When Meta Gets Expensive, Smart Brands Shift: Why Sponsored Brand & Product Video Can Replace Mid-Funnel Meta in an Andromeda World
Creative is no longer optional. It’s the cost of staying alive.
And with Meta’s Andromeda update forcing brands to produce constant creative variation to maintain delivery, brands are waking up to an uncomfortable truth: the price of playing on Meta has fundamentally changed.
Where a brand once needed three to five core creatives per month, Andromeda demands:
significantly more hooks
significantly more variation
significantly more formats
and a far faster refresh cycle
This is brilliant for Meta.
But for ecommerce brands? It’s punishing.
And the fallout is clear: cold traffic is more expensive, CPMs are often unstable, and the cost of maintaining creative variety now outweighs the margin many brands actually make on the sale.
In this new reality, the most sensible ecommerce brands aren’t simply trying to “fix Meta.”
They’re re-architecting their funnel.
They’re asking a more intelligent question:
“If Meta is becoming more expensive to run, where else can we create mid-funnel impact without the creative tax?”
And increasingly, the answer is:
Amazon Sponsored Brand + Sponsored Products Video.
Meta’s Andromeda Problem: When Creative Becomes the Product
The biggest shift with Andromeda is that creative is now the primary delivery lever.
If your ad set doesn’t have enough variety, Meta switches off your reach. It’s ruthless — and designed that way.
Meta wants more content.
More variation.
More signals.
More creativity.
More data.
But creative production isn’t free.
For most brands, it’s the single biggest operational bottleneck.
The cost now looks like this:
→ Creative team time
→ UGC fees
→ Video production
→ Testing variations
→ Endless iteration cycles
→ Faster burnout of top performers
→ Higher cost per learning phase
Suddenly, Meta’s CPMs aren’t the only problem. The invisible cost of creative execution is.
This is where brands begin searching for a more commercially sane mid-funnel engine — one that doesn’t punish them for not having an in-house creative studio.
This is where Amazon’s brand and video formats start to shine.
The New Mid-Funnel: Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brand Video & Sponsored Products Video
Amazon Sponsored Products convert bottom-funnel shoppers. Everyone knows that.
But Sponsored Brands and video formats operate much earlier in the journey.
They intercept customers who are:
browsing broad categories
exploring problems
not yet sure what solution they want
not yet comparing brands
not yet product-aware
These are the exact mid-funnel buyers Meta used to reach affordably — before Andromeda pushed creative costs through the roof.
1. Sponsored Brand & Sponsored Brand Video: Your Amazon mid-funnel workhorse
Sponsored Brands (banner + logo + multiple ASINs) and Sponsored Brand Video sit at the top of search and in high-visibility placements. They allow you to:
tell a brand story in a few seconds
hero a problem/solution message
showcase multiple products
drive shoppers into your Storefront rather than a single PDP
SB Video, in particular, lets you do Meta-style storytelling inside Amazon — but you’re speaking to shoppers who are already in buying mode, not aimlessly scrolling.
2. Sponsored Products Video: Product feature videos inside Sponsored Products
The big Amazon unBoxed update is Sponsored Products video: the ability to add multiple short feature videos directly into Sponsored Products placements. Shoppers see clickable thumbnails, can jump to the feature that matters most, then click straight through to the PDP.
Early Amazon testing shows campaigns with video see a CTR uplift vs static Sponsored Products, with a significant spike for shoppers who watch more than a few seconds. This means:
Ione good product video can now work as:
→ product explainer on your PDP
→ Sponsored Brand Video asset
→ multiple feature clips inside Sponsored Products
you extend its life without creating 20 variants just to stay in delivery
This is mid-funnel education and product comparison happening inside the conversion engine.
A Real Example: How We Used Full-Funnel Amazon Thinking for a Cleaning Brand
One of our recent clients , a premium enzyme-based cleaning brand found Meta had become commercially untenable.
CPCs were spiking.
Creative was fatiguing within days.
And the cost of producing new variations simply to stay in delivery was eroding margin.
Instead of forcing Meta to perform, we rebuilt their funnel around Amazon:
Step 1 — Sponsored Brand & SB Video to educate at scale
We targeted broad problem-led terms:
“pet smell remover”, “cleaning spray”, “carpet stains”, “household odours”.
Sponsored Brand banners introduced the science and the brand world.
Sponsored Brand Video showed the product in action: real stains, real odours, real results.
Step 2 — Sponsored Products + Sponsored Products Video to convert
We rebuilt key PDPs and layered in short, tight feature videos that mirrored shoppers’ biggest questions:
Does it actually remove the smell?
Is it safe around pets and kids?
How do I use it on fabric vs hard floors?
Those same clips now sit inside Sponsored Products as feature videos, catching high-intent shoppers in search results before they click through.
Step 3 — Let Amazon do the heavy lifting Meta once did
Instead of relying on expensive Meta traffic to pre-frame the customer, we used:
Sponsored Brands to tell the story
SB Video to demonstrate transformation
Sponsored Products Video to answer objections
All of it inside Amazon, with none of the Andromeda-level creative overhead.
The result?
Lower TACoS, healthier ranking, and more predictable scale.
The Bottom Line: Meta Isn’t Dead, But the Economics Have Changed
Meta still matters.
But Meta under Andromeda is expensive, volatile, and creatively demanding.
Amazon’s Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Products video formats have quietly become the most commercially rational mid-funnel tools for many ecommerce brands, especially those already winning on Amazon.
Because when creative becomes a tax, efficiency becomes a strategy.
And right now, the most efficient move for many brands is simple:
Shift a meaningful slice of mid-funnel budget from Meta into Amazon’s video and brand formats, and let your best product stories work harder where intent - and conversion - already live.
