The short answer
- Andromeda decides which ads are eligible for each person, out of an enormous supply. The more genuinely different ads you have, the more different people the system can reach.
- Small variations barely count. A different colour, background or one word in the headline is almost the same ad to the system.
- Variety lives in the angle. A different problem, desire, objection or audience: that's what reaches new people.
What Andromeda is
Andromeda is the system Meta uses to decide which ads are even eligible to be shown to someone. According to Meta's own engineering team, it selects a few thousand relevant ads out of tens of millions of candidates, after which other models make the final choice. It's explicitly designed to make use of the explosive growth in the number of ads, driven partly by automation and AI-generated creative (Engineering at Meta, 2 Dec 2024).
In practice, that means how Meta finds your audience depends less on the targeting you set, and more on what's in your ad. Meta's Head of e-Commerce put it briefly: "Creative is targeting" (B&T).
Why ten variants no longer work
For a long time the standard approach was: take one winning ad and make lots of small variants. Different background, different opening line, different colour. That made sense when you chose your audience yourself and the system only had to pick the best variant.
Now that the system itself looks for who fits which ad, near-identical variants give it little new. They all speak to the same people, for the same reason. You pay for production, but your reach doesn't get any wider, and the same group gets saturated faster.
What "genuinely different" means
A new ad is only truly new if it gives a different reason to buy, or speaks to a different kind of person. A few ways to look at the same product:
- The problem: the frustration your product removes.
- The desire: the result someone is looking forward to.
- The objection: the doubt that holds people back, and why it isn't justified.
- The comparison: why this works better than what they do now.
- The proof: what customers say or show.
- The identity: what type of person this product suits.
Each of those angles attracts different people. Combine them with different formats (a short video, a static image, a customer telling their story, the founder explaining) and you give the system something real to work with. More on the difference between an angle, a concept and a hook on our angles & hooks page.
A typical example (for illustration)
A composite example, not a specific client case.
A sports nutrition brand runs twelve ads. On closer inspection, they're twelve versions of the same message: "more energy during your workout", each with a different photo and headline. They replace them with four genuinely different angles: recovery after a hard week, a healthy alternative to energy drinks, taste for people who hate protein shakes, and an honest comparison of ingredients. Each speaks to a different kind of athlete, and the system finds its own audience for each angle.
What this means for your approach
- Think in angles, not variants. Start every new round with the question: which reason to buy haven't we tested yet?
- Get your angles from your customers. Reviews, questions and objections show why people really buy, and in what words.
- Refresh regularly, but meaningfully. Replace a tired ad with a new angle, not the same message in new clothes.
- Make sure your measurement is right. The system learns from the conversions it sees. With broken measurement it learns the wrong lesson; check that first.
Why this takes strategy, not volume
It's tempting to use AI tools to churn out hundreds of variants. But volume without new ideas is exactly what Andromeda doesn't reward. What does work is understanding why different people want your product, and making a different, sharp message for each reason. That's creative work, and it's exactly what we focus on.