Meta Wants To Fully Produce Ads With Ai By Next Year

Meta will provide AI tools for brands to create ads from scratch and target users on its social media platforms by the end of next year, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, putting an ETA on an important goal for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s what Zuck’s envisioning:

• Companies looking to interrupt your Instagram or Facebook scroll can currently use Meta’s AI tools to tweak existing ads. But soon, Meta will enable advertisers—likely those with smaller budgets—to have AI churn out their entire ad campaign simply by presenting it with an image of their product.
• Meta’s also planning real-time personalization based on geolocation so that users in an urban setting would see the product on city streets, while users looking at the same product in Middle-earth would see it in The Shire (these are theoretical examples).

Zuck sees AI-powered ads as Meta’s future: Advertising dollars accounted for 97% of Meta’s revenue in 2024, and that money is being reinvested in AI chips, data centers, and training for the AI models that are presumably learning about marketing as you read this.

Can Meta be trusted?

Ad execs who spoke to The Verge last month expressed skepticism about the performance results Zuck promised from Meta’s self-contained advertising ecosystem, with one bluntly stating: “No clients will trust what they spit out as they are basically checking their own homework.”

That’s not just sour grapes: A potential $7 billion class-action lawsuit accusing Meta of inflating its ad reach numbers by 400% was allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court this year.

Big picture: Despite AI’s seemingly inevitable encroachment on the ad world, some big brands remain hesitant about ceding more control to Meta and are concerned about the quality of images and videos the technology is capable of producing. Nonetheless, Zuck’s vision of the future sent the stocks of ad giants WPP, Omnicom, and Interpublic sliding yesterday.—DL