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The dopamine of bringing fabulous returns for our clients’ ad spends on Facebook ads is something we’re no longer willing to chase. We’ve built enough skills over the past five years to know we can do it elsewhere.

When it comes to Facebook ads, until they fix their system, we’re done using it.

Getting up to twelve dollars back for every dollar spent on a campaign is great when Facebook ads work. Until now we’ve tolerated the increasing gestapo-like and inconsistent policies that Meta’s automatic system can never get quite right.

Like other agencies, we’ve tolerated the inconvenience and lost revenue of account shutdowns that took place even when the client and our campaigns have not breached policy.

Just recently I wondered how my twenty-year-old self would have reacted if I told her I’d be working in an industry where, for instance, I should avoid using the word ‘home’ in ad copy because the account wasn’t registered for the special category of real estate. Or that a client’s ad would be disapproved because the product, a ‘bomber jacket’, created disruptive language … while the support rep from Meta on that case was called Bullet.

Having read George Orwell’s 1984 in high school, it had become a shock that it has become my day-to-day, with thought police and arbitrary rules.

But that’s not why McKee Creative is giving the finger to Facebook ads.

We’re done, because it’s not acceptable for our clients to be spending money on our agency fees and Facebook budget, only to have their accounts shut down and restricted for no reason.

It’s not acceptable for them to - some of them 3 times - have to go to their bank and arrange a new card for their business because some underbelly breached their account and ran up thousands of dollars in ad spend while they were sleeping.

It’s not acceptable for clients to have to wait weeks or months to see those funds reimbursed.

It’s not acceptable for Meta to expect our team to have to rebuild work over and over again with no surety that it will stay active.

We respect our team’s sanity, knowing how it feels to have all the security in place that Meta recommends, and yet feel completely violated when personal profiles are breached, accounts with connections to friends are lost and often not restored, and their ability to work on accounts then becomes impossible because … wait for it … every business account and access to that has to happen through a personal profile, and creating alternate profiles breaches Meta’s policy.

We also respect the productivity of our own business, and will no longer tolerate the whole days each month taken up with answering vacuous, machine-created emails from supposed Meta reps who send good wishes for the health and safety of our families but do not resolve the problem … and can’t even get our name correct.

It is not good enough, Meta, to advertise a service that you do not deliver.

As an agency owner who is incredibly proud of the work our team does, and very appreciative of the calibre of clients we serve, I say ‘enough’.

I am grateful we have spent the last couple of years building a robust marketing system that means our clients’ revenue continues to grow, with or without Meta and its damaging system.

We’re ramping up spend on Google, Tik Tok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Taboola and Twitter.

Our email marketing, SEO and content publishing continue to underpin paid traffic campaigns and build the long term, more sustainable growth.

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To me, marketing is an incredible opportunity to connect people with the products and services that make their life better.

Nothing lights me up more than hearing someone say “it just appeared right in front of me, and I’m so excited to get started!”

Or hearing that the customers we brought to our clients are phoning them, saying “You saved my life.”

That is our service.