What, you thought all that AI investment was for smarter Ray-Bans?
Meta—for whom advertising represents
97% of its total annual revenue—reportedly plans to use its pricey artificial intelligence prowess to help brands create ads from scratch.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has hardly been shy about incorporating AI into the tools that it offers advertisers. Its current tools allow for AI-powered tweaks to existing campaigns.
But the
Wall Street Journal reports that Meta plans to be far more aggressive by the end of 2026, allowing advertisers to, for example, submit a product image and let the AI create an entire campaign: text, image, and video, personalized and geolocated.
“A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain,” the
Journal writes, “whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.”
(We’re not saying it’s
just like the billboards in the film
Minority Report, John Anderton, but we’re not
not saying it, either.)
The Don Drapers of the world shouldn’t be too worried. Meta’s AI ad firepower is meant to cater to the small and medium businesses that otherwise couldn’t afford
the full Sterling Cooper treatment.
Still, deep-pocketed marketers do advertise on Meta’s platforms, and it should be interesting what they’re willing—and not willing—to do with such capabilities on offer.
—AN