Announced via the Facebook business blog, October 4th 2023, Meta are introducing generative AI to their ad platform. Meta generative AI ads will enable advertisers to unlock new levels of personalization, with deep data driven decisions about ad creative made automatically by artificial intelligence. How will Meta AI ads change how we shop online?
Meta AI ads
Meta’s ads manager is already one the the highest revenue ad platforms in the world, at over $113.6 billion USD in 2022. Tapping into the wealth of consumer data that the social media giant has collected over the past 19 years, generative AI technology is set to alter the e-commerce landscape forever.
The tech giant has already rolled out an AI chatbot (among other generative AI capabilities) to most of the social media platforms in Meta’s portfolio – Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook messenger. The ads business is sure to grow via third-party AI apps built with Meta AI studio, and now manual campaigns are becoming a thing of the past.
In a recent Meta study, the tech firm found that “creative diversification lead to a 32% improvement in CPA”, and a “9% improvement in incremental reach”.
Essential AI Tools
Meta’s generative AI tools
For this ads platform, generative AI means three things: Background generation, image expansion, and text variations.
Background generation
This AI tools adapts the background of your ad creative to suit the individual. What have they clicked on before? What caught their attention? Imagine if your ads knew that information, and could act on it, person to person.
“Creates multiple backgrounds to complement the advertiser’s product images, allowing advertisers to tailor their creative assets for different audiences.”
Meta
Image expansion (formerly Image outcropping)
Iterating ad creative to fit different aspect ratios can be a surprisingly time consuming process, especially if elements need to be moved around or resized. This is not a particularly creative process either, more tedious than anything – the perfect target for AI acceleration.
“Seamlessly adjusts creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, like Feed or Reels, allowing advertisers to spend less time and resources on repurposing creative assets.”
Meta
Text variations
Harnessing the natural language processing (NLP) power of LLMs like LLaMA 2 or OpenAI’s GPT-4V, AI can handle the psychological strategic work of convincing a real human to buy things. Will this put a few copywriters out of the job? More than likely.
Generates multiple versions of ad texts based on advertiser’s original copy, highlighting the selling points of their products/services and giving them multiple text options to better reach their audience.
Meta
What is the Meta Advantage?
Each of these new generative AI features in the Meta Advantage suite can improve campaign performance for the select group of advertisers who get to try it out. Creative assets can be produced and personalised on a mass scale with generative artificial intelligence like LLM’s (Large Language Model) for text and diffusion models (like Midjourney and DALL-E 3) for images. Until rollout is complete next year, early testing will be conducted by this small group of advertisers.
“Meta Advantage is our portfolio of automation products that use AI and machine learning to help optimize campaign results, personalize ads by matching them to the right people at the right time and ultimately help advertisers save time and money.”
Meta
Where and when can I use Meta Advantage AI features?
There’s no need to scrap your existing campaigns and start anew. Within the next month of roll-out, businesses “will be able to transform their current campaigns into Advantage+ shopping campaigns, allowing them to take advantage of AI quickly and easily.
To access the new functionality on an existing campaign, head to Ads Manager. From there, “click on “duplicate” within an ad campaign. It will start rolling out gradually to all advertisers with access to Advantage+ shopping campaigns within the next month.”