Meta's New Creative Insights vs What Media Buyers Actually Need
Meta shipped a native Creative Insights tool in Ads Manager. Here's where it falls short — and what real creative intelligence looks like.
Meta recently rolled out a native Creative Insights tool inside Ads Manager — available to roughly half of advertisers so far. It's their latest attempt to answer the question every media buyer asks daily: why is this creative working (or not)?
It's a meaningful step. But after spending time with it, the gap between what Meta shipped and what performance marketers actually need is hard to ignore.
What Meta Shipped
Credit where it's due — the new Creative Insights tool does a few things:
- Creative fatigue alerts that flag when an asset is losing steam
- Theme tagging that buckets creatives into broad categories like "Joy," "Motivation," or "Trust"
- Industry benchmarks with example creatives from other advertisers
- Visual pattern matching via AI that attempts to surface what's working across your account
It lives natively in Ads Manager, which means zero setup and no extra cost. For advertisers who've been flying completely blind on creative analysis, something is better than nothing.
Where It Falls Short
Peter Quadrel, a media buyer who reviewed the tool in depth, put it bluntly: the fatigue alerts are useful. Everything else is weak.
The core problems:
Theme buckets are too broad to be actionable.
Tagging a creative as "Joy" or "Motivation" tells you almost nothing about why it's performing. Was it the hook format? The offer framing? The pacing of the first three seconds? Broad emotional categories don't translate into creative briefs.
Industry examples are often irrelevant.
The tool surfaces "similar" creatives from other verticals that share visual patterns but have nothing to do with your business context, audience, or funnel stage. Pattern matching on pixels without business relevance is noise, not signal.
The AI sees surfaces, not strategy.
As Quadrel noted, the model "pattern matches visually without true business relevance." It can tell you two creatives look similar. It can't tell you that Creative A won because it led with a specific pain point that resonated with cold audiences in Week 2 of a launch.
Olivia Kory, CSO at Haus, made a broader observation: Meta has tried and failed to automate the "why" behind creative performance for years. This isn't a new ambition — it's a recurring one, and the structural limitations haven't changed.
What Real Creative Intelligence Looks Like
At Sentrum, we've been building creative analysis from the ground up with a different philosophy: every insight should connect to a decision a media buyer can actually make.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Deep Creative Analysis, Not Surface Tags
Every creative that runs through Sentrum gets analyzed by Gemini vision models — not for vague emotional buckets, but for specific, actionable attributes: hook type (question, stat, UGC testimonial, pattern interrupt), message theme, visual style, and an honest breakdown of strengths and weaknesses. The output reads like a creative strategist's notes, not a tag cloud.
Fatigue Detection That Goes Beyond Alerts
Yes, we detect creative fatigue — but we don't stop at a flag. Sentrum scores every creative with CTR and CPR trend analysis across high, moderate, and healthy tiers. You see when fatigue started, how fast it's degrading, and what the downstream impact looks like on cost efficiency. It's a trend line, not a binary alert.
Creative Diversity Scoring
Most accounts don't have a single-creative problem — they have a portfolio problem. Sentrum's Creative Diversity Scorer uses Shannon entropy to measure how varied your active creative mix actually is, with mono-culture penalties when you're over-indexed on one format or angle. It answers the question Meta can't: is my creative strategy diverse enough to sustain performance?
Creative Velocity Tracking
How many days since your last creative refresh? Sentrum's Creative Velocity Tracker monitors refresh cadence with health tiers, so you know whether you're feeding the algorithm enough new material — before performance degrades, not after.
The Full Diagnostic Chain
This is where the gap is widest. Sentrum connects the dots across your entire account: creative fatigue → placement drift → audience saturation → spend pacing. When your CPA spikes, we don't just tell you a creative is tired. We show you whether fatigue caused placements to shift to lower-quality inventory, whether your audiences are saturated, and whether your spend pacing amplified the problem. It's a diagnostic chain, not isolated data points.
Creative Flighting Narratives
What happened to your account metrics when Creative X launched? What shifted when you paused Creative Y? Sentrum builds flighting narratives that map creative changes to performance inflections — the kind of analysis that usually lives in a strategist's head or a messy spreadsheet.
Briefs That Write Themselves
Sentrum generates creative brief recommendations grounded in the actual attributes of your winning creatives. Not "make something joyful" — more like "lead with a question hook, feature the product in the first 2 seconds, use a testimonial format, and lean into the pricing angle that drove your lowest CPR last month."
What's Next: Competitor Creative Intelligence
On our roadmap: Competitor Ad Spy — automated scraping and AI analysis of competitor creatives from the Meta Ad Library. Not just what they're running, but what formats, hooks, and angles they're investing in. Competitive intelligence that feeds directly into your creative pipeline.
The Bigger Picture
Meta building creative analysis tools isn't surprising — it's inevitable. But platform-native tools will always have structural constraints that independent tools don't:
They only see their own platform.
Your creative strategy doesn't exist in a Meta vacuum. Platform tools can't contextualize creative performance against your broader marketing mix, your competitive landscape, or your business goals.
Incentive misalignment is real.
Meta's business model is ad spend. Their tools are optimized to keep you spending inside their ecosystem, not necessarily to give you the sharpest possible read on what's working and why. An independent tool has one incentive: make you a better buyer.
Shallow AI is a design choice, not a limitation.
Meta has world-class AI infrastructure. The reason Creative Insights ships with broad theme buckets instead of deep strategic analysis isn't technical — it's that deep analysis is hard to productize at Meta's scale without also revealing things about the algorithm they'd rather keep opaque.
The fatigue alerts are genuinely useful. Use them. But if your creative analysis strategy starts and ends with what Meta gives you for free inside Ads Manager, you're leaving enormous signal on the table.
Creative intelligence isn't a feature. It's the whole game.
See What Real Creative Intelligence Looks Like
Sentrum is the creative intelligence platform for performance marketers — AI-powered diagnostics that connect creative decisions to business outcomes. Deep creative analysis, fatigue detection, diversity scoring, and actionable briefs — all automatic.
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