Harry Delmege’s Meta problem started in the middle of August.

Delmege, CMO of digital marketing agency MHI Media, was overseeing a campaign for a fashion brand and targeting would-be customers when all of a sudden, he says, the platform’s targeting tools appeared to flip: Instead of targeting younger audiences mostly on Instagram, Meta’s automated ad tools started targeting older, 65+ audiences mostly on Facebook.

Delmege still isn’t sure if the flip was intentional or a bug within Meta’s ad tools, he said. Either way, he said, the results weren’t great—few of the targeted users bought anything, and performance plummeted. Delmege estimated that the incident may have cost his client somewhere in the “high-five-figure” range.

“In times like this, it’s scary, because it can crush our business,” Delmege told Marketing Brew.

Delmege isn’t alone. Five other media buyers told Marketing Brew that they feel like Meta’s ad tools, which automate ad targeting across platforms including Facebook and Instagram, are broken and buggy. Whether it’s observing that ads didn’t load properly or seeing that daily budgets were blown through within hours, some buyers have come to expect issues as often as every other week, and told Marketing Brew that they find Meta’s support falls short.

• A website maintained by Meta that tracks issues with Facebook Ads Manager has noted at least a dozen disruptions to the ad tools since Memorial Day, with four classified as “major disruptions.”

“That is a fundamental part of running ads on Meta today—you have to bake in that there will be bugs and there will be disruption,” said Andrew Foxwell, co-founder of the social media advisory firm Foxwell Digital and the manager of an advertising networking Slack channel where buyers commonly discuss issues on the platform.

Keep reading here.—RB

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They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in the streaming world, there seems to be a lot of flattery going around.

Apple TV+’s drama series La Maison, which premiered Friday, is just the latest example. The French-language series is set in the fashion world, but with enough business rivalries, scandals, and high-stakes family business decisions that it is already being compared to HBO’s Succession, which ended its run last spring. La Maison isn’t the only show whose similarities to the award-winning drama have been noted. HBO’s very own Industry has also drawn similar comparisons.

Sounds familiar: There are plenty of other shows to choose from that share similar enough premises or themes to draw comparisons among viewers and critics alike. Apple TV+’s 2023 drama The Buccaneers, which follows young American women navigating British society (in corsets, of course) to find love and status, has been compared to Netflix’s Bridgerton due to the similar time periods, romances, costumes, and balls. The same can be said for Prime Video’s 2024 entry My Lady Jane, which was recently canceled after one season: “Bridgerton Walked So My Lady Jane Could Trot,” one Vanity Fair headline reads.

Continue reading here.—JS

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Mike Zeman is chief marketing officer of Life360. He has also held senior marketing roles at Square, Google, and Netflix, and Publicis Groupe.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Leading the team that launched Netflix in more than 100 markets was a career-defining moment. It was a time of incredible momentum for the company, with original content just beginning to take off and our disruption of Hollywood truly underway. The bold move to launch in so many countries simultaneously was an exhilarating challenge, and it's an experience I’ll carry with me forever.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? A bit of a throwback, but Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign was truly fantastic. At a time when beer marketing was largely uniform, this campaign broke the mold with its creativity and fun. But it was more than just style—it was also strategic. The campaign targeted occasional beer drinkers, inviting them to choose adventure with Dos Equis over the more commonplace experiences offered by mainstream beers. It clearly worked, as Dos Equis was one of the only growing beer brands during a very challenging set of declining years in the category. It’s the kind of campaign that deserves both Lions and Effies. Stay thirsty, my friends.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I can recite all 50 states in alphabetical order in under 20 seconds while juggling.

Read more here.

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Mergers and acquisitions, company partnerships, and more.

• Taco Bell partnered with singer-songwriter Omar Apollo for a new sauce packet, Disha Hot, based on the musician’s family recipe.
• Publicis acquired the commerce marketing agency Mars United Commerce.
• Blue Matter, a consulting firm, acquired healthcare PR agency Sam Brown.