Meta & Generative AI - Good News for SMBs?

Earlier in April, Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, revealed the company’s plan to launch new generative AI ad creation tools by December of 2023. These tools would provide simple, automated ways for advertisers to create and customize ads for different audiences across its platforms. 

This might seem, at first glance, like Meta is jumping on the bandwagon a few weeks behind Google and Bing. But the significance of the announcement from Meta – which, perhaps even more than its search engine colleagues, has invested heavily in AI research and development for years – is fundamentally different.

What Effect Will Generative AI Have for SMBs?

For Google and Bing, incorporation of generative AI into search is almost certain to fundamentally change the search landscape itself. Conversations replacing more traditional links will have a huge number of ripple effects for marketers in SEO and beyond.

For Meta, generative AI will give SMBs without lots of in-house creative resources the ability to produce lots of ad variations across formats and creative types, which is currently a frequent roadblock to successful ad campaigns. With generative AI, advertisers would be able to upload a few images and messaging notes, press a button, and have the system create a whole campaign, including audience targeting, ad creative, and messaging, for them to QA and test. The time and resources saved would allow marketers to focus more on analyzing and strategizing for higher-level results.

In short, while generative AI is producing huge questions in the field of search, it may provide some valuable answers to Meta advertising challenges. And there’s a clear benefit for Meta: more advertisers competing in Meta’s auction would lead to higher engagement costs.

The other layer to watch on the Meta/generative AI front is how the ripple effects might reach the Metaverse and web 3.0. Those will presumably take longer to come into focus for advertisers, but it’s not hard to picture a scenario when AI can and will make the Metaverse more compelling for users and advertisers alike.

If you’d like to chat with us about how to plan for these new AI tools, drop us a line.