You probably heard that Meta ads have been acting a little weird lately.

You probably heard that Meta ads have been acting a little weird lately. Some advertisers are seemingly crushing it while others are getting completely smoked. And I think Meta's engineering team just told us why. Meta just released this. It's not a marketing blog. It's the engineers explaining how the underneath layers of Meta's algorithm works. I read all of these so you don't have to. They're calling it Hierarchical Interest Representation. Which sounds terrifying. Also, I can't pronounce it. But I think what it really says, like the subtext, is changing how we as ad buyers should think about making creative. The old Meta used to learn things like this person likes coffee, this person likes fitness, this person likes dogs. But the new Meta is trying to understand something deeper. And all these algorithm updates are just trying to make way for AI to come in when Meta releases their own AI and getting a lot more signals on all of you and me. Just basically being able to utilize all the context. So, look at this image here. On the far left, you have everything that Meta knows: users, advertisers, products, and what they call world knowledge. Basically just context. All of that gets combined into one giant engagement graph. Think of every dot here as like a person, interest, a behavior, a product. And every line is a relationship between the two. But this right here is the interesting part. They're organizing interests into layers. The bottom layer is raw behavior, like watched a video, clicked an ad, bought a protein powder. The middle layer is they're calling it primitive interests. Maybe this is a better graphic for you guys. So like fitness, nutrition, running, those types of things. Then the top layer are like broader identities, like health-conscious professionals, a marathon runner, longevity enthusiast. They're moving away from like isolated actions to more of like deeply understanding who somebody is. All that gets encoded and then pushed into what's called a representation. Think of it as like your fingerprint. Everybody's is different. Not a fingerprint of like what you clicked yesterday, but a fingerprint of who you are and what you like. Okay, so what does this all mean for you? I think this changes creative. I think the trend that we've already been seeing is still going, where creative diversity and the more angles the better. But old creative briefs were like let's explain the product, let's talk about the features, let's tell them about a discount. I think the new briefs are becoming let's vividly describe the customer. Let's make the viewer of this ad be like, oh, fuck. Try not to curse because of TikTok. That's me. They know me. So instead of saying like premium coffee, you say, you're the type of person with two monitors, color-coded Notion, and your hardest work happens before 9:00 a.m. Now your ad isn't just selling coffee. It's identifying a very specific person. And expanding your creative diversity to have very specific ad is what Meta's going to pull from when it's going to send that ad to that right person. Let me know what you guys think in the comments.