No Humans Needed: Machines Will Make and Distribute the Ads

Meta is an advertising-fueled juggernaut. Its fourth quarter income was $48.39 billion, up 21% from the prior year. The company is minting money, and recently, Mark Zuckerberg said his company plans to further disrupt the advertising business with AI-assisted automation.

According to two articles in The Guardian, Facebook’s new AI-powered tools will autogenerate an entire ad campaign, including images, video, and text for customers. Zuck described the capability in a recent interview as “a redefinition of the category of advertising. You don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out.”

Zuck later clarified that the tools are mostly meant for small businesses that do not typically work with agencies.

“In the future, if you were working with a creative agency to make creative, you’ll probably keep doing that,” he said at the Stripe conference. “If you aren’t and you’re just hacking something together and throwing it into Meta’s ad system, well, now we’re going to be able to come up with 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best.”

Four thousand versions sounds like too many, but I’m not a machine. Maybe it’s the precise number of iterations required to get it right (and something far beyond human reach). Maybe.

This might be a good time to remind the reader that Bob Hoffman’s May 3rd newsletter says:

If there’s anyone in the world who knows how pathetically weak, timid, and feckless the advertising industry has become it’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has bullied, conned, outsmarted, and intimidated the ad industry for over a decade. God only knows how much business he’s taken from these marketing geniuses — who don’t even have a hint of a strategy to defend their business. Today the ad industry is little more than the sales arm for Facebook and the rest of the adtech crime syndicate.

I love the righteous fight in Bob’s words and his challenge to think and act strategically in the face of radical change. I am also interested in what current practitioners believe and are saying. They’re more moderate in their assessments.

Patrick Garvey, the co-founder of the independent agency We Are Pi, said, “It’s not the death of agencies. It’s the death of outdated agency models.” He is supportive of small businesses benefiting from the changes, but says Meta’s approach to AI is akin to the “fast food of advertising.”

Another intelligent person, Penny Langenfeld of DoubleVerify, told Campaign Asia:

I don’t believe Meta’s AI tools will fully enable brands to bypass agencies. While AI can streamline ad creation and targeting, it still falls short in areas that require deep human insight like brand storytelling, nuanced audience understanding, and long-term strategic planning. These are core strengths agencies continue to bring to the table.

I believe Garvey and Langenfeld speak for countless professionals who, despite the obstacles, continue to do their best, producing the most ethical and effective work possible for clients in their care. Also, Facebook has been a massive part of the media landscape for two decades now. The way forward isn’t around (Facebook), it’s through.

Automation, imitation, and iteration are real, and maybe the agency business needn’t be bothered about such things. Langenfeld reminds us that “brand storytelling, nuanced audience understanding, and long-term strategic planning” is still a great business and the core of what high-quality agencies offer.

FB is going to do its AI dance, and smart, caring brand guardians will do theirs. These are parallel worlds under the wide banner of Advertising. Machine-made ad campaigns are a thing today, but not necessarily a thing for human ad makers to be particularly frightened of. On the other hand, leaders of SMBs who purchase these synthetic campaigns (meant to appeal to real people) may have plenty of reasons to bring their concerns forward in due time. Time and their return on investment will tell.