Meta’s AI ad plan raises stakes – even if creative execs are shrugging it off
Meta’s plans to fully automate ads with AI by 2026 doesn’t come as a surprise to creative agencies – but it could make retaining clients and scooping up new business that much more difficult.
By next year, the social media company aims to allow brands to fully create and target ads using AI, seemingly giving marketers carte blanche for creative automation, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Still, five of the execs Digiday spoke with for this piece say the writing has been on the wall for some time as the AI hype cycle continues. “It’s not new,” said Rachael Datz, executive director of social at VML, later adding, “There’s a certain amount of things that can’t be replaced and can’t be automated.”
It’s the latest move in Meta’s generative AI initiatives. Last year, the platform rolled out AI ad tools with more ways to create AI-generated variations of images, headlines and other text.
Creatives say the strategy is in-line with tech platforms like Google, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest — all of which have been inching for the last two years toward AI-driven ad products amid the AI hype.
“If you look historically, with all the platforms, they’ve been chipping away at various direct brand marketers’ tools, services that have eroded a lot of creative and media agencies’ power,” said Jeff Bowerman, executive creative director at DEPT.
The promise of AI in advertising is to make things faster and cheaper — including copy writing, content creation, ad variation, optimization and other so-called grunt work that has long served as a proving ground for junior creatives. Whether agencies are ready to reckon with it or not, automation eats away at that layer and has ultimately started changing the shape of the ad industry itself. Meaning, agencies need to find new ways to prove themselves to clients, capture new business and keep up in the AI arms race.
At the same time economic headwinds and tightening marketing budgets could make AI an appealing efficiency play for brands of all sizes.
Meta’s latest news haven’t set off alarm bells yet at creative agencies, execs say. AI is still seen as an imperfect tool that needs human oversight, they say, and Meta’s all-in-one offerings are geared to smaller businesses that may not have been able to afford an agency partner anyway. Additionally, increasingly, agencies are rolling out their own AI powered tools to meet client needs — and to compete with the platforms themselves.
“It really just supercharges what we’re already making,” said Nicole Stetter, head of creative, at Saylor creative agency. AI may promise efficiency, but whether that means cutting jobs is a question no one’s seems eager to answer.
Agencies are positioning themselves as the gatekeepers between the platforms’ AI-powered tools and brand marketers with the proposition of high-level strategy and storytelling that AI can’t replicate — at least not yet.
“Today in the agency world, a lot of our value proposition is assigned, like it or not, to how long something took,” said Matt Powell, CEO of Moroch, a full service independent agency. “As AI helps you move faster, does that diminish the value of the product that you’re delivering?” Powell doesn’t believe so.
Clients are curious, but cautious about putting their intellectual property and ad dollars into the black box that is AI. Even as the AI hype grows, marketers are unsure of how exactly AI systems compute and make their decisions, and how much control marketers have over AI tools. Then there’s the risk of AI slop, or low-quality content generated by AI tools without human oversight. Wholly relying on AI without much human oversight could make less differentiation between each brand’s creative.
“That is what you get when you have a machine generalizing and outputting stuff from a machine. It becomes ad slop,” Powell added.
AI isn’t the first challenge creatives have faced. It’s just the latest trend in a long line of many that creative agencies have had to adapt to — that’s everything from brands in-housing their creative work to TikTok and the pivot to short-form video. “That’s scary but there’s no such thing as a job for life, as we figured out,” said DEPT’s Bowerman.
Creative shops may no longer be the only partner in the room thanks to AI. But to them, it doesn’t render creative agencies redundant or irrelevant. Instead, the job is evolving as AI siphons off production, leaving creatives to think more about strategy and storytelling.
Agencies are on the frontlines of proving the worth of a human’s work. The current pitch isn’t that AI won’t replace us — just that it’s not happening yet.
“We are always advising our clients and should be positioning ourselves as the first person to turn to when these things happen,” said Rachael Datz, executive director of social at VML, a creative agency.
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