Brands are cautious about Google and Meta’s generative AI holiday ad push

Meta’s holiday marketing guide encourages advertisers to use its generative AI creative features within its Advantage+ ad platform to change backgrounds on images, expand ad image sizes to fit different aspect ratios or generate different versions of ad text to see what works best with shoppers. A Google Ads newsletter by Jyotika Prasad, Google’s senior director of retail ads, recommends brands use similar features to generate new holiday lifestyle imagery, create new image variations or automatically change headlines and descriptions within campaigns.

Agencies, however, say clients are reticent to test it out. Some may be using generative AI in some parts of the creative process, such as idea generation and copywriting, but most major advertisers aren’t giving complete control to artificial intelligence just yet.

Despite the push from these major platforms, Calla Murphy, svp of digital strategy and integrated marketing at Belardi Wong, said every brand has its own level of comfort around AI tools, and that the agency continues to have conversations with them around their level of creative resources and whether they would give up some control over their brand in exchange for efficiency.

“I would not say that we’re seeing a lot of our clients hand over creative keys to generative AI this holiday,” Murphy said. Larger brands are more hesitant to go deep into generative AI than smaller brands, she added.

But for small businesses, the ability to reach audiences without a media buyer or agency is a selling point of AI creative tools.

Brands producing more ads over the holiday season that don’t have the design or creative resources to create them may turn to generative AI content-creation tools, Jacob Posel, director of AI for e-commerce growth agency Common Thread Collective, told Modern Retail. He said many brands “don’t have the bandwidth and the resources in terms of design or creative strategists to be able to produce the number of ads that they were that they require” for the holiday season, so “one big way to unlock that is through using AI because that allows you to take a lot of the tasks that you require to generate more ads and make it far more efficient.”

Generative AI works better for brands that require simpler ads and have a vast image library to work with, Posel said.

Ashvin Melwani, CMO and co-founder of the supplement brand Obvi, told Digiday, “There was a barrier to entry for a certain type of small business. Now that barrier is eliminated.” However, while Obvi has experimented with various social platforms’ AI-powered creative tools, Melwani said they’re not advanced enough for use in a customer-facing campaign. “I don’t think we’re at a place yet where I can go and tell Meta, ‘go and do everything for me and let me publish it,’ and have me confident of that going live.”

As creative AI features continue to evolve, they may prove more lucrative for brands. Katya Constantine, CEO of Digishopgirl Media, an ad agency working with DTC brands, especially sees potential for AI generation within video, as video is costly to produce but is an important part of the creative mix. Amazon launched an AI-powered video generator for advertisers in September. Adobe and OpenAI have also announced video-generation tools.

“Video is really where the big pain points are on creative, and that’s probably the area where we haven’t seen necessarily as much functionality as we have in the other areas,” Constantine said. “When we have better tools for video, I do imagine that that is going to be a pretty big adoption and game changer.”