If you built Sales or Leads brand safety by unchecking placements, that control is leaving the ad set. Meta has not published a hard kill date. The replacement is not a block.

Jon Loomer published the in-product notice on 20 August: excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available at the ad set. What Meta wants instead is a placement value rule. You can cut a bid by up to 90 percent (or raise it by up to 1,000 percent). Audience Network is on the list. A −90 percent bid is still a bid. A cheap enough auction still clears it. “Never Audience Network” becomes “Audience Network at a discount.”

The only hard off-switch left is account-level Placement Controls under Advertising Settings. It applies to every campaign in the account. A Spanish agency running several clients through one shared ad account cannot use it for just one brand.

Kill the headline number while you are there. Meta’s 11.7 percent lower CPA claim for Advantage+ placements versus manual has no sample size, date range or vertical mix. Treat it as marketing, not an audit.

If any AI agent is wired to Ads Manager, open Business Settings → Integrations → Ads MCP Server today. When Meta shipped the permissions panel (Loomer checked around 10–11 August), accounts defaulted to 7 of 7 write actions allowed, budgets included. A reporting agent needs none of them. Switch off budget edits and the create actions on every account the agent should not touch. Separately, Meta AI for small businesses launched around 19 August and can read the ad account. That is a different product from MCP, but the same rule applies: know what is connected before Q4 spend lands.

Creative diversity (Low / Medium / High) is now a column in Ads Manager. Meta calls it “estimated and in development.” Mixed formats (statics, video, UGC, carousels) still score Low in real accounts. Log it next to CPA if you want; do not rebuild creative strategy on it yet.

One short API note for the ops stack: Graph API v20.0 expires 24 September. Expired calls do not cleanly fail. They quietly fall forward to the next usable version. Pin and test versions before your connectors start telling a different story.

This week’s checklist for an EU / Spanish agency desk: list every Sales and Leads ad set that excludes a placement; build the matching −90 percent value rule now; move true never-serve requirements to account-level Placement Controls (or split the account); open Ads MCP and turn write off unless you meant an agent to spend; check Graph v20 hardcoding in any tool you maintain. Brand safety is a policy problem. A discounted bid is not a policy.