Across the Meta ad accounts Andrew Foxwell reviews, a pattern repeats: brands are optimizing what they can see inside the dashboard while ignoring variables that determine whether those accounts grow. The problem, Andrew has found, is almost never where the brand thinks it is.

“Innovation in reference to creative is an everyday task,” he says. “You have to be curious and test different types of creatives and formats on a very regular basis because these things change so frequently.”

Andrew is the co-founder of Foxwell Digital, a social media advisory firm he launched in 2013 that operates from Santa Barbara, California. The firm’s primary product today is Foxwell Founders, a paid membership community of more than 600 digital marketers across more than 30 countries who collectively spend over $500 million per month on Meta platforms, according to the company. About 70% of members are agency owners, with the remainder comprising brand owners and people working within brands, primarily across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and Google. 

That community gives Andrew live data from hundreds of active accounts across verticals and geographies, refreshed daily by members posting wins and losses together. When platform conditions shift, the signal travels through the network fast. In January 2026, iPhone landing page view rates dropped across Meta; Foxwell Founders members were comparing screenshots across hundreds of accounts before the platform had said anything publicly.

Meta’s Ad Engine No Longer Rewards the Strategies That Built Most DTC Brands

Meta has moved away from the micro-targeting architecture that defined its advertising system for most of the past decade. The previous model asked brands to organize spend into structured audience containers, with the platform serving ads to predetermined groups within those parameters. That architecture, Andrew says, is no longer doing the work brands expect it to do.

Meta’s current system incorporates its GEM recommendation model and Andromeda ads retrieval engine, which help serve advertising based on what individual users have already consumed and shown a preference for, rather than relying on pre-specified audiences. “The containers are less useful and less necessary than they used to be,” Andrew says. “Meta is showing ads to people in a relevant way to that person based on what they’ve consumed before and shown a preference for.”

The consequence is that creative diversity, not audience segmentation, has become the operative lever. A brand that diversifies its ad formats, voices, and creative treatments gives the algorithm more signal to match the right execution to the right individual. “It can’t just be product photos on a white background,” Andrew says. “It has to be more than that.” 

Meta underscored this direction in late 2025 when it publicly stated that organic content had become important to ad serving, a signal Andrew says he saw brands underreact to. “Organic has come back to the forefront, and I just haven’t heard that as much as I thought I would this year,” he notes.

Scaling Accounts Have Structural Traits in Common

Looking across accounts in the Foxwell Founders community, Andrew identifies consistent characteristics among DTC brands sustaining growth and consistent gaps among those that are not.

The first differentiator is business model. “The brands that have a one-time purchase, you’re one and done,” Andrew notes. “That’s a very challenging place to be.” Subscription or product innovation that drives repeat purchase alleviates that constraint. For brands where subscription does not apply, Andrew looks for whether product development itself is creating reasons for customers to return.

The second differentiator is creative ideation. Accounts that scale are running structured processes built on post-purchase survey data, AI-assisted customer research, and exploration of customer personas or pain points not yet addressed in the account. Andrew identifies a “very sophisticated brainstorming technique” in the accounts that are truly growing, one that surfaces concepts the brand had not previously considered rather than iterating on what already exists.

The third differentiator is measurement scope. Brands relying on in-platform ROAS as their primary metric are working from an incomplete picture. Andrew’s strongest performers track contribution margin, new customer percentage, and acquisition marketing efficiency alongside in-platform figures, and they use third-party attribution tools to connect ad performance to actual business outcomes. “It used to be very singularly focused on, ‘We’re getting a 5x return on ad spend in the account, keep spending,’” he says. 

The brands in his community that are operating most effectively “are looking at how this set of ads helps us in reference to contribution margin, in terms of percentage of net new customers.”

Audits Surface a Common Problem

When Andrew reviews an account, he first checks whether the brand is running conversion campaigns. That remains an issue more often than the industry would expect. He then looks at 90-day performance: ROAS, outbound click-through rates, and the creative pipeline. A dry pipeline, in his reading, is among the clearest indicators of an account heading toward decline.

What the audit surfaces most reliably, though, is a problem the brand was not looking for. “A lot of times the customer or consumer experience as it relates to the post-click is ignored,” Andrew says. Brands send traffic to a collection page and treat the ad account as the primary optimization lever, without examining whether the landing page, offer structure, or checkout flow is limiting conversion. He uses a line common among digital marketers to make the point: “Have you run through your own checkout process in the last couple of weeks?”

Campaign proliferation is a separate and equally common finding. An Australian skincare founder who came to Andrew as a consulting client, making every jar by hand, had watched her monthly new customers fall from roughly 1,000 to between 200 and 300. CPA had risen above $30 against a target under $25, and her advertising media efficiency ratio (aMER) had stalled below its 2.38 breakeven. The account, on inspection, was running traffic, lead, video view, engagement, and retargeting campaigns simultaneously, leaving no individual effort room to generate usable signal. The problem was not the quality of the ads, but the structure preventing any single effort from being readable.

Andrew stripped it back: one or two sales ad sets kept running continuously with budget moved up and down rather than campaigns switched off, best-performing creative moved into an Advantage Shopping Campaign, and a purchase call-to-action tested directly against a lead quiz, which purchase won by a wide margin. Six months later, new customers had returned to around 900 per month, CPA had dropped to between $13 and $21, and the account’s aMER peaked at 3.63 before settling in the high 2s.

More Creative Doesn’t Fix a Creative Problem

A common response to the industry’s emphasis on creative diversity is to increase production volume. Andrew’s position is that volume without a measurement framework produces noise.

“You have to have a hypothesis before you do so that you have something to measure against,” he says. “That’s been a big shift.” Launching creative without defining what each execution is meant to test, which customer problem it addresses, and what metric will signal success leaves brands unable to determine whether anything worked. 

The risk of high creative volume is that it makes the account harder to read. What Andrew is looking for is “quality shots on goal,” executions with specific strategic purpose tied to distinct personas or pain points the account has not yet addressed.

Andrew also notes that AI has complicated the calculation. Accessible creative production has lowered the cost of generating more executions, which has increased pressure to do exactly that. His view is that lower production cost should motivate better concept development and more rigorous measurement planning, not just more creative.

Knowing What You’re Growing Is the Prerequisite for Everything Else

If Andrew could change one practice across the brands he works with, it would be strategic: brands need to know specifically what they are trying to grow, into which customer segments, and with which products. “Just saying ‘grow’ isn’t an answer,” he says. “How are you trying to grow? Into what customer segments are you trying to grow? What products are you trying to grow?” 

Without that clarity, he argues, brands become susceptible to what he calls “shiny object syndrome,” chasing new tactics or formats without a stable criterion for evaluating them.

The Foxwell Founders community is structured, in part, around building that evaluative discipline at scale. Tactics discussed within the community always arrive with context: account size, vertical, and what else changed that week. The community functions as an early-warning network, aggregating live signals before they register in individual accounts. “Every tactic has a shelf life,” Andrew says. “Once everyone runs it, that shelf life gets short.” 

Being the first to find a new approach is, in his view, less important than being fast to recognize when it has stopped working. “I don’t need to be the first person to find a tactic,” Andrew says. “I need to know the day it stops working.”

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