Welcome back to Funnel Vision, the weekly newsletter that puts performance creative & growth marketing in focus. Brought to you by the crew at Ready Set.

Quick editor’s note on last week’s radio‑silence 🐾

Hey, everyone—Dan here. We were full steam ahead with a great issue for last Friday… right up until my phone lit up. Roza, my in‑laws’ 10‑year‑old Vizsla, had bolted into the woods. One frantic, multi‑mile search later, she made it home safe. Alas, the newsletter window had slammed shut.

Rather than rush out a half‑baked send, we parked it, polished it properly, and rolled it into this week’s edition. Thanks for your patience—enjoy the extra‑refined read!

Here’s what’s inside today’s edition:

• How Meta’s new ad machine is changing the performance game

• Three ways to boost the volume, variety, and velocity of your ads

• All the latest industry news you may have missed

Reading time: 5 minutes

AD INDUSTRY TRENDS

Why You Need To Know About Andromeda, Meta’s Supercharged Ad Picker

Meta’s engineers have been quietly rolling out some serious upgrades to their advertising engine.

The four pillars behind Meta’s new backend stack line up like a roll call in a Guy Ritchie film (read this next part in a Cockney accent…)

🧠 GEM a.k.a “The Brains” 
Generative Ads Recommendation Model, or GEM, knows the crowd better than they know themselves. It’s memorized an ocean of data, detects the subtlest of patterns, and is always two steps ahead.

📚 Lattice a.k.a “The Librarian”
If you need the intel on a job, Lattice has the goods. The all-seeing librarian runs a massive catalog of every ad surface, format, and objective; replacing a patchwork of smaller models so insights can cross-pollinate.

♟️Sequence Learning a.k.a. “The Connector”
By studying the exact chain of events before and after someone converts, Sequence Learning connects the dots and maps the next move—queuing up the perfect product pitch before they even know they want it.

🪐  Andromeda a.k.a. “The Bouncer”
With the power to screen tens of millions of hopefuls in milliseconds, Andromeda only ushers the best-dressed ads into the most exclusive club in town: your feed.

Zooming in on Andromeda

Of all of the characters in the line up, Andromeda has piqued our interest most. Why? Because:

• Recent innovations have made Andromeda 10,000x faster.

• Which has the potential to fundamentally shift how ad auctions work on Meta.

Remember how we said access is exclusive? Well this retrieval is only the first step in the multi-stage ad delivery pipeline. Shortlisted ads still need to pass through ranking and bidding before being shown.

So how do you get your ads past the world’s most selective bouncer?

No, you can’t slip it a 50.

(That’s the next stage, bidding 😜)

The key to getting ahead is to understand what it “wants”. And what Andromeda wants more than anything is variety, volume, and velocity.

Andromeda thrives on the three Vs

As the model gets more sophisticated (see above, 10,000x faster) it needs more to work with. The more creative combos it can chew on, the more precisely it can show more personalized and relevant ads.

 To do this, it needs volume, variety, and velocity.

• Volume is the total number of distinct ads live at a given time

• Variety is how different those ads feel—formats, creative themes, hooks, products, etc.

• Velocity is the rate new creative is introduced or refreshed

These factors are exponential: Dialing up any one of them increases the pool Andromeda has to work with.

The V³ Formula: Volume x Variety x Velocity = Performance

Andromeda is hungry for more, and you need to feed the beast with a constant supply of fresh creative. If it sounds expensive, fret not: here are three practical tactics to boost your V³ without breaking the bank.

1. Boost volume with multiple hooks 

If you’re already producing video ads, the hard part is already done—shooting, cutting, and editing footage. The key is finding efficiencies in the existing process.

This can multiply your ad count without major production expenses or editing headaches. Here’s some ideas:

• Get your copywriter/strategist to script three opening hooks/angles instead of one.

• Ask creators/talent to shoot/read these different openers.

• Have editors cut multiple intros with different shots and supers.

2. Use the 3-in-1 method to increase variety

Pick a high-performing video ad, and:

☝️Grab one crisp frame that spotlights the product/service. Add some snappy copy and you’ve got yourself a static image ad.

✌Pull 3-5 consecutive frames that show the problem → product → payoff. Stitch into a carousel or GIF.

🤟Launch the new static ad, the carousel or GIF, and the original video ad together.

Congrats! You’ve just efficiently tripled your creative formats and given Andromeda 3x the assets to test.

3. The Friday fix to ramp velocity

Every Friday, identify an ad with one strong metric (like thumbstop) but that isn’t an overall high performer and tweak one thing. 

• Drop in a testimonial, get to the product faster, add overlay copy… you get the idea.

This gives your creative concepts a second life without expensive reshoots—and can propel mid-range ads to top-performer status.

💡 Bottom line: What this means for you

Advances to Meta’s ad rec engine have made creative volume, variety, and velocity unignorable factors to running high-performing campaigns. 

The ad machine is a hungry beast. Keep it fed—or risk getting eaten.

CLICKABLE LINKS 👆️

🧑‍⚖️ U.S. Justice Department appears to double down on desire to break up Google’s ad empire.

🤑 Digital advertising revenue hit $258.6B in 2024, a 15% year over year increase. Digital video was the fast-growing channel for ad spend.

🙊 The cost of good manners: Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to ChatGPT is costing OpenAI millions, according to Sam Altman.

🍪 After years of delays and speculation, Google announced they’re keeping third-party cookies after all.

👀 Meta shares five key insights on boosting ad performance following stellar Q1 earnings.

🎂 YouTube celebrated its 20th birthday with a trip down memory lane that all started at the zoo. Here’s a timeline of its biggest culture-shaping moments.

AD OF THE WEEK ✨

This ad from Atticus, a law firm specializing in disability benefits and worker’s compensation, addresses the misconception that getting help is a complex process.

Brand: Atticus
Length: 25 seconds
Platform: Facebook & Instagram

WHY IT WORKS 🧠

📝 It reframes applying for benefits, a notoriously complex and daunting process, into a quick and easy checklist/quiz that anyone can complete in a few minutes.

🔍 While clear disclosures keep it above board in a highly-regulated industry, it doesn’t diminish from the impact (or the performance) of the ad.

✋ Scroll‑stoppers keep viewers glued. A bold dollar figure ($3,800/mo), handwritten copy viewers linger to read, and a warm, relatable presenter create a pattern‑interrupt that holds attention long enough for prospects to self‑qualify and click.

That’s it. That’s all.

Thanks for reading! Seeya next time 🫶 

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