Meta is close to handing the reins of its ~US$160 billion ad business to the robots.
What happened: By the end of next year, the social media giant plans to use AI to fully automate its ad creation and targeting, per the Wall Street Journal. That means a business could simply provide a product photo, a budget, and a goal, and Meta’s AI would create the visuals, write the copy, and find the audience — all without a human marketing team.
Why it matters: The ads popping up in your feeds could soon get even more personalized (and maybe a little creepier). Meta wants the AI to show tailored versions of ads to individual users based on everything it knows about them, which is quite a bit.
- Shopping for a car in Whitehorse? You might see an ad for a truck powering through a snowstorm. In Toronto? That same ad might show the car cruising downtown.
Zoom out: This shift could level the playing field for small businesses that typically can’t afford swanky marketing campaigns. Some companies, however, could be hesitant to let AI have so much control over how their brand and products are advertised when it still churns out content that’s weird at best and harmful at worst.
Bottom line: As one of the world’s largest ad platforms, the direction that Meta takes with AI will have a domino effect on the rest of the marketing world.—LA