificial audience. Push trusted go-to-market team to identify potential users and customize for each and make sure the creatives focus on the user.”

While the potential is there, it’s important that Facebook, and in this case Twitter, reminds itself what worked – as opposed to what hasn’t worked – and sets itself free from the shackles of AI-driven ads that are designed to solve problems, but don’t do any good. While automation is important, just make sure it does it for those things that really matter.