To ASC, or not to ASC...that is the question

If you hang out on marketing LinkedIn, you might have seen a post making the rounds:

🚨 Stop using ASC campaigns in Meta! 🚨

The claim came from a recent analysis by Haus (640 incrementality tests across 18 months) is fueling a new narrative:

"Manual ABO campaigns beat ASC long-term. Use ASC for quick wins, but use manual bids for long-term sustainable growth."

Their conclusion urges brands to not default to Meta's Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC). Instead, put most of your budget into Manual Advantage Budget Optimizations (ABO) and save ASC for promos.

It's a spicy take for sure. Sounds definitive, right? It's fueling the "don't use ASC" vibe across LinkedIn right now. But before you re-architect your 2025 ad account chasing this shiny object, let's break down why it's not so black and white. As marketing legend Miles McNair writes: "Anything can work, and anything can not work."

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What the data says vs. what it means

Haus claims Manual campaigns delivered $12 more per $100 spent by experiment conclusion. But here's the fine print LinkedIn hot takes skip over:

Were the brands tested actually like yours?

• Industry mix (DTC vs. lead gen vs. apps) could skew the results

• Creative quality, landing page CRO, and brand maturity matter

• Were the budgets and time frames comparable?

Incrementality tests measure lift, not profit. $12 per $100 sounds sexy, but what if it costs you $15 more in staff time to manage? A +$12 per $100 in revenue doesn’t equal +12% profit if creative, management costs, or labor scale disproportionately for Manual ABO.

ASC is push-button simple. Manual ABO takes more dials, more testing, more hours.

The scalability problem

Manual ABO works, but it's hard to scale.

• You can hit saturation fast.

• CPAs often rise as you scale.

• ASC, on the other hand, thrives on big signals and scales with less manual lift.

So yes, Manual might outpace ASC in a clean experiment. But can you actually maintain that advantage with limited bandwidth? If you're a startup or have a super lean marketing team (i.e. a team of one that is also responsible for every other channel under the sun and more) then ASC might be a better use of your resources.

The creative elephant in the room

ASC isn't magic. It doesn't find buyers out of thin air. What it does is pressure-test your creative against a massive pool of people.

• If your creative is strong: ASC performs brilliantly. It thrives on volume and signal density.

• If your creative is weak: ASC spends your budget fast and leaves you blaming the algorithm.

Manual ABO, meanwhile, masks bad creative because you can handpick targeting to squeeze performance from a limited audience. But that's not a long-term fix. That's hiding the real issue.

In other words: Campaign type is the steering wheel. Creative is the engine.

Meta's algorithm has gotten so good at finding people that the bottleneck is no longer targeting. It's thumb-stopping creative.

• ASC is designed to test multiple assets at scale and optimize delivery.

• Without a creative refresh cycle (think: new ads every 2–3 weeks), even the best ASC campaign will flatline.

• Manual ABO buys you more time, but you're still pushing a weak ad uphill.

What founders and startups should actually do

Instead of arguing ASC vs. Manual, think about how this fits into your growth system.

In the Growth Marketing OS, campaign type is just a tactical lever - important, but downstream from the real drivers:

• Creative sits in your Infrastructure layer: Offer → Positioning → Messaging.

• Campaign setup belongs in your Tactics layer: ASC vs. Manual ABO is the steering wheel, not the engine.

• Creative refresh cycles live in your Feedback Loop, where you test hooks, iterate fast, and feed learnings back into your OS.

So here’s the actual 2025 playbook:

✅ Use ASC when you’ve got a strong creative pipeline and want fast scale with minimal manual lift.
✅ Use Manual ABO when you need precision (or your creative bank is thin) to squeeze performance from narrower audiences.
✅ Install a creative refresh ritual: 3–5 new assets every 2–3 weeks. This keeps ASC efficient and prevents Manual ABO from stalling.
✅ Anchor all of this inside your Growth Marketing OS, so campaign changes compound instead of reset every quarter.

You don't win by picking ASC or Manual. You win by wiring your creative, testing cadence, and campaign levers into a repeatable OS that compounds.

Until next week,

Adam

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