Meta aims to enable businesses to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of next year, according to Wall Street Journal sources. The company already offers some AI tools that can generate ad variations, and now Meta wants to help brands create advertising concepts from scratch.
Advertising brought in more than 97% of Meta's overall revenue in 2024 and funds the company's AI, metaverse, and hardware ambitions. So the easier and more effective the company can make advertising on its platforms for brands, the more Meta has to gain.
With the ad tools that Meta is developing, a brand could present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video, and text. The system would then decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target and where to place the ads.
Meta also plans to allow advertisers to personalize ads with AI so that users see different versions of the ad in real-time based on their geolocation and other factors (as opposed to having to manually create separate creatives and ad sets). For example, a person in rural Colorado might see an ad for a car driving up a mountain in the snow, while a person in Charlotte, North Carolina might see the same car driving through a city.
Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting last week:
“In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve, like selling something or getting a new customer, how much they’re willing to pay for each result, and connect their bank account and then we just do the rest for them.”
Critics are wary of giving Meta more control over their advertising efforts and also worry that AI-generated ads won't have the same look and feel as human-made ads, given that current AI technology often produces distorted or unusable visuals. However Meta says that brands are already using third-party tools like Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E to create the ads they place on its platforms, and the company is simply exploring how to integrate those tools to streamline the process.