Meta is overhauling how ads are built in Ads Manager. The old format-first approach is giving way to a new asset library model - and it changes everything about how you set up campaigns.
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If you've logged into Meta Ads Manager recently and noticed things look different, you're not imagining it. Meta is rolling out one of its biggest structural changes to ad creation in years - and it affects how you think about creatives from the ground up.
The shift was spotted early by digital marketers who noticed a new message inside Ads Manager: "Format selection is changing. Soon, Format display options in Ad creative will be the new way to choose formats. This also gives you the flexibility to show ads in multiple formats." What followed has been a gradual but significant overhaul of how ads are built and structured.
The core idea: instead of choosing a format first and building creatives around it, Meta is moving toward a model where you upload a pool of assets - images, videos, copy - and the platform assembles the best combination for each user and placement automatically.
The traditional Meta ad creation workflow was predictable. You picked a campaign objective, selected a format - Single Image, Video, Carousel, Collection, or Flexible - and then uploaded creative specifically tailored to that format. Each placement often required its own set of assets, which made campaign setup time-consuming and highly structured.
The new workflow works differently. You still choose your objective, but format selection has been moved out of the setup stage. Instead, you upload all your assets into what Meta calls an "Uploaded Media" pool - up to 10 images and videos per ad. From there, you configure "Format Display Options" to define how those assets can appear: as product tiles, link tiles, carousel-style layouts, or collections. Meta's AI then assembles the best-performing version for each placement and each user in real time.
The Flexible format and standalone Collection format have been removed from Ad Setup entirely. What replaces them is a more fluid system where formats are no longer a starting point - they are an output.
Despite the shift toward AI-driven assembly, manual control has not disappeared - it has been reorganized. Here is what stays in your hands:
The result is that what previously required six separate ads can now be built as a single campaign entry - with per-asset customization built in. That is a meaningful efficiency gain for teams managing large creative volumes.
The direction is clear. Meta is accelerating its shift toward AI-driven creative assembly. By treating creatives as interchangeable assets rather than fixed, format-specific units, the platform gains more flexibility to optimize delivery across its placements - Feed, Reels, Stories, and beyond - without advertisers having to build for each one manually.
For Meta, this model makes sense. More assets in the pool means more data points for the algorithm to learn from, and better creative matching per user segment leads to higher engagement - which translates directly to better CPMs. As industry observers have noted, this looks like "another push from Meta to move away from traditional ad setup with a few carefully structured ads, toward a landscape where formats and creatives are fluid and dynamically assembled."
This is consistent with where the broader platform is heading. Post-Andromeda, Meta's ad delivery system has increasingly prioritized creative signals over audience targeting signals. The asset library model is a natural extension of that philosophy - give the algorithm more material to work with, and let it find the winners.
The practical impact depends on how your team currently structures campaigns. If you rely on Flexible format or standalone Collection setups, those are now gone and need to be replaced. If your workflow involves pre-launch preview links for creative approvals, note that shareable preview links are only available after publishing - not in draft stage.
The teams that adapt best will be those that already think in terms of creative volume and asset diversity. Supplying multiple aspect ratios, testing different copy angles per asset, and mapping specific creatives to specific landing pages are now part of standard setup rather than advanced workarounds. The recommended minimum is three aspect ratios per campaign: 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16.
As Meta moves toward an asset library model, the ability to build, organize, and deploy large volumes of ad creative becomes a core competitive advantage - not a nice-to-have. Campaign Builder's catalog ads tool is built for exactly this kind of creative at scale: structured, data-driven, and ready to feed into the kind of fluid, multi-asset campaigns Meta now expects.
Ready to see it in action? Explore Catalog Ads on Campaign Builder - the fastest way to build and launch dynamic, data-driven ad creatives across Meta placements.
