Credit: Niick Fewings via Unsplash
It's a brief but not as the advertising industry knows it.
Step aside big brands and big agencies. Let the Meta AI agent do the job, including the creative, and defining an audience, all done in the blink of an eye.
The next step, minus the steps, in performance advertising.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, plans to upend the way advertising works.
Just tell us the results you want, and the budget you have, and we’ll do the rest.
The social media platform in the March quarter saw 30% more advertisers using AI creative tools and there's more to come.
Meta is spending big on AI. It expects to outlay between $64 billion and $72 billion this year on data centre investments and artificial intelligence.
“Our goal is to make it so that any business can basically tell us what objective they're trying to achieve -- like selling something or getting a new customer -- and how much they're willing to pay for each result, and then we just do the rest,” he told analysts when briefing them on March quarter results.
“Businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach.
“But AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their product than many businesses are themselves, and that keeps improving. “And now AI is generating better creative options for many businesses as well.
“ I think that this is really redefining what advertising is into an AI agent that delivers measurable business results at scale.
“And if we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today.”
In the last six months, Meta’s improvements in its recommendation systems have led to a 7% increase in time spent on Facebook, 6% on Instagram and 35% on Threads.
Zuckerberg said AI is also enabling the creation of better content.
“Some of this will be helping people produce better content to share themselves,” he said. “Some of this will be AI generating content directly for people that is personalized for them. Some of this will be in existing formats like photos and videos, and some of this will be increasingly interactive.
“I've often talked about this long term trend of content becoming richer over time. Our feeds started mostly with text, and then became mostly photos when we all got mobile phones with cameras, and then became mostly video when mobile networks became fast enough to handle that well. We're now in the video era, but I don't think that this is the end of the line.
“In the near future I think we're going to have content in our feeds that you can interact with and it'll interact back with rather than you just watching it.
“Over the long term, as AI unlocks more productivity in the economy, I also expect that people will spend more of their time on entertainment and culture, which will create an even larger opportunity to create more engaging experiences across all of these apps.”
Zuckerberg also sees opportunity in business messaging.
Current the majority of advertising is on feeds on Facebook and Instagram.
However, WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion monthly active users, with more than 100 million people in the US and growing quickly.
Messenger is also used by more than a billion people each month, and there are now as many messages sent each day on Instagram as there are on Messenger.
“Business messaging should be the next pillar of our business,” he said.
“In countries like Thailand and Vietnam where there is a low cost of labour, we see many businesses conduct commerce through our messaging apps.
“There is actually so much business through messaging that those countries are both in our top 10 or 11 by revenue even though they're ranked in the 30s in global GDP.
“This phenomenon hasn't yet spread to developed countries because the cost of labour is too high to make this a profitable model before AI -- but AI should solve this.
“In the next few years, I expect that just like every business has an email address, social media account, and website, they'll also have an AI business agent for customer support and sales. And they should be able to set that up very easily given all the context they've already put into our business platforms.”
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