Meta advertising is in the middle of a major transition. What used to be a relatively predictable environment, where advertisers could reach niche audiences with specific interest targeting, is currently (2025-2026) unstable. In this article, we will discuss the future of Meta ads, and the shifts that are starting to define that future.
To be fair to Meta, niche targeting has been flawed and in need of some change for a while. Categories have been too granular, while others were broad, underrepresented or convoluted. Advertisers have questioned the accuracy of audience sizes and the freshness of data making up each cohort.
Meta has begun consolidating interest targeting categories, stripping out detail, and pushing niche audience segments into broader pools. At the same time, AI is moving from being a support tool to the foundation of how campaigns are bought, optimized, and delivered.
Disclaimer: I, along with my agency, operate in the digital and tabletop gaming space and might make use of examples from these industries to illustrate the concepts below. All information is applicable outside of these specific examples.
1. Audience consolidation is diluting niche targeting
Gone are the days of small audience cohorts, IP references, exclusions to interest targeting and slightly variant offshoots of larger groups.
Meta has started folding detailed interests into broader categories. BoardGameGeek, once a sharp signal for serious hobbyists, is now absorbed into a broader Board Games audience. This creates more volume, but dilutes quality. Large retailers selling sneakers or consumer electronics benefit, but publishers in specialist sectors see their precision fade. Advertisers who once relied on surgical targeting must now find other ways to reach their niche communities.
You can read Meta's official statement on this update here.
For industries that rely on precision, these shifts create turbulence. When Pathfinder collapses into a generic Tabletop Games bucket, or Exploding Kittens and Cyanide and Happiness terms end up lumped into the Card Games audience along with Poker and Blackjack, the ability to find your true audience suffers. In the short term, this means less control and instability in performance. Over the long term, it means a full recalibration of what best practice looks like on Meta ads.
2. Short-term turbulence requires agility
With categories merging and bidding strategies recalibrating, performance swings are the new normal. In tabletop, where campaigns often hinge on short crowdfunding windows or seasonal releases, those swings can have a big impact. The best way forward is agility. Test new creative variations, explore Advantage+ where it makes sense, and watch signals like CTR, frequency, and ROAS closely.
Historically, we have been conditioned to stand back and try to assess trends from a distance to avoid anecdotal data sets. This has always ensured decisions are made from data backed by enough spend and volume.
Success right now, however, comes from making adjustments quickly and often - something fairly unintuitive to competent performance marketers.
3. AI automation is reshaping the industry
Mark Zuckerberg's vision is a fully automated ad chain where AI handles creative, targeting, and reporting. Meta is spending billions to get there, and changes like Advantage+ are at the center of the rollout.
Right now, Meta's Advantage+ is in its infancy. For small industries and niches like tabletop, it is far from efficient, in the same way that Generative AI ads are still poor compared to what a talented human team can produce. Advantage+ also strips out the ability to see what is working inside a campaign, diminishing the feedback loop between user action and result.
Without that clarity, advertisers lose the chance to replicate success and build on it. Meta is forcing this transition before its AI component is truly ready, which creates a difficult period for advertisers in specialist markets. Move fast and break things sounds cool, unless you are just left with broken things - as many advertisers have been experiencing.
Simply put, if you asked Chat GPT to write you a description of your product based on your website, it may or may not get it right. You would definitely want the chance to assess its writing and ensure that the text was accurate before using it anywhere. You might want to rewrite it altogether. Advantage+ does not give you a chance to sense check, it does not show its work. It is just a trust us with this scenario, with little to no transparency on what it is actually doing, how it is identifying cohorts and how it is making decisions on which ads get served to who while you foot the bill. It is just too early in its deployment for me to afford it that level of trust with our clients' money.
4. First-Party and custom audience data is a competitive advantage
In this unstable period, brands with access to a richly-tagged CRM or segmented audience platform have an edge. They can build precise custom audiences while Meta's categories are broadening out. For tabletop gaming, this might mean separating past webstore purchasers, Kickstarter backers, Discord communities, or prelaunch signups into clear segments that can be retargeted with relevance. Having these custom cohorts helps preserve stability while the platform itself is volatile.
Large qualified inputs lead to powerful outputs in the form of lookalike audiences for prospecting. Now more than ever this tool is useful, especially for new ad accounts.
5. Personalization at scale is growing
Meta's push into hyper-personalization means ads are increasingly tailored to micro-signals. In theory, that sounds powerful. In practice, AI-driven personalization of messaging is still fairly weak. Audiences can often spot machine-written messaging instantly. In niche communities, tone matters and using the AI personalization feels contrived.
Players and fans know when a marketer understands their world and when they do not. Poor personalization risks breaking immersion and damaging trust between consumers and advertisers. For industries built on authenticity and community, this can do more harm than good.
6. New formats are not proven yet
Meta is investing in augmented reality and other immersive formats, positioning them as the next big thing. But advertisers have heard promises like this before. We all remember Zuck telling us that the metaverse would be bigger than the mobile internet. Sometimes despite how flashy the idea is, the tech and accessibility just is not there.
AR ads today feel more like a gimmick than a lasting shift. For niche industries where budgets are tight, it is too early to bank on AR or other experimental formats as a core part of strategy. The focus should stay on proven channels and creatives that connect with communities in a meaningful way. Advertisers will find AR more meaningful as a medium when it has a volume of users and proves to be valuable to their bottom line. Until then it is not feasible for ads.
7. Measurement and predictive analytics are essential
Attribution and measurement are under pressure. Meta has started leaning on estimation and aggregation in its reporting, which makes results less transparent. The challenge is that the machine has an incentive to show you that your ads are working, but those numbers are often inflated and not entirely accurate.
That does not mean the reporting is fraudulent, but it is not always a reliable source of truth. Advertisers need external attribution tools and cross-channel analytics to validate performance. For tabletop publishers, where margins are slim and every backer matters, trusting the machine alone is not enough.
Conclusion: Adaptability is the real advantage
Meta's advertising landscape is being rewritten. The consolidation of audiences makes niches harder to reach, AI automation is becoming unavoidable, and performance is less predictable. Coupled with an ever changing and almost dishonest UI (which is another blog altogether), Meta advertising is in flux and new norms are being discovered and defined in real time.
At the same time, new tools and personalization features are emerging, but not all are ready for prime time. For niche industries, success will come from agility, maintaining control of custom audiences, and blending the efficiency of automation with the authenticity of human strategy. The new normal is still forming, but those who stay flexible and proactive will be ready for whatever comes next.
Keep building qualified custom audience cohorts, testing, researching and sharing!