Meta Wants To Automate Ad-Creation With AI

Meta will reportedly allow brands to create and target ads to users on the company’s platforms solely using AI by the end of next year.

The Big Picture: Advertising represents a whopping 97% of revenue for Meta, so any changes to it is a massive deal for the entire digital-advertising ecosystem. Coupled with Meta’s aggressive push into AI, the combination of both represents a major paradigm shift for the tech giant, where its biggest investment fuels its biggest revenue stream.

Behind the Code: Will Meta’s fully-AI advertising represent the zenith of targeted marketing or the beginning of social media’s AI-slop era?

• The AI-advertising feature will allow brands to “present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video and text,” per WSJ.
• Meta’s AI system will then automatically determine which users on Facebook and Instagram the ads should target, as well as how the budget should be allocated across the platforms.
• Eventually, AI-generated ads could be tailored to each user — for example, showing a car driving through snowy mountains if you live in a cold climate, or placing it in a bustling city if you live in an urban area.

The Future: Unsurprisingly, the news sent Meta’s stock up and those of ad agencies down — Meta was up 3%, while WPP, Omnicom, and Interpublic were down between 2% and 4%. But there’s a lot of big-picture questions lingering from the news — will big brands want Meta to have so much control over marketing creative just to save money? And will Meta be building unique AI models for each brand that signs up for the feature to protect brands’ IP? Like AI at large, there will be a lot of kinks to work out.

Prediction: While small- and medium-sized businesses may opt for fully-AI advertising, big brands may double down on the use of human creativity to show off that they’re a premium company. Who knew using people was a luxury?