From interest media to intent media, Manus AI lands in Meta Ads Manager, and Messenger.com is being retired

The way marketing works on social platforms keeps shifting. What worked last year - or last month - often no longer works today, and AI is accelerating the cycle. One longtime industry voice describes how we have left the social media era for good and are now firmly in the "interest media" era: the feed comes to you, and algorithms select content for you based on your interests and what you have interacted with, so the system assumes you want more of that.

The next step may be an "intent media" era: algorithms that predict with high accuracy what you intend to do - especially what you intend to buy - and serve organic content and ads based on what you are about to do rather than what you have already done. For marketers, the practical question raised this week is worth asking yourself: which sources do you actually trust to keep current on strategy and tactics, and are they preparing you for intent-based distribution or still teaching interest-era playbooks?

In platform news, Meta is proceeding with integrating Manus AI - the agent-building startup it acquired last month - directly into Ads Manager, giving some advertisers agent functionality inside the tool they already use. The focus is on AI agents that can undertake a range of tasks, including report-building and audience research. If the agents genuinely help advertisers raise return on ad spend and conversions, this will be a meaningful step in Meta's agentic AI push; watch for the rollout reaching your account.

Meta is also retiring Messenger.com and the desktop Messenger app starting April 14, 2026. Notifications are already showing to users of both. Nothing changes for people who use Messenger in a browser tab - you can simply go to facebook.com/messages instead, so swap any old bookmarks. Meta has not fully explained the move; consolidation of tracking and data collection is the widely assumed reason.