Meta plans full AI automation for ad production by year-end

Meta plans to let brands fully generate and target advertisements using AI by the end of 2025, reports the Wall Street Journal. The ad automation leap marks a significant milestone for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The goal is to enable small and medium-sized businesses on Meta platforms to input a product image and budget and let AI handle the rest. It would involve generating images, text, and videos and targeting users on Instagram and Facebook.

The social media giant already offers AI tools that tweak existing ads, but the new AI-generated services would build entire campaigns from scratch and personalize them based on factors such as location.

For example, a car ad might show a snowy mountain to a viewer in Colorado but city streets to one in New York.

Why is it important?
Advertisements alone brought in 97% of Meta’s overall revenue in 2024. The money helps fund the company’s investments in AI chips, LLMs and data centers. Any uptick in revenue in the segment would also help Meta in the AI race.

However, embracing artificial intelligence in targeting ads could also chip away at the profits of advertising firms. Shares of the largest advertising agencies, Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP, fell 4%, 3.2% and 2.45%, respectively, on hearing the speculated news yesterday.