Meta showed off snazzy new AI features for users of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp at its developers conference last week. On Wednesday, it unveiled a different collection of generative AI tools for an equally valuable group of users: advertisers.
The new tools harness the power of AI image and text generation to make it easier than ever for people to create ads for Meta’s various platforms, potentially providing a new tailwind to boost to the company’s $117 billion advertising business.
The AI tools, which will be available for free to anyone who uses Meta’s self-service advertising management platform Ads Manager, mean that businesses as small as mom-and-pop shops, home contractors, and social media influencers will be able to produce online ads with video and images that typically require staff with specialized skills to create.
“We believe that these features will unlock a new era of creativity that maximizes productivity, personalization and performance for all advertisers,” Matt Steiner, who leads Meta’s monetization infrastructure and ranking AI team, told a group of reporters ahead of the announcement.
For Meta, which has seen its advertising revenue growth slow in recent years, anything that lowers the barrier for marketers to spend money on its platforms is an opportunity for growth. Privacy changes implemented by Apple on iPhones have reduced the highly targeted ads that once fattened Meta’s bottom line, and the popularity of rival platforms like TikTok has siphoned away ad revenue.
By next year, Meta will have rolled out AI background generation, image expansion, and text variations to all U.S.-based advertisers on its platforms. “This seems super helpful,” Suah Lee, a director of analytics, who has worked in advertising for eight years, said of Meta’s new advertising tools. “These tools are things that already exist that they've been able to integrate onto the platform so you don't have to come off-platform in order to do [image resizing, text and background generation].”
Meta said that in tests marketers saved an average of “five hours or more” per week—or 10% of their time—using its new AI tools. Of course, increased automation also means that jobs in the marketing and advertising industry could be threatened.
While Meta made a point of stressing that making the most out of these marketing tools will still require the human touch, including copy editors and visual editors as well as experts who are able to tailor data insights into effective campaigns, some aren’t so sure.
Yu Yang Pei, the chief growth officer at marketing services agency AX10, has worked in advertising for 12 years, and watched AI rock the industry. His company recently cut two full-time employees because AI made their roles superfluous. “The thing that I'm most concerned about is that anyone who is in marketing, anyone who is in the creative space, how do we convince clients that our roles are valid? And that there's something about a creative person that can drive more value than just an AI generated concept,” he said.
He also speculated that the prevalence of free, easy-to-use AI tools like Meta’s could cause many marketers to favor quantity over quality.
“It's so easy that everyone would just bombard the market with all of these assets that might not look good,” Pei said.
If it leads to a bump in revenue growth however, it will look just fine to Meta’s investors.
