Who Is Seeing This Ad?

When I first started working on paid social ads, it was 2014. Thousands of people were voluntarily freezing themselves for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, everyone was sharing Ellen’s Oscar selfie on Twitter (Not X, Elon), and QR codes were still quaint little squares on posters that nobody quite knew what to do with. This was before they became the gatekeeper between you and any restaurant menu in existence. 

Facebook was in its prime – not just as an advertising platform, but as a genuinely exciting place to campaign. Content spread organically, people were engaged, and communities formed around causes. And for digital campaigners, Facebook Ads felt like you’d been handed the keys to the future. No more paying for a newspaper ad and hoping for the best. You had targeting, measurement, fast feedback loops. You could reach the right people with the right message — and prove it with data.

At the time, it felt like a real breakthrough…

Fast forward to now, and campaigning on Meta increasingly feels like flying through fog, as advertiser-controlled targeting has steadily narrowed. In the past, you could layer detailed audience criteria — targeting people interested in climate policy who also followed specific NGOs, or building audiences that mirrored not just demographics but the specific interests and behaviors of your top donors. 

Now, many of those granular options have been removed. What remains are broader categories and looser parameters, with the platform increasingly pushing advertisers toward “Advantage+ audiences” (Meta’s polite way of saying “don’t worry about who you’re targeting, we’ve got this).

 In practice, this is automation that lets Meta’s algorithm decide who should see your ads based on its own signals, rather than the criteria you’ve explicitly set. You can still set your own targeting, and many folks still do, turning off Advantage+ to keep that control. It’s just that the detailed options available a few years ago have quietly disappeared. The toolbox is smaller than it used to be.

It’s also important to be honest about why some of this changed. There was a time when targeting included religion, political beliefs, deeply personal inferred characteristics – a level of precision that was always slightly creepy, and occasionally genuinely harmful. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrated why that needed addressing. No argument there.

The issue isn’t that guardrails were introduced, it’s that they were replaced with systems that are far harder to understand, interrogate, or challenge. Where targeting used to be based on visible rules an advertiser could control, it’s now driven by predictive models — opaque, AI-driven systems that decide who is “likely to respond,” without showing their working. That makes it harder to spot bias, explain outcomes, or correct course when something goes wrong.

At the same time, political and social issue advertising has been increasingly restricted, and in some places removed altogether. Combined with weaker targeting, this has made paid social a much less reliable tool for political campaigning.

One consequence of all this is easy to miss: it favours the biggest players. Large political organisations can usually adapt. They have name recognition, established supporter bases, and large email lists to fall back on. Smaller charities and business owners don’t. The challenge isn’t just weaker targeting – it’s that the entire growth model has shifted. 

Before 2017, most small organisations didn’t have paid media budgets at all. They didn’t need them. A strong message could spread organically through feeds that still prioritized reach over revenue. That viral potential was the engine – the way a compelling campaign found its audience without advertising budget. Now, organic reach has collapsed, pushing everyone toward paid media. And just as small organisations have been forced to play that game, the paid tools themselves have become less precise and more expensive. When both the organic growth loop and the paid precision break at once, campaigning doesn’t stop – it just becomes much harder to start.

So what now?

This isn’t an argument for abandoning social platforms, or pretending that email can replace them. Meta still works for countless campaigns – it’s just less effective as a precision tool for advocacy work in the way it once was. The shift is in how we approach it: while paid social can still build engaged supporter bases directly – particularly through custom audiences and lead generation tools – it increasingly requires treating it as much as a discovery mechanism as a conversion one, with a focus on moving people to owned channels where possible.

As engagement and reach metrics become harder to trust — diluted by automation, low-quality traffic, and bots — it’s increasingly difficult to know what real impact looks like inside a feed. That’s where owning access to your audience matters.

One practical way to do this: lead generation ads that prioritize list-building over engagement metrics. Rather than optimizing for clicks, shares, or time spent scrolling, these ads are designed to capture email addresses directly – turning an impression into a tangible contact. As organic reach continues to decline and feeds become more crowded, you’re no longer borrowing an audience from the algorithm; you’re building one you actually control. The person who signs up for your email list isn’t just a data point in Meta’s system – they’re someone you can reach directly, regardless of what the platform decides to show them next week.

It also means diversifying. Relying on any single platform is now riskier than it was, even with the increase in ad placements across Meta since 2014. That includes exploring other channels, but also working with content creators who already have the trust and attention of the audiences you’re trying to reach – often more effectively than a boosted post ever could.

There’s another challenge here that’s easy to overlook: when paid media becomes the primary way to reach people, the conversation increasingly belongs to whoever can afford to dominate it. Disinformation campaigns backed by serious money can outspend evidence-based advocacy. Well-resourced opposition can drown out grassroots movements. And the platforms themselves are neutral about truth – they’ll amplify whatever performs and whoever pays. This makes the shift to owned audiences more urgent than it might seem. It’s not just about measurement or efficiency – it’s about maintaining some control over your message in an environment where you’re constantly being outspent on critical issues.

Email lists aren’t a throwback tactic; they’re a way of building first-party data you actually control. They offer a clearer sense of who is actually paying attention, create space to test and learn outside opaque systems, and provide a stable foundation that paid activity can build on. Used well, they complement social platforms rather than replace them — helping campaigns make smarter decisions in an increasingly noisy environment.

Meta isn’t over. But the era of easy precision is. The campaigns thriving now are the ones that have stopped relying on platforms to do the growing for them — and are building direct relationships with their audiences that no algorithm can dilute.