Facebook Marketing API - Ad Creative not generating properly - facebook

Question

I'm working on a script to generate Facebook ads through the API. For some reason the variables for the ad creative are not being added to the ad. The main issue is the title and body are not being added. Here's the code I have for generating the ad creative:
try{
$creative = new AdCreative(null, $accountId);
$creative->setData(array(
AdCreativeFields::NAME => $ad_info['Ad Name'],
AdCreativeFields::TITLE => $ad_info['Title'],
AdCreativeFields::BODY => $ad_info['Body'],
AdCreativeFields::IMAGE_HASH => $image->hash,
//AdCreativeFields::OBJECT_URL => $ad_info['Preview Link'],
AdCreativeFields::OBJECT_STORY_SPEC => $object_story_spec,
AdCreativeFields::URL_TAGS => $ad_info['URL Tags'],
));
$creative->create();
echo 'Creative ID: '.$creative->id . "\n";
}
catch (Exception $e) {
echo '<pre>creative';print_r($e);exit;
if($e->getMessage()){
echo 'Error message: ' .$e->getMessage() ."\n" . "<br/>";
}
//echo 'Error Code: ' .$e->getCode() ."<br/>";
}
And the code for adding the creative to the ad:
$ad = new Ad(null, $accountId);
$ad->setData(array(
AdFields::CREATIVE =>
array('creative_id' => $creative->id),
AdFields::NAME => $ad_info['Ad Name'],
AdFields::ADSET_ID => $adsetId,
AdFields::STATUS => 'ACTIVE',
AdFields::TRACKING_SPECS => array('action.type' => $ad_info['action type'], 'fb_pixel' => $fb_pixel),
));
$ad->create();
It's not throwing errors, and the other variables, such as ad name, status, etc. all appear to be added to the ad correctly. As near as I can tell all of the above is correct according to Facebook's API documentation. I even tried throwing a sleep function in between the creative being generated and adding it to the ad. What could the issue be?

Answer 1

I figured out what the issue is. The ad creative object isn't applied to an ad if it's a link ad, which the ads this script is generating are. In order to get things like the the title and body text to appear, you have to add them in the AdCreativeLinkData like so:
$link_data->setData(array(
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::DESCRIPTION => $ad_info['Link Description'],
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::LINK => $ad_info['Link'],
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::NAME => $ad_info['Title'],
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::MESSAGE => $ad_info['Body'],
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::IMAGE_HASH => $image->hash,
AdCreativeLinkDataFields::CALL_TO_ACTION => array(
'type' => AdCreativeCallToActionTypeValues::SIGN_UP,
'value' => array(
'link' => $ad_info['Link'],
'link_caption' => $ad_info['Link'],
),
),
));
Once I added the NAME and MESSAGE variables to this object, the title and body of the ad showed up perfectly.