If you run Meta ads, a couple of this week's changes will affect your very next campaign setup — and one piece of local news is quietly reshaping who's even in your audience.
Placement exclusions are gone — it's bid adjustments now
Meta has removed the ability to manually exclude specific ad placements from a campaign. In its place is a placement value rule that lets you adjust bids for individual placements by anywhere from -90% to +1000%, but you can no longer block a placement outright — only make it less attractive to the algorithm. Account-level placement controls still exist, but they apply across every campaign in the account rather than letting you make a call per campaign. If brand safety on specific placements matters to you, it's worth reviewing your account-level settings now rather than assuming your old exclusions still apply.
A new permissions panel for AI agents touching your ad account
Meta has also launched a new permissions interface for its ads MCP server — the connection point that lets AI agents and automation tools act on your ad account. Seven write actions, including budget editing and campaign creation, ship switched on by default. If you or your agency use any AI or agent-based tool connected to your Meta ad account, this is worth a five-minute check: know exactly what that tool is allowed to change, and turn off anything you haven't deliberately approved.
Meta AI for small businesses can now see across platforms
Meta AI for small businesses launched on 19 August, giving the assistant read access to your ad accounts, campaign data and analytics — and, notably, across both Meta and Google platforms, not just Meta's own. It's a genuinely useful step for time-poor small business owners who want a plain-English view of how campaigns are tracking, but it's worth being deliberate about what access you grant, particularly if a Google account is shared with other stakeholders.
Creative diversity scoring has arrived
Ads Manager now rates each ad set's creative variety as Low, Medium or High. Early testing has thrown up some surprising results — accounts already running a healthy mix of statics, video, UGC and carousels have still come back with a Low rating, so treat the score as a rough signal rather than gospel while Meta calibrates it.
What's happening to costs and delivery
August CPMs rose 12–13% year on year, according to analysis from Meta, Tinuiti and Triple Whale, and there was one confirmed delivery outage on 21 August. On the technical side, facebook-business-sdk v26.0.1 dropped 14 fields including budget_schedule_specs, and Messenger Stories support ends on 27 October 2026 — worth reallocating that budget to Facebook or Instagram Stories and Reels ahead of time if you're still running anything there.
Australia's under-16 ban is already reshaping the local audience
Closer to home, Meta says it has removed access to more than 750,000 accounts in Australia assessed as belonging to under-16s since it began complying with Australia's social media minimum age law, which took effect in December 2025 — more than 500,000 of those were removed before the law even came into force. That's a meaningfully different approach to the one now playing out in the US, where new rules cap teen usage at two hours a day across Facebook and Instagram rather than removing under-16s outright. For Australian advertisers, the practical effect is a smaller, and slightly older-skewing, teen audience pool locally than in markets without an outright age restriction — worth factoring in if any of your targeting has historically reached into the 13–17 bracket.
Two things worth doing this week
Review your placement bid adjustments now that hard exclusions are gone, and check the default permissions on any AI or agent tool connected to your ad account. Neither takes long, and both are the kind of housekeeping that's easy to skip until something goes wrong.
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Written by
Nic Franklin
Founder
Nic leads strategy across every Franklin account, connecting paid media, CRM and sales execution into one revenue system. He has spent over a decade building performance programs for Australian property, health and hospitality brands.
