Meta forecasted it would make $1 4T in revenue from generative AI by 2035
The company started testing these capabilities with a small group of advertisers earlier this year and hopes to complete the global rollout by next year. In the interview, Bosworth also addressed a recent backlash against the development of advanced AI technology. He called the demands expressed in an open letter for a pause on advanced AI development “unrealistic.” Advertising is the main source of revenue for Meta, which is looking to bounce back after a bumpy 2022 caused by competition with TikTok and expensive projects (cough, cough Zuck’s metaverse). The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don’t expect it to create profits anytime soon. Meta sees “an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors today.
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And Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant, may eventually show ads and offer a subscription option with additional features, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the company’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday. Generative AI is great at churning out quality creative content at impressive speed and scale, so we’ll continue to see more of these applications that support marketers in the coming months. Recently, Adobe announced a suite of generative AI tools marketers can use to help with everything from generating content for a campaign to deploying it. These features have the potential to bring a lot of value to businesses by helping already-stretched marketers and business owners save time and money on shooting a new product and carrying out an entirely new campaign.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta wants to ‘introduce AI agents to billions of people’
Both formats are powered by Advantage+ catalog, which is a rebranded version of what used to be called dynamic ads. “I think we’re coming into a new era now of creator and customer engagement, one that is fueled by the very powerful combination of AI and video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Meta’s global business group, also speaking at Tuesday’s press event. AI can help ease the burden of asset creation, which is why Meta’s been investing billions to boost its capabilities. This allows researchers to test new approaches to limiting or eliminating the risk of bias, hallucinations, and toxic responses that users have been exposed to when interacting with an AI.
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“Once you light up the ability for tens of millions of AI agents acting on their behalf, you’ll have way more businesses that can afford to have people engaging in chat,” he said. Similarly, Meta is upgrading the text generation feature to include ad headlines in addition to the primary text. Meta revealed that this text feature will “soon” be built with Llama 3, the company’s most advanced large language model (LLM), making the feature more advanced than it currently is and offering advertisers more comprehensive help.
That’s good for advertisers, but it’s even better for Meta as it works to bring Reels monetization up to par with Feed and Stories. AI-assisted advertising is working well for marketers willing to cede control to a computer. Nikkei Asia reports that Bosworth highlights the importance of generative AI in creating pictures for users. According to the CTO Andrew Bosworth, the shipment of the tools will happen later this year. Get stock recommendations, portfolio guidance, and more from The Motley Fool’s premium services.
The image expansion feature is being upgraded to include Reels and Feed on both Instagram and Facebook, making it easier for users to adjust the same content across aspect ratios and eliminating the need for manual adjustments. Now, the company is adding new image and text generation capabilities, the highlight being a new image variation feature that can create alternate iterations of your content based on the original creative. The first three tools to make it out of the AI Sandbox and into production are text variation, background generation and image cropping. On Wednesday, Meta announced it’s starting the process of rolling out three of the AI-powered tools that it’s been incubating within its AI Sandbox so advertisers can implement them for ad campaigns.
To aid in this, Meta is enhancing its partnership ads tool, so advertisers can easily integrate creator content with their ad collections on Reels and additional services. Another new way to create videos is by animating existing images, the company said. The new Image Animation feature lets advertisers animate a single, static image to create video-based ads for Instagram Reels. And with that, it’s also looking to help advertisers with the launch of a range of new ad formats specifically for video-based content. The announcements were made at the Advertising Week 2024 event in New York this week, where Meta revealed that the average user now spends more than 60% of their time on Facebook and Instagram watching videos, be they Reels, longer videos or livestreams.
- While Meta is releasing some lightweight generative AI features for advertisers, some ad tech startups are heavily leaning into it.
- Meta’s late adoption of AI-friendly hardware has left the company scrambling to catch up, according to a report from Reuters.
- Earlier this year, Meta launched a new tool that lets advertisers generate multiple text and image variations, including through text prompts and automatically creating different image backgrounds based on text inputs.
- Zuckerberg said that AI improvements in its feed and video recommendations have led to an 8 percent increase in time spent on Facebook and a 5 percent increase for Instagram this year.
The company has prioritized building out its Advantage+ suite of ad products that rely on automation, as well as a Lattice framework for predicting and optimizing campaign performance. Meta in May debuted image and text generators that can produce reams of creative, and those offerings appear to be gaining traction. Similar technology related to AI-powered video and animation is in the testing phase now and expected to be more widely available early next year.
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A new image generator relies on assets that the advertiser already owns, part of Meta’s efforts to ensure its ad products align with internal brand guidelines. Meta says it’s already tested these AI features with a small but diverse set of advertisers earlier this year, and their early results indicate that generative AI will save them five or more hours per week, or a total of one month per year. However, the company admits that there’s still work ahead to better customize the generative AI output to match each advertiser’s style.
TechCrunch states in another report that Meta also shares its plans to “create virtual worlds” through the power of generative artificial intelligence. In other words, Meta has the potential to grow the number of businesses advertising on its platforms. The company says it is working on new features that will allow businesses to use AI to connect with customers on Messenger and WhatsApp, driving engagement through conversational responses. Meta’s announcement comes after the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth said last month that the company was looking to use generative AI tech for ads. During the call, Meta also highlighted that despite the $1 billion annual revenue rate, Reels are not generating enough money.
Plus, as it announced at Meta Connect, businesses will be able to use AI for messaging on WhatsApp and Messenger to chat with customers for e-commerce, engagement and support. Omneky, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, was using OpenAI’s DALLE-2 and GPT-3 to create campaigns. Movio, which is backed by IDG, Sequoia Capital China and Baidu Ventures, is using generative AI to create marketing videos. Today, the organization led by Mark Zuckerberg said that it aims to use generative AI in creating ads for different companies by the end of the year. That was the message from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to investors during Wednesday’s call for the company’s first-quarter earnings report.
Finally, the image cropping feature helps companies create visuals in different aspect ratios for various mediums, such as social posts, stories, or short videos like Reels. Earlier this year, Meta launched a new tool that lets advertisers generate multiple text and image variations, including through text prompts and automatically creating different image backgrounds based on text inputs. Meta also recently started testing logo uploads so its model can produce more brand-specific images. The vast majority of the company’s advertisers are small- and medium-sized businesses that tend to have smaller budgets for creating a professional marketing campaign. In theory, those companies could eventually use Meta’s generative AI tools to create promotional texts and images for free, cutting down on costs. Another feature, image expansion, allows advertisers to adjust their assets to fit different aspect ratios required across various products, like Feed or Reels, for example.
