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What is the new £2.99 Meta Ad-free Subscription?

This month, Meta released their new ad-free paid subscription for Facebook and Instagram. From just £2.99, you can doomscroll to your heart’s content without seeing a single advertisement. It’s not just a visual change either – Meta won’t even process your personal information for advertising purposes while the subscription is active. This echoes regulatory changes regarding ‘consent-by-use’ advertising, with the ICO now preferring companies to allow users to opt-out as part of a ‘consent or pay’ advertising model.

Who is the new Meta Ad-free Subscription for?

Realistically, it’s suited more for the privacy-aware, perhaps conspiratorial, individual. I’m sure you’ve accidentally opened a Sun article and noticed that you can either consent to cookies or pay for the privilege to not be bombarded with ads. I’m also quite sure you didn’t pay for that privilege. Most people don’t and never will. YouTube has offered this for a decade as of the 21^st of October and only 1/16^th of their userbase pay for YouTube Premium. No matter how annoying ads are, people that don’t pay for them probably never will.

How does the new Meta Ad-free Subscription affect clients?

I do not yet have data on this but here’s my educated guess: it won’t. Imagine in your head the type of person who will pay for the new Meta Ads subscription. Do you think they’re the type of person to dictate their purchasing decisions based on the ads they were shown while doomscrolling that day? Perhaps for businesses with longer sales cycles focusing on lead gen campaigns instead of conversion campaigns, there could be a small difference in the very short-term in the number of leads they get from a campaign due to the fact the audiences for those campaigns tend to have higher disposable income or may value their time more than the £2.99 it costs to get rid of the ads. However, the algorithm will adjust and will continue to serve ads to people who are likely to interact with the ad (which obviously excludes the people with this subscription since they won’t see the ad in the first place).

How does the new Meta Ad-free Subscription affect agencies and in-house marketing teams?

I can see CPM increasing purely because there’ll be a lower number of people that could potentially see your ad, increasing bid competition. Depending on the uptake of this subscription, that could mean a huge increase in CPM. That’s veryyy unrealistic. As said above, after 10 years only 6.25% of YouTube users have YouTube Premium and I’d argue that YouTube ads are far more interruptive than those on Facebook and Instagram. I’d be surprised to see CPMs increase noticeably at all, at least any more than they usually do over the lifetime of a campaign.

How the new Meta Ad-free Subscription helps ad campaigns

I mentioned in my recent article about the Andromeda update recently that, since August, performance metrics like ROAS have gotten worse for many advertisers on Meta Ads. And, sure, the algorithm tries to only show ads to people who are likely to fit the campaign goal – but it can never be perfect. With this new subscription, I’d love to see this start to reverse. Yes, bids will be more competitive and so CPM could increase. However, the people buying this subscription likely would never convert through an ad on Facebook and Instagram anyway. Conversion rate could go back up, ROAS could go up – it all depends on the uptake of this subscription and how its subscribers overlap with your audience.

Key Takeaways

• Uptake is likely to be low – it’s taken 10 years for YouTube Premium to have a 6% uptake. This Meta Ads subscription is a lot more affordable, but the ads are less intrusive;
• CPM (cost per thousand views) could increase depending on the level of uptake;
• CVR (conversion rate) could increase as the people who buy this subscription would likely not have purchased or interacted with your ad anyway;
• ROAS will, most likely, stay the same or change very negligibly. Top of the funnel should improve since most people will this subscription would have ignored your ad completely.

Will the new Meta Ads ad-free subscription save paid marketing? Ideally. I’d love it if everyone that wouldn’t buy from an ad on a Meta platform would pay for this subscription. It’s not like paid marketing actually needs saving, though. ROAS can still be great with the right strategy. That’s why keeping up to date with the latest changes in paid ads is insanely important.

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Best,

Tyler L. Sinclair

Marketing isn’t the art of how to manipulate your audience. It’s the art of understanding how to help your audience in the best way possible.

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Defining Marketing vs Manipulation

To marketers and advertisers, the differences between marketing and manipulation are clear — one is good, and the other is bad. To our audiences, predatory marketing has made any attempt at marketing come across as manipulative or even ‘scammy.’ We’ve all seen ads recently that basically just lie just to increase conversions. So, to clear up the differences, here are their definitions:

Marketing

Marketing is the promotion of products or services.

Manipulation

Manipulation is the skilful and intentional use of tactics to influence someone’s decisions to further one’s interests.

Okay. Sounds the same, right? After all, you have to influence and maybe even change people’s decisions to get them to buy products or services.

That’s a conclusion that makes sense after reading those definitions. It’s also wrong. Let me explain. Let’s go back to basics.

Promoting Products and Services

You don’t need to influence anything at all for someone to buy products or services. It doesn’t matter where they are in the funnel, either.

Ask yourself a question: why do products and services exist?

Products and services exist to fulfil a need. They exist to help someone do something. Therefore, they have a target audience who has something they need help with.

I could end this article here. Promoting products and services to an audience that would benefit from them clearly isn’t manipulation because you aren’t influencing anything, just informing them that 1) they have a problem and 2) you can help them with that problem. An optimistic person might even go so far as to say that ads are barely marketing at all and are actually just an extension of the product and/or service.

There’s a clear choice that must be made there, though. If you have to inform your audience they have a problem, do you be 100% honest about it or do you exaggerate? Do they even actually have a problem if they have to be convinced of its existence?

That’s where the lines between marketing and manipulation blur.

Building Trust instead of Exploiting Fear

To me, the difference between marketing and manipulation isn’t in their definitions. It’s in what their methods should consist of. Because, sure, you can definitely use manipulation in marketing. It’s effective and it works very well, at least in the short-term.

Marketing and advertising should be all about building trust. Building trust is a lengthy process but one that yields compounding results. It’s what drives word-of-mouth referrals, good brand loyalty, and high LTVs.

Compare that to manipulation. There are two ways to manipulate someone: exploit their fears or exploit their desires. There is no better way to manipulate someone than by exploiting their fear. The fear of the loss of something they have is much more tangible than the desire to obtain or attain something that they don’t have. That’s not always bad — from 2009 in the UK, manipulation was legally required to be used on cigarette packets to dissuade people from smoking. It worked. This form of print marketing resulted in younger generations largely avoiding cigarettes altogether. However, you are not a governmental body, and you’re probably marketing to get someone to buy a product or service, not stop something they’re already doing.

Even then, if the government kept trying to exploit fear to dissuade people from continuing their habits, there’d be a massive loss in trust and believability and a growing amount of people would no longer care.

By building trust by being honest and actively trying to help your target audience, you’ll develop a long-lasting relationship with your customers and clients that makes them want to buy from you again. Repeat purchases are always the cheapest sales with the highest ROI, and so optimising for anything else is usually terrible for business.

To Summarise: Transparency is the Key to Honest Marketing

Manipulation is distinct from marketing because it lacks honesty. It’s deceitful by nature.

What does that mean for your business?

Failure, to put it bluntly.

So be honest. Be helpful. Be transparent.

In today’s digital age where information — and therefore reviews — are easily found, trying to lie and act in bad faith doesn’t work. Aim to help people, be transparent when you make a mistake (which will just make you more relatable to your audience and make your brand seem more down-to-earth), and your results will compound.

If you’d like to keep up to date with my articles have some more free marketing insights delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to my newsletter — it’ll only take a second:

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Tyler L. Sinclair