‘Little things you can do to build an edge’: Meta is pushing brands and marketers to trust its AI tools while promising them more control
Over the past month, Meta has gone into overdrive with a flurry of new tech and advertising announcements designed to keep marketers hooked on its AI-powered ad juggernaut.
At the beginning of the month, Meta hosted its fourth annual Performance Marketing Summit, which caters to marketers and agencies representing high-growth startups. At the event, Meta announced that it was expanding the availability of some products like Value Optimization, which allows advertisers to optimize their campaigns for a variety of outcomes, depending on whether they, say, care most about ROAS based on purchases or profit margins. It also announced the expansion of Value Rules, which allows advertisers to assign higher value to certain types of customers.
Then, at the annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this week, Meta said it would finally be bringing ads to WhatsApp, something that advertisers have long been clamoring for. Finally, Meta announced a bunch of new tweaks to its tools that allow brands to create videos and imagery using generative AI. For example, brands can now integrate their logos, colors and fonts into these tools to ensure better branding consistency at scale.
These announcements also underscore how Meta’s AI pitch has evolved over the past few years. Meta has made AI a cornerstone of its advertising strategy ever since Apple’s iOS 14 update threw a wrench in its ad targeting engines. In 2022, Meta rolled out Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, which used AI to automate parts of the advertising process and decide who to serve an ad to. It quickly became a hit for Meta’s business, achieving a $10 billion run rate by 2023.
While the first step of Meta’s AI evolution was focused on getting brands and marketers to trust the company’s machine learning tools, step two now seems to be focused on giving advertisers more control and the opportunity to make more granular tweaks that make sense for their particular brand.
“The SMB space, or the direct-to-consumer space, has always been focused on outperforming and believing there are little things you can do to build an edge,” Matt Breuer, svp of portfolio growth and strategy at holding company Aestuary, said.
Still, that forces Meta to thread a careful needle in this moment in time by both convincing advertisers to trust its AI tools, while also promising them more control. On a high level, it seems like the shift toward AI could spell doom and gloom for marketing jobs, with the Wall Street Journal reporting at the beginning of the month that Meta aims to eventually fully automate ad control using AI. But among the marketers who spoke to Modern Retail, many are happy with the shift toward AI, so long as it is coupled with changes that give them more control and the opportunity to optimize for different outcomes.
As Kevin Simonson, CEO of e-commerce marketing agency adMixt put it, “ASC was more of a bottoms-up approach to getting advertisers to adopt AI tools.” That is, it was designed to ensure that “media buyers or advertisers don’t have to do as much work to get better results.”
But according to Simonson, the expansion of tools like Value Rules and Value Optimizations is more designed for the “most aggressive and strategic brands and agencies” that are constantly looking for new ways to tweak and optimize their campaigns.
At the Summit, Meta also announced that it recently completed the global rollout of Incremental Attribution, which the company says measures for lifts in incremental conversions in real-time compared to business-as-usual campaigns.
Simonson, who attended the Performance Marketing Summit, said the pitch from Simon Whitcombe — the vp of Global Business Group at Meta, who did the introduction at the summit — was essentially that he “wants to enable marketers to have more nuance in their strategy.”
That sentiment was echoed by others who attended the summit. Katya Constantine, founder of the agency Digishopgirl Media, said Meta’s pitch at the Summit was all about how these tools could serve the “right format to the right customer at the right time,” likening it to the promise of the early days of email marketing.
Promoting the ‘next era’ of generative AI creative tools
In addition to helping brands reach the right customers, Meta’s AI pitch has also increasingly centered around getting more brands to use its tools for image and video generation. And that’s where Meta has run into more roadblocks, especially with advertisers concerned about ensuring that their brand look remains consistent and aesthetically eye-catching across ads.
On Tuesday, Meta unveiled what it is calling “the next era of generative AI solutions,” designed to address some of these concerns. A suite of tools that Meta is branding as “Branding+ Personalization” will allow brands to tap into their existing content, like website content, previous ads and product information, to present a unified creative voice that Meta’s generative AI tools can tap.
Constantine said a “consistent concern” she’s heard from clients regarding AI-powered creative tools is that they will create something “different from the brand voice and the brand look” — by, for example, using the wrong shade of green. Another seemingly subtle but frequent mistake these tools make is placing the creative overlay in the wrong place. So, she said, she’s excited about tools like these, which, in theory, should allow brands to create ads that more closely “align with brand guidelines, while still using AI.”
As Breuer sees it, these new tools will likely largely benefit the “large-scale online retailers” that have product catalogs with thousands of images, versus the small businesses that are just shooting a handful of items at a time. Still, he said, “I think it’s still very much the Wild West, [in terms of] finding a way to use AI inside your creative process that is value additive.”
Ultimately, Meta’s continued AI push comes at a precarious time for all advertising platforms as any changes in tariff policy or declines in consumer sentiment could lead brands to cut their advertising spend in the second half of the year.
Simonson said that, for his part, Meta spend among his clients is up so far this year. Constantine said Meta spend among her clients was down in Q1 year-over-year, but she expects it to be flat or slightly up in Q2. Breuer, meanwhile, said that April and May were pretty disruptive due to tariffs, but so far in June, “Meta spend is trending up” at his company.
Breuer, for his part, said he is most excited about ads coming to WhatsApp. But overall, the way he sees it is that Meta has given him and other marketers a bunch of new things to test in the next three to four months.
“If one of the three or four net new things that Meta has rolled out … hits, that’s probably enough to steal a little bit more share heading into Q4,” he said.