Meta advertisers are reporting that the platform's “Advantage+” and “automatic adjustments” settings are auto-enabling to generate bizarre, unauthorized creatives in their campaigns, despite the brands explicitly opting-out from using the tools.
Business Insider offered a few examples:
- Bryan Cano, head of marketing at the clothing brand True Classic, said that Meta switched out his top-performing ad featuring an attractive millennial man in a matching fleece set with an AI-generated photo of a cheerful grandma sitting in an armchair smiling. The company typically targets its ads to men ages 30 to 45. The ad ran for several days before customers alerted the brand to what they were seeing.
- European footwear brand Kirruna said that Meta created an ad featuring a model whose leg had twisted around completely the wrong way.
- E-bike company Lectric shared a story of Meta producing a creative for the company featuring a car flying through clouds, but they were able to catch the ad before it ran.
A Meta spokesperson gave a statement:
“Advertisers who use our full image generation feature have the opportunity to review the generated images before running their ad. We are continuously improving our products and features based on advertiser feedback.”
Maybe. But Cano at True Classic denies being able to preview the grandma ad before it went live. Other advertisers told Business Insider that they'd encountered issues where Meta would automatically switch on its “automatic adjustments” settings even after they'd explicitly turned it off.
Rok Hladnik, CEO of the marketing agency Flat Circle, which manages around $100M in annual Meta ad spending for D2C brands, confirmed that the setting will randomly turn on, and said that his company is now setting aside several mornings a week to manually check that AI enhancements are still switched off.
Meta's not concerned with the issues or the backlash, as they've likely got a playbook to deal with it. LOL.
